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| Roots (1977): LeVar Burton in the seminal mini-series directed by Marvin Chomsky, John Erman, David Greene and Gilbert Moses. - photo courtesy of ABC Photo Archives. | click images for larger views and more information. |
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Just as ABC was at the forefront with the Movie of the Week, it was also at the center of the development of the American television mini-series. The network introduced the concept of multi-part, serialized stories to U.S. audiences for solid business reasons in 1973. Management was searching for new ways to grab viewer attention and saw the possibilities in selling bigger blocks of advertising time around programs that kept audiences returning on subsequent nights. But who could have foreseen the impact the mini-series would have?
ABC’s 1976 production Rich Man, Poor Man (Boris Sagal and David Greene, directors), an 8-part, 12-hour rendition of Irwin Shaw’s novel, achieved high ratings and critical acclaim. But bigger success lay ahead.
In 1977, a stunning 66% of the television audience tuned in for ABC’s Roots (David Greene, John Erman, Marvin J. Chomsky and Gilbert Moses, directors), an 8-part adaptation of Alex Haley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel tracing the lineage of one African-American family. In a scheduling breakthrough, ABC aired it on consecutive nights in January because management was too nervous to air it during the all-important sweeps period the next month.
Brandon Stoddard, the longtime ABC executive who oversaw motion pictures for television and mini-series during the 1970s, believed Roots would perform well, but couldn’t fathom how well until he received a 5:00 a.m. phone call from the New York office with the overnight ratings. “It was kind of a staggering day,” he says.
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| Shogun (1980): Jerry London directing Toshiro Mifune in the 12-hour adaptation of the James Clavell novel. |
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The great era of the mini-series arrived with productions such as the epic Holocaust (Marvin Chomsky, director) in 1978, Shogun (Jerry London, director) in 1980, The Thorn Birds (Darryl Duke, director) in 1983, among others. CBS’s Lonesome Dove (Simon Wincer, director) in 1989, an epic story of the West based on the novel by Larry McMurtry, prompted speculation the western might be on the comeback trail (didn’t happen).
Stoddard, who logged 25 years at ABC, views the mini-series as a unique form of storytelling, ideally made for complex narratives that wouldn’t succeed as 90-minute or 2-hour television movies or feature films. “With The Thorn Birds, Warner Brothers spent at least a year, maybe two, trying to make a feature out of it,” he says. “The story was too big. It could only work in longform.”
Dan Curtis spent an entire year shooting The Winds of War (1983), an epic saga of the build-up to World War II based on the Herman Wouk novel. When first approached about producing and directing the project, Curtis rejected it. “I said, ‘Are you out of your mind? This thing weighs 500 pounds. No one has ever done anything like this.’ ”
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| The Winds of War (1983): Robert Mitchum in Dan Curtis’ adaptation of Herman Wouk’s novel about the build-up to WWII. - photo courtesy of ABC Photo Archives. |
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Eventually, he relented and brought Winds of War in on time, with a then hefty $41 million price tag. The follow-up, War and Remembrance (1988), would further up the ante for the mini-series. It was shot in 10 countries over two years, with 8,000 setups, 300 speaking parts. Total production budget: $104 million.
In today’s multi-channel era, it’s gotten harder for broadcast networks to justify mini-series’ production costs. But broadcasters still use the form strategically, as big events to blunt the competition. ABC has staged several Stephen King novels as mini-series, which is why the prolific, best-selling author likes to see his work produced on the small screen, according to Mick Garris, who directed The Stand (1994) and The Shining (1997).
But Curtis believes the current focus on mini-series as events misses the point that they are often the best way to tell a story. “The problem today is that the question is no longer, ‘is it a good story?’ It has to be an event, and cutting edge, and that’s b.s. to me. To me, it’s all about storytelling.”
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