ABC's Wide World of Entertainment

ABC's Wide World of Entertainment
Genre	Variety
Country of origin	United States
Original language(s)	English
Production
Producer(s)	20th Television 20th Century Fox Television 20th Century Fox Television(Fox Television Studios)
Camera setup	89
Running time	90 minutes
Release
Original network	American Broadcasting Company
Original release	January 8, 1973 – January 10, 1976

ABC's Wide World of Entertainment is a late night block of programs created by the American Broadcasting Company. It premiered on January 8, 1973 and ended three years later.

Unable to find a single talk show to compete with NBC's highly successful Tonight Show, the network aired a collection of comedy specials, documentaries, mystery movies, music concerts and talk shows with a variety of hosts. Included in the broadcasts were The Dick Cavett Show, Jack Paar Tonite, Good Night America (with Geraldo Rivera), the live concert series In Concert, the UK-originated anthology series Thriller, and Comedy News (with Robert Klein, Mort Sahl and Dick Gregory). Initially, Paar, Cavett, comedy specials and mystery movies were each given one week per month. Two nights of music concerts, broadcast every other Friday on weeks where specials or movies were broadcast, completed the monthly schedule.

Monty Python's Flying Circus, the British comedy sketch television series, taped its last episode in December 1974 and was syndicated to American public television stations soon after. On October 3, 1975, ABC aired the first of two edited compilations of sketches from the series as one of its Wide World of Entertainment comedy specials. The Python group represented by Terry Gilliam, the group's only American-born member, sued ABC for copyright infringement.

The comedy and variety specials proved to be unpopular and, along with most of the talk shows, were dropped by the summer of 1974. They were replaced with reruns of television movies and the programming block was retitled ABC Late Night on January 12, 1976. In addition to movies (which were seen under the Tuesday Movie of the Week banner), the network aired a variety of prime-time series reruns including Police Woman, Mannix, Starsky and Hutch, Soap, Barney Miller and Fantasy Island. ABC Late Night ended on October 21, 1982.

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