11 TV Shows That Changed the Course of History

Have you ever been watching television and thought, “Wow, this soap opera is so good it could cause the downfall of a corrupt communist regime,” or “this comedy show could change the outcome of an election”? Well, maybe you’re not giving the boob tube enough credit. Many have blamed television for all of society’s downfalls, but these television shows didn’t just entertain, they helped convince the world to get with the program.

1. Dallas
2. General Electric Theater
3. This Is Early Bird
4. Cathy Come Home
5. Star Trek
6. See It Now
7. The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In
8. The Inventors
9. Hour of Decision
10. The Living Planet

Dallas

Dallas was one of the most popular TV shows in history—and nowhere was it more talked about than in Nicolae Ceaușescu communist Romania. How did the soap opera get past Romanian censors? With help from Dallas leading man J.R. Ewing of course. Because J.R. was portrayed as a despicable oil baron, Ceausescu’s government presumably decided the show must be anti-capitalist. Whatever the reasoning, Dallas became a runaway hit when it arrived in Romania in 1979. A series about wealthy, beautiful people (evil or not) was an inspiration to Romania’s poor and dejected masses.

Eventually, the government decided such Western television was a bad influence, and Dallas was taken off the air in 1981. In the years that followed, Romania instituted a severe austerity program that, among far more horrifying consequences, led to only a couple hours of television being aired a night. As a contemporary LA Times article described it, “On one typical evening, opera singers, actors and poets appeared in formal attire on a flower-decked stage to read patriotic verse and sing songs of praise to the diminutive, 67-year-old leader, whose larger-than-life portrait loomed above the performers.” In 1989, Ceaușescu was overthrown, tried, and executed.

The actor who played J.R., Larry Hagman, visited Romania some years later and was treated as a hero. In an interview following the experience, Hagman said, “people from Bucharest come up to me on the street with tears in their eyes saying, ‘J.R. saved our country.’ ”

General Electric Theater

In the early 1950s, film actor Ronald Reagan was at a low point in his career. So when Taft Schreiber of the Music Corporation of America (MCA) got him a gig as the host of the anthology series General Electric Theater, Reagan jumped at the opportunity. For $120,000 a year and, eventually, part-ownership of the program, he not only hosted the show, but also toured America as a “goodwill ambassador” for the electricity giant, giving speeches to plant employees and acting as its public spokesperson.

By the time General Electric Theater was cancelled in 1962, Reagan was a new man: All those years defending free enterprise for one of the nation’s biggest multinational companies had transformed Reagan into one of America’s leading conservative speakers. Although the actor had long been a Democrat, the Republican Schreiber convinced Reagan to change political parties. Four years later, the newly Republican Reagan was elected governor of California, and the rest is presidential history.

This Is Early Bird

On April 6, 1965, NASA launched one of the world’s first commercially sponsored satellites into space. Dubbed Early Bird (but later renamed Intelsat 1), the geosynchronous satellite was backed by the newly formed International Telecommunications Satellite Consortium (Intelsat), which comprised agencies from several countries, but mostly the American agency, COMSAT. The selling point, according to NASA, was that it could provide “almost 10 times the capacity of the submarine telephone cables for almost 1/10th the price.” (This continued until the 1980s, when new cable technology emerged.)

Sounds great, but at the time, it was an enormous risk. Prior to Early Bird, space technology had been largely reserved for government projects, and there was no guarantee Americans were going to get excited about using satellites for their TV reception.

In order to win over TV viewers worldwide, Intelsat had to show off what Early Bird could do. Enter This Is Early Bird. Just one month after the satellite’s launch, as many as 300 million viewers across Europe and North America were united by this television special. The program featured live scenes from across the globe, including footage of a heart operation in Houston, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. speaking in Philadelphia, Pope Paul VI making an address from the Vatican, a bullfight in Barcelona, and (perhaps most intriguingly) Russian sailors singing and dancing aboard the HMS Victory in England.

Cathy Come Home

Directed by Ken Loach (who later became one of Britain’s most respected filmmakers), the 1966 drama Cathy Come Home was a poignant episode of the BBC-1 anthology series The Wednesday Play. It told the tragic story of the titular Cathy, a young wife and mother who becomes the victim of Britain’s welfare state. After ditching her small town home for the big city and getting married, her husband loses his job following an accident and becomes unable to support the family. In a painful spiral toward destitution, Cathy suffers through various states of homelessness, is separated from her husband, and eventually, has her children forcibly taken away from her by government council workers.

