The Movie of the Week

The ABC Movie of the Week was a weekly television anthology series, featuring made-for-TV movies, that aired on the ABC network in various permutations from 1969 to 1975.

In the 1960s, movie studios viewed television as a second-rate medium but also as a threat to their theatrical revenue, so they charged high fees for the privilege to broadcast their films. The networks experimented with having films made specifically for TV to lower expenses. NBC created the first weekly umbrella for such films with their World Premiere Movie in 1966, running in a 2-hour time slot.

Until the late 1960s, ABC ran a distant third behind rivals CBS and NBC, leading to jokes about its acronym meaning "Almost Broadcasting Company" or coming in fourth among the three networks. Desperation and a looser corporate structure allowed ABC to consider plans the other networks would not. Barry Diller, then a junior executive at ABC and later a co-founder of the Fox network, is often cited as the creator of the Movie of the Week (MotW), but the concept was actually originated by producer Roy Huggins. Huggins reasoned that many older theatrical films ran shorter than 90 minutes so requiring a 120-minute time slot was unnecessary. His proposal was rejected by all three networks but became the subject of a cover story in Variety magazine. ABC's interest was renewed but they lacked confidence that Huggins could produce an entire season of telefilms by himself. As the Variety article had effectively placed the concept into the public domain, ABC continued to develop it without Huggins' permission or involvement. They approached Universal, which demanded a larger budget than ABC wanted to spend, as well as the exclusive right to produce all future TV movies for ABC, conditions that pushed ABC to control production on their own, assigning them to various studios and production companies. ABC consoled Huggins by allowing him to produce several films, including The Young Country, precursor to Alias Smith and Jones.

...
Wikipedia