Weekend

I have a few memories of this show when i was a kid and being disappointed that 'Saturday Night Live' wasn't being shown that week. I remember a somewhat sardonic piece about the then-new World Trade Center, and at one point it snidely suggested that the whole project should be dynamited--there was even a low-budget animation of the towers collapsing on themselves down to the ground.

I also remember they did a piece on an early video arcade game where the object of the game was to drive a car and rundown as many pedestrians as possible. The graphics were pretty primitive (white on black), with a little cross popping up after the little walking stick figure was rundown. The piece questioned whether 'violent' games like this were morally OK, and if they were a sign of things to come.

WEEKEND was meant to reach teens and 20-somethings with a 60 MINUTES-style magazine format, and it succeeded admirably with me, as I watched as a kid. Initially, it was on every fourth week in the Saturday at 11:30pm ET slot, to give the Saturday NIGHT LIVE folks a break (similarly, NBC was driven through desperation to schedule professional wrestling in the same timeslot in the early '80s during one of SNL's fallow periods). I remember the show's pace and breadth of subject matter were impressive, and would be nearly as likely to stick with WEEKEND to the end of the show at 1am as I would be SNL in its first seasons. It's a real pity that the attempt to move WEEKEND into primetime was botched so badly...certainly no other newsmagazine show since has quite had its tone or approach (there was a faint echo of it in the first season of CBS's much later, short-live WEST 57TH, but that show lacked the wit and grace of WEEKEND).