American television networks began producing and airing made-for-television films in 1962, but the ABC Movie of the Week made them a fixture of American broadcasting. A total of 243 aired between 1969 and 1975: genre-bound films with compact running times, small casts, low budgets, and limited ambitions. A few—including Duel (1971), The Night Stalker (1972), and Bad Ronald (1974)—were hailed as genre classics. Others served as pilots for successful ABC television series, such as Alias Smith and Jones, The Six Million Dollar Man, and Starsky and Hutch. A third group dramatized the divisive social and cultural issues of the day: the counterculture in The Ballad of Andy Crocker (1969), the Vietnam War in Tribes (1970), race relations in Carter’s Army (1971), homosexuality in That Certain Summer (1971), drug abuse in Go Ask Alice (1973), and gun violence in The Gun (1974).


Michael McKenna’s book breaks important scholarly ground by treating the series in both breadth and depth. The first half offers an interpretive history of the series in roughly 180 pages: a chapter per season, and a page or two of text apiece for the films that McKenna judges the most significant of that season. The second half uses another 180 pages to provide a chronological listing and alphabetical filmography of all 243 films aired in the series. The two pieces of the book reinforce one another: the second providing an authoritative guide to the series, and the first making a case for its social and aesthetic significance. The illustrations, reproductions of period newspaper advertisements for the films, are an unexpected bonus. They suggest the surprising frequency with which ABC relied on visual promises of sex, mayhem, and seamy realism to draw viewers to the films.



The book’s comprehensive, detail-oriented approach comes, inevitably, at a price. There is, for example, no discussion of the advertisements’ use of exploitation-film techniques, or of the parallels in subject matter and production techniques that united the ABC productions with the “B” features of an earlier era. Production details are drawn primarily from actors’ published interviews and memoirs, and so appear sporadically and haphazardly. The earlier careers of film-and-television veterans who worked on the films go unmentioned. Discussions of the social-problem melodramas seldom tie them, in more than a broad sentence or two, to the real-world developments that inspired them. McKenna’s coverage of individual films are brisk introductions, rather than in-depth explorations.


Despite these limitations, The ABC Movie of the Week: Big Movies for the Small Screen decisively supersedes Michael Karol’s slender, selective, idiosyncratic ABC Movie of the Week Companion as the definitive book on the series for scholars and serious fans. ( )