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Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.
IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: June 27, 1966
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: If you’re making the list of the most influential television professionals of the past 30 years (if not longer), there’s a spot right near the top of that list for J.J. Abrams. The son of a TV producer had been working in the business since he was a teenager, and had written screenplays for the films Regarding Henry, Forever Young, and whatever bits of his made it into Armageddon. But it wasn’t until 1998’s Felicity that Abrams dipped his toe into television, writing, directing, and creating the WB drama series about a college freshman (Keri Russell) who follows the high-school crush she never even spoke to until graduation clear across the country to a barely fictionalized version of NYU, where they learned about life, love, and incessantly switching majors in the palatial dormitory environs of downtown Manhattan.
Felicity became something of a sensation in its freshman year (before Keri Russell cut her hair short and disaster soon followed). But J.J. Abrams was just getting started. After getting the random idea that it would be cool if Felicity had become a spy while matriculating at college, Abrams created the mythology-heavy spy series Alias, launched the careers of Jennifer Garner and Bradley Cooper, and began a fascination with secret numbers and the intersection of religious prophecy and scientific mumbo-jumbo.
After Alias? A little show called Lost, which Abrams helped to launch and then handed off to Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, though he still gets tagged with shit that Lost pulled in his final season. By that point, Abrams was well into his film career, though he was also helping to launch the massively underrated sci-fi series Fringe (and the sadly underwatched Undercovers, starring the impossibly attractive duo of Boris Kodjoe and Gugu Mbatha-Raw). But more than the series he continued to create, Abrams’ influence has been felt across all of television. From an era when serial dramas were treated by networks like the actual boogeyman, we now live in an era where dramas as free to tell vast, intricate, wide-spanning series that hook audiences by promising a show that go bigger than big.
So happy birthday, J.J. Abrams. You keep making those Stars Warses, but we will always remember you for following that teen girl from Palo Alto to New York City with a crush a a dream.
