Jun 10, 2015 4 min read

The 1970s have always been America’s misunderstood, enabling middle child of the late 20th century, seemingly nowhere near as tumultuous or sea-changing as the ’60s, and or as socially and economically polarized as the 1980s.

That perception is wrong, of course, and in recent years, we’ve come to respect that poor neglected decade of disco music, “Star Wars,” Watergate and “All in the Family.”

CNN offers a survey of the decade, subtitling its new documentary series “One Nation Under Change,” which is well put. Judging by the first episode, “The Seventies” may enlighten those who didn’t live through those years, and serve as a pleasant but unremarkable refresher course for those who did. Tom Hanks is among the producers of the eight-part series, which begins at 9 p.m. Thursday with the one-hour segment “Television Gets Real.”

The evolution of TV news and entertainment mirrored social and political events in the decade. At the end of the ’60s, with Vietnam still raging and social upheaval in many corners of the nation, TV was a morass of escapism, with a spate of rural sitcoms such as “Green Acres” and “The Beverly Hillbillies” that had virtually nothing to do with what was going on in the real world at the time.

Yes, there were some exceptions, such as “Julia,” a sitcom that cast an African American actress in the lead, “That Girl,” which focused on a single woman trying to make it as an actress in New York and more than likely having a physical relationship with her boyfriend, and “Laugh-In,” which at least acknowledged that there was a real world beyond the walls of its NBC studio.

These shows aren’t mentioned in the CNN documentary because, one assumes, they’d spoil the overly simplified comparison of TV in the ’60s to that of the ’70s.

However, it is true that Norman Lear changed everything with a show about a Queens bigot named Archie Bunker that premiered in 1971. “All in the Family” begat “Maude” and “The Jeffersons” and opened the door for “MASH,” “Good Times,” “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “Rhoda,” and other shows which, indeed, got more real than TV had been before.

For a while, television seemed to be making up for lost time in the area of diversity alone, but then it seemed to get institutional cold feet. The definition of a family was recast again, back to mythological good old days, with shows like “The Waltons,” “Happy Days” and “Little House on the Prairie.”

It wasn’t a complete counterrevolution, as interview subjects such as Pulitzer-winning TV critic Tom Shales remind us. He and fellow commentator Jim Miller wrote “Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live,” and, indeed, “SNL,” and, before that, the British import “Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” broke the traditional comedy model in the 1970s altogether.

And while “Happy Days” was rooted in nostalgia of the nuclear family, two of its spinoffs, “Laverne and Shirley” and “Mork and Mindy,” were about young single adults, one of whom was, of course, an alien.

The documentary also examines the changes in sports coverage during the 1970’s, including the debut of “Monday Night Football,” which began on ABC with a broader playing field, as it were, designed to engage viewers who weren’t just interested in the games.

Sports also played a role in the early years of cable, which was originally viewed with bemused curiosity by the broadcast industry. HBO came along in 1972 with very little to offer. Comedians like Robert Klein found their way to HBO because they could say whatever they wanted to. But it wasn’t until “The Thrilla in Manila” boxing match between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier that HBO really took off, and no one in broadcast has been bemused since: Everyone’s been too busy running for their ratings.

The film benefits from contributions from Lear, Klein, Shales, Miller, Valerie Harper and John Amos and others. But at just an hour, it’s virtually impossible to provide much depth or interpretative analysis of television in a crucial decade.

Future titles in the “Seventies” series include “United States vs. Nixon,” about Watergate; “Peace With Honor,” on the US withdrawal from Vietnam; “Crime and Cults of the Seventies”; “Ford, Carter and the Rise of Reagan”; “Terror at Home and Abroad” and “From Disco to Punk: The Music of the Seventies.”

If “Television Gets Real” is any indication, expect the decade to continue to be shortchanged as it’s always been in the weeks ahead.