Summer Sunday USA

The 3D catalogue: film cases on wooden shelves, with the cat sitting at the counter next to its greeting.

The catalogue in 3D

The film shelves have a room of their own that you can walk around in. The cat behind the counter is the AI Catbot, and they pick real films from the same catalogue when you tell them what you feel like watching. Nothing is for sale, here or in there. Go in from here and this series is already out on the counter, with more like it waiting on the shelf next to it.

More series like this

How it feels

A short-lived 1980s NBC news series aired live each week from a different US location. Anchors covered current events, analysis, and human-interest stories, testing a new satellite vehicle that caused technical problems. It got poor reviews and low ratings.

liveexperimentaljournalistictopicaldownbeattechnicalnewsy

What happens

Summer Sunday USA is an American prime-time television news program produced by NBC News that aired on NBC for 11 episodes, from July 1 to September 9, 1984. Linda Ellerbee and Andrea Mitchell coanchored the first nine episodes, which were broadcast live from a different location in the United States every week. The last two episodes were presented by Tom Brokaw and Roger Mudd, respectively. Summer Sunday USA was the first news program that incoming NBC News president Lawrence K. Grossman green-lighted, demonstrating the network's commitment to creating a successful prime-time news series after several failed attempts since the early 1970s. It combined coverage of current events with analysis and contextualization of topical issues, as well as lighter human-interest features, all reported by the anchors and NBC News correspondents. It was also an experimental program designed to test the journalistic potential of a newly introduced Ku-band (commonly styled as Ku-band) satellite news-gathering vehicle capable of transmitting live broadcasts from anywhere, but it was hampered by technical and other problems. Although ratings and reviews were poor, it was the first national network prime-time news series to fully integrate this technology and the first such series to be anchored by two women. It exemplified an era when technological experimentation and journalistic risk-taking were more possible in network news than they would be in succeeding eras. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

More like this

This page is from Underplayed Gems. Not quite it? You can browse by genre, country and year, or take this one into the 3D catalogue and ask the Catbot for something closer.