The impact of the truly horrifying story was compounded by the fact that Cathy Come Home was filmed in such a realistic style and felt so authentic some reviewers felt it straddled the line between play and documentary. And although one official claimed the movie was “full of blunders,” Labour Party politician Anthony Greenwood said the show should be “compulsory viewing once a month for five years.” British audiences agreed, and Cathy Come Home was aired again shortly after. While it’s always difficult to draw direct lines between a show and changes in society (Cathy Come Home emerged at the same time as other advocacy efforts) the show definitely helped bring about changes to British welfare law and became a major component of the conversation.

Star Trek

Avid Spock fans might tell you that Star Trek is directly responsible for the invention of everything from cell phones to 3D printers, but that’s slightly exaggerated (and in the case of cell phones, largely fictional). Engineers at companies ranging from Nokia to General Electric have admitted to being inspired by the show’s futuristic designs, but most real life scientists and manufacturers don’t credit the show for their inventions.

Star Trek did, however, help shape the future in another, and arguably more significant, way. Defying all stereotypes, the heroic crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise was comprised of a mix of races and sexes. Here again, Star Trek became an inspiration—only this time, to underrepresented groups rather than tech enthusiasts. Lieutenant Uhura, played by singer/dancer Nichelle Nichols, showed audiences that Black women could be senior officers and hold positions of power. In fact, when Nichols contemplated quitting the series during its first year, she was persuaded to keep the role by none other than Dr. Martin Luther King, who said, “Don’t you realize how important your character is?”

Years later, women like Whoopi Goldberg and Dr. Mae Jemison, the first Black American woman astronaut, cited Lieutenant Uhura as a major inspiration in their careers. Nichols even spent time working for NASA on an astronaut-recruitment program—an initiative that roped in such people as Dr. Sally Ride and Dr. Guion “Guy” Bluford, the first American woman and Black American man in space, respectively.

See It Now

If you know your 1950s history (or if you saw the movie Good Night, and Good Luck), you know the impact crusading journalist Edward R. Murrow had on American politics. His vehicle for galvanizing change? The current affairs show See It Now, which premiered in 1951.

Well known as a World War II radio correspondent, Murrow wasn’t a fan of television initially. He wanted to go beyond the talking-head discussions and newsreels that filled most nightly news shows at the time. So when he finally decided to move forward with See It Now, he did so on his own terms. The show’s debut episode featured television’s first live coast-to-coast transmission, which included a split-screen of New York on one side and San Francisco on the other. Murrow also broke new ground by airing a day in the lives of Korean War soldiers. Of course, the show’s most influential role was in exposing Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist fear campaign and opening Americans’ eyes to the many lives and careers it was ruining. Thanks in part to fallout from Murrow’s broadcast on March 9, 1954, the U.S. Senate reprimanded McCarthy for abusing his power, and McCarthyism came to an abrupt end.

Murrow wasn’t afraid to take on rogue senators, and later, he proved he wasn’t scared to take on Big Tobacco, either. Two episodes of See It Now investigated the link between cigarettes and cancer—a brave move, considering television depended heavily on tobacco sponsorships at the time. But perhaps Murrow had a personal interest in the story: A three-pack-a-day smoker who regularly appeared on camera with a cigarette in hand, Murrow died of lung cancer in 1965.

The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In

The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour was one of the first network TV shows to make fun of the Establishment, supported America’s counterculture, and had enough nerve to put controversial political singers like Joan Baez and the long-blacklisted Pete Seeger on the air—decisions that set up fights with CBS censors.

In the wake of its success came Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, which was once described as “NBC’s ‘hip’ nod to the comedy hour” and carved out its own place in counterculture history. But, ironically, the two shows’ major achievements might have been making Richard Nixon president.

