ABC's Wide World of Entertainment
television series
ABC's Wide World of Entertainment is a late night television block of programs created by the ABC television network. It premiered on January 8, 1973, and ended three years later. The title was based on the long-running broadcast ABC's Wide World of Sports; there was also an ABC's Wide World of Mystery broadcast from 1973 to 1978.
Credits
Unable to find a single talk show to compete with NBC's The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, the network aired a collection of comedy specials, documentaries, mystery movies, music concerts and talk shows with a variety of hosts. Included were The Dick Cavett Show, Jack Paar Tonite, Good Night America (a news magazine hosted by Geraldo Rivera), the live concert series In Concert, the UK-originated anthology series Thriller, and Comedy News (a parody of Eyewitness News with an ensemble cast of comedians and satirists including Kenneth Mars, Marian Mercer, 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. The 1975 and 1976 editions of Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve were also broadcast as "Wide World Specials".
Monty Python broadcast
Monty Python's Flying Circus, the British comedy sketch television series, taped its last episode in December 1974 and was syndicated to American public broadcasting 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.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “ABC's Wide World of Entertainment” is television series. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through ABC's, Wide and World, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “television series” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4650035. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1973, 1978, 1975 and 1976.
Titles can refer to several editions, objects or performances, making precise identification essential before interpretation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.
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This entry incorporates text from “ABC's Wide World of Entertainment” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.