Yes, It Was a Real Thing
Looking Back on TV’s Family Viewing Hour, Which Began 50 Years Ago Tonight
(Spoiler Alert: It Didn’t Last)
To understand it is to unknow everything there is to know about television today.
The platforms. The choices. The downloading and binging. Commercial-free. Creative freedom. Bezos and Sarandos. Content.
Think broadcast instead. Initials like ABC and CBS and NBC. FCC and NAB, too. Standards. Timeslots and time zones. Commercial-filled. Lear and Ferguson. Prime-time.
Out with the new, in with the old.
Only then can the idea that two minutes could upend an industry begin to be understood — when TV is the industry and the two minutes are used to show a naked teenaged girl gang-raped with a plunger.
It happened. The two-minutes part. In a September 1974 made-for-NBC movie called Born Innocent. The upending part came four months later when, in the wake of a public uproar that aimed an unforgivingly bright spotlight on broadcasters, amid an increase in letters and calls of complaints in general about TV’s then-recent brashness, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced a new policy effective with the start of the next television season that would regulate what aired when in prime-time.
Fifty years ago, the Family Viewing Hour was born.
Condemned in creative ranks and ultimately ruled unconstitutional 15 months after it began, the Family Hour, as it became better known and remembered, stands as one of the industry’s more curious chapters, with government stepping into the entertainment business in a way it really hadn’t since the quiz-show scandals of the late 1950s.
Back in 1975, network TV was a year shy of 30 years old, still in its infancy by today’s eyes but more a rebellious adolescent at the time, questioning long-in-place rules in a bid for self-identity. TV’s reach, went the thinking, could and should be exceeding its thus-far self-limiting grasp.
The rebellion began in increments a decade earlier, with attempts to seed a mostly bland landscape with storytelling that better reflected both the times and the people living them (That Girl, Julia, Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, Room 222). But when All in the Family took hold in 1971 so did the full pivot towards edgier material. In just the few years that followed, Maude had an abortion, M*A*S*H satirized war, That Certain Summer explored gay romance, Mary Tyler Moore’s unmarried Mary Richards revealed she was on the Pill, Good Times showcased TV’s first-ever nuclear black family, Chico and the Man introduced America to the barrios, Police Story blurred the line between cop and criminal, and Marcus Welby, M.D. addressed topics like venereal disease and pedophilia.
Twenty years before the term became an MTV trope, the real world had come to prime-time.
But if adolescent rebellion can be about questioning the rules for a perceived greater good, it can also be about flaunting them for provocation and shock. Enter Born Innocent.
Airing on Tuesday, September 10, 1974, at 8pm (ET/PT) as part of NBC’s premiere week, Born Innocent told a then-trendy story of teenaged alienation, here involving a runaway from an abusive home sent to a girls’ detention center. And it starred high-profile 15-year-old Linda Blair, Oscar-nominated earlier in the year for The Exorcist.
The rape scene comes about a half-hour into the film, when Blair’s character is confronted in the center’s shower by four other young female residents, three of whom pin her to the floor as the fourth violates her. However suggested the violence — though the repeated thrusting by the plunger-wielding rapist suggests plenty — it’s a scene of such extreme that it begs the questions of how it was filmed, let alone broadcast. (As a college instructor in 2019, 45 years after it aired, I showed the scene, with multiple advance cautions, to my Media class; I was reported to the dean.)
Four years into a rapidly changing reality-reflecting television landscape, the cry was “Enough.” Not on our public airwaves.
Concerns about violence on television, specifically about its potential influence on children, were hardly new in the Fall of 1974. As early as 1950, the New York Times took issue with NBC for what was described as “carnage” on both its radio and television programming. Later in the decade, ABC’s tommy-gun-friendly The Untouchables ended up a focus of the Senate Juvenile Delinquency Subcommittee. And the 1960s assassinations of President John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King each led to questions about what role television might be playing in an increasingly violent society.
But with Born Innocent, an abstract concept (media influence) and a broad target (Hollywood) had a specific villain: NBC. A key issue: the network’s scheduling of the film at 8pm (ET/PT), which meant it began at 7pm Central Time, when more children were likely to be watching. The din made its way to the FCC and to the whole of Capitol Hill. By early January 1975, following discussions with (begrudging) network representatives and in conjunction with the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), under-fire FCC chair Richard E. Wiley, announced that the Family Viewing Hour, restricting programming “inappropriate for viewing by a general family audience” from airing in the first hour of prime-time (8–9pm ET/PT, 7–8pm CT/MT), would go into effect with the 1975–76 season.