As a gag, Smothers Brothers star Pat Paulsen ran for office during the 1968 presidential election. “I’m a pretty good candidate because I’ve been consistently vague on the issues,” announced Paulsen, “and I’m continuing to make promises that I’ll be unable to fulfill.” Regardless of his humorous motives, Paulsen claimed to have garnered 250,000 votes that helped swing one of the closest elections in history. He later recalled that Nixon’s opponent, Hubert Humphrey, “told me I cost him the election … and he wasn’t smiling when he said it.” Paulsen’s claims seem dubious, however, considering that in Texas he got just 11 write-in votes, and there’s little evidence he did phenomenally better anywhere else.

The stronger claim for changing the results of the election might be for Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. One of the show’s writers was Paul Keyes, who was a long-standing Nixon ally. There are different stories as to what happened, but somehow, Nixon was convinced that saying “sock it to me” on the show was a good idea. Dick Martin later said that the next week Nixon’s opponent Hubert Humphrey was in the area and they asked him to do the “sock it to me” as well—but, unlike Nixon, Humphrey’s advisors were able to convince him not to do it.

It’s long been debated how much the “sock it to me” helped Nixon’s campaign. Some argue that it helped break the view of Nixon as dour and serious, while others argue a campaign ad shown during the show was probably more effective. Either way, the perception that it might have made a difference also changed history. In 2013, Producer George Schlatter said, “Now you can’t have an election without the candidates going on every show in sight. But at that point it was revolutionary.”

The Inventors

In 1970, The Inventors was becoming the American Idol for hyper-intelligent geeks south of the equator. The judges were primarily science and business know-it-alls who were almost as scary as Simon Cowell, but the panel was balanced out with Diana Fisher, who was intended to represent the consumer side. And while the contestants weren’t always as talented as Kelly Clarkson, the show did create its own superstars. Perhaps the biggest winner was Ralph Sarich, whose many inventions included the orbital engine, a rotary-style internal combustion engine that seemed set to change the world with its low-emission but high-power system. By the time Sarich was named the show’s Inventor of the Year in 1972, he’d already signed a multimillion-dollar deal with a major Australian manufacturing company. The original orbital engine didn’t work out in the end, but engines incorporating some of the technology had some success. In 1993, he sold his shares and invested heavily in real estate, becoming one of Australia’s richest men.

Hour of Decision

Hour of Decision didn’t introduce American audiences to televangelism; it introduced them to the televangelist who would change America—Reverend Billy Graham.

Other evangelists had hosted TV shows in the 1950s, including Bishop James Pike, then-Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, and Oral Roberts, but few were able to use the medium as effectively as the charismatic Reverend Graham. Based on his wildly successful radio program of the same name, a typical TV episode of Hour of Decision featured religious music, a short sermon by Graham, and a prerecorded interview with a person of interest. Although the show lasted only two-and-a-half years and wasn’t particularly successful—Graham himself is quoted as saying, “They are interesting films, but I can’t find anyone who ever saw one! Prime time on Sunday nights on network TV, and no one remembers”—Graham continued his television work with a series of live telecasts that allowed TV audiences to be a part of his Madison Square Garden crusade.

Graham’s telecasts were a huge hit, and the Reverend became a bona fide national celebrity. Year after year, he appeared in Gallup Polls as one of the “most admired Americans,” and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association was receiving some 50,000 viewer letters a week.

The Living Planet

Sir David Attenborough is possibly Britain’s most influential and venerated environmentalist—all thanks to the power of television. A wildlife buff, Attenborough made a name for himself beginning in the 1950s as the host for the BBC show Zoo Quest. But in 1979, he hit it big with the acclaimed 13-part miniseries Life on Earth, in which he traveled the world studying the evolution of life on this planet. (All told, the film crew traveled some 1.5 million miles to more than 30 countries during a three-year period.)

The tremendous success of Life on Earth led to its Emmy-winning 1984 sequel, The Living Planet, which focused on all the ways species adapt to their natural environment—and in the case of humans, plunder it. “The natural world is not static, nor has it ever been,” Attenborough explained. “But man is now imposing such swift changes that organisms seldom have time to adapt to them. …  The continued existence of life now rests in our hands.”

Attenborough wasn’t the first person to make such warnings, but he was the first person people really listened to—not just in Britain, but around the world. The Living Planet aired across the world, and audiences came to revere Attenborough. The show also became a major inspiration for the Green Movement.

Read More About Television:

A version of this story ran in 2008; it has been updated for 2024.