1974 in television

See also:

Events

• February 8 - The Secret Storm airs its 5195th and final episode. The show is replaced ten days later by Tattletales, a game show hosted by Bert Convy.
• March 13 - The Execution of Private Slovik. A made for television film, it told the story of Pvt. Eddie Slovik, the only American soldier to be executed for desertion since the American Civil War.
• August 5 - For the first time on a pre-school children's programme, the UK show Inigo Pipkin covers the death of the main character, Inigo, as the actor who played him (George Woodbridge) had died. The show is renamed Pipkins.
• August 8 - US President Richard Nixon resigns live on television.
• September 10 - The controversial TV movie Born Innocent, starring Linda Blair, was first screened on the NBC network in the United States. The film, which involved a fourteen-year-old being sent to what the television preview deemed a women's prison (when in reality it was a reform school), drew heavy criticism due to an all-female rape scene, the first ever seen on American television. The scene was deleted in subsequent re-airings after a group of girls assaulted an eight-year-old with a pop bottle, influenced by the scene in the film.
• Monty Python's Flying Circus, the popular British sketch comedy which aired its final episode this year, is first shown in the US on an educational TV station in Dallas, Texas.
• The children's special Free to Be... You and Me first airs on American television, produced by comedic actress Marlo Thomas.
• Meg Dale (Tudi Wiggins) calls her son Ben (Christopher Reeve) a "bastard" on the soap opera Love of Life, the first time a profanity was spoken on American daytime television.
• The documentary series Legacy for the Future first airs on NHK in Japan.