As writer-producer David W. Rintels wrote in a 1976 New York Times reflection, the result was that “for the first time in American history an agency of the U. S. Government succeeded in telling some Americans what they couldn’t say — and what all Americans couldn’t see — on television.”
Condemnation in television’s creative ranks was immediate: The Family Viewing Hour was codified censorship. It also stigmatized shows that had to be moved out of the hour. The most vocal critic was powerful All in the Family producer Norman Lear, whose adult-themed CBS hit would lose its Saturday-at-8pm berth under the policy, which he felt endangered its future earnings potential. (How concern over the sexualized violence in Born Innocent came to sweep up the sitcom All in the Family or how a series then being enjoyed by tens of millions of general family audiences was now considered unsuitable for the same, is up for guessing.)
Two lawsuits followed, aimed at the FCC, the NAB, and the three networks. One was brought by the Writers Guild of America, West, on behalf of the industry’s other creative trades, and the other by Lear’s Tandem Productions. Ultimately, the pair was consolidated into a single action: Writers Guild of America, West, Inc. v. Federal Communications Commission.
When the season launched on September 8, 1975, 50 years ago tonight, two other series, each a police drama, joined All in the Family in vacating their timeslots: ABC’s 8pm Monday The Rookies was moved to 9pm Tuesday, and CBS’s Sunday-at-8:30pm Kojak was pushed a half-hour to 9pm. (Family, sent to 9pm Monday, retained its pull, even against the stronger competition of ABC’s Monday Night Football; Kojak fared fine, too. The Rookies was not as lucky and cancelled at the end of the season.) ABC also lost its successful Tuesday and Wednesday movie-of-the-week franchises, which had begun at 8:30pm. Except for those from Disney, all movies now began at 9pm. The new Family Hour itself consisted of a nine general-appeal dramas (such as Emergency! and The Waltons), sixteen sitcoms (from Sanford and Son to Welcome Back, Kotter), and two variety shows (notably Tony Orlando and Dawn) — some of which faced a bit of regular inspection throughout the season to ensure they were in keeping with the hour’s mandate.
The policy didn’t stop the onslaught of edgier material, however, if only after 9pm. That once-breached door had essentially been pried from its hinges. On the first night of the season, in fact, CBS aired the first of a landmark and controversial two-part Medical Center entitled “The Fourth Sex,” about a man undergoing sexual reassignment surgery. In October, as commentary on or to take advantage of the headlines, NBC actually rebroadcast Born Innocent — though after 9pm and with the shower scene edited. CBS ended its season with the blood-soaked Helter Skelter mini-series. And in between, All in the Family introduced cross-dressing Beverly LaSalle character, and One Day at a Time premiered with a mother-daughter row involving pre-marital sex that referenced chastity belts.
(The clock-watching is one of the reasons why producer Lear called the policy a “deceit” at the time. “We all know children of all ages are awake long after nine.”)
Final arguments in Writers Guild of America, West, Inc. v. Federal Communications Commission were held in the summer of 1976. That November, U.S. circuit judge Warren J. Ferguson ruled the new policy unconstitutional. Whatever its merits, stated Ferguson, the FCC had gone too far in applying pressure on the networks to adopt it.
Rintels called it “a landmark decision” that held the parties involved responsible for violating the First Amendment.
As a regulation, the Family Hour was abandoned with the 1977–1978 season. As a concept, it still informed the broadcast schedule that season — and future schedules for years beyond, as much out of caution as strategy. Then TV changed so much a generation later it couldn’t be contained, not even when on-screen labeling and the V-chip technology was introduced in the late 1990s.
With its political posturing and moral watchdogging, its strange pairing of sex and violence, and the fact that as a regulatory policy it was defined only by what it disallowed, the Family Viewing Hour emerged from the 1970s a punchline. When it came to the bigger picture of TV violence, the needle of responsibility moved little if at all, then or since. In 2020, in fact, the Parents Television Council (PTC) advocated for its return.
As for Born Innocent, it never aired again, though it did eventually come to video and then more recently to streaming. Never seen as a prestige or even good movie, even by 1970s standards, it stands as a cultural footnote. And a legal one, which made NBC’s 1975 re-broadcast smack of reckless temerity.
On September 14, 1974, four days after Born Innocent first aired on NBC, a 9-year-old California girl was sexually assaulted with a soda bottle by a group of minors. After the offenders’ arrests, two referenced the shower scene. A lawsuit followed.
Olivia N. vs. NBC was settled in NBC’s favor in 1981.
Jim McKairnes is a writer and college instructor. He vividly remembers watching TV as a child in the 1970s and gravitating toward all the programming that had parental advisories attached, telling him not to watch.
