Saturday, September 16, 1972. Premier of the Bob Newhart Show.

Cast of The Bob Newhart Show.

The Bob Newhart Show premiered on CBS.  One of the great sitcoms of the 1970s, it would run only until 1978.

I'm actually fairly surprised, as I well recall the show and would have thought that it premiered a little later than 1972.  Having said that it has always, in my memory, seemed very early and mid 1970s, not late 1970s.  My family watched it regularly.

The show was set in Chicago at a time just after the television Rural Purge which would feature a lot of television comedies set in mid-sized Midwestern cities. WKRP In Cincinnati, for example, was set, obviously, in Cincinnati. The Mary Tyler Moore Show was set in Minneapolis.

Earlier that same week, on September 14, the nostalgic The Waltons commenced airing.  While fondly remembered, I never liked it.  I really dislike Spencer's Mountain, which is based on the same source material.

We didn't watch The Waltons, but even back then I had the feeling I ought to like it.  I never did and never have.  It always, even in the 1970s, had the feel of a show filmed in the 1970s, with the look of the 1970s, trying to be about the 1930s.  It ran until 1981.  Additionally, the set and the fact that it was tapped made it impossible to suspend awareness that you were, in fact, watching it in the 1970s.

The show was unusual in that it had a rural setting at a time in which most television shows did not.  It was also unusual in that it presented a very clean, romanticized, look at the Great Depression, something that was well within living memory of many of the viewers.  In this fashion, it contrasted with the earlier Spencer's Mountain, which was centered on desperation.   Both were based on the work of Earl Hamner Jr. who had grown up in Depression era Virginia.  Hamner died in 2016 at the age of 92.

FBI Associate Director W. Mark Felt reviewed a draft of Bob Woodward's news story on Watergate by telephone and confirmed an anonymous tip that money from Maurice Stans had been used to finance the break in of the Watergate Hotel.  Felt did so undercover, using the odd and somewhat perverted cover name Deep Throat.