Holiday Evergreens: The Best Specials Keep on Giving

Forty years ago, when CBS broadcast “A Charlie Brown Christmas” for the first time, Charles M. Schulz’s animated special drew 15.4 million viewers and was the second-most popular show of the week.

When ABC rebroadcast the same special earlier this month, it drew 15.3 million viewers, and was ranked eighth for the week. In other words, a TV special first shown during the Lyndon Johnson administration is as popular now as it was then.

Why?

One, because it’s great _ the single best holiday special ever made, with wonderful music and a wonder-filled message.

At an overly sensitive time, when Amy Poehler, on “Saturday Night Live,” notes wryly that “There are just seven more shopping days till holiday,” the meaning of Christmas as explained by Linus is as welcome on TV as it is rare.

But “A Charlie Brown Christmas” also endures because it’s always been available, shown annually by either CBS or ABC since its inception. Yesterday’s kids, now parents and grandparents, show it to their own young ones in one of the few remaining TV rituals. The show’s longevity is a holiday treat _ and a relative rarity.

“Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol” deserves to be treasured almost as much, but the 1962 animated classic is rescued from oblivion just once this year _ Saturday at noon on Cartoon Network. And while “It’s a Wonderful Life” gets its second of two annual NBC showings Saturday at 8 p.m., that 1946 movie, starring Jimmy Stewart, is less of a network holiday fixture than it once was. For a while, “Wonderful Life” was shown by any station that owned a print, once the copyright lapsed in the mid-`70s.

“Suddenly,” writes Diane Werts in her new “Christmas on Television” book, “a crazy quilt of local network stations, PBS affiliates, and anybody else with a video signal was throwing the James Stewart feature onto its schedule, seemingly for days and nights on end throughout the Christmas season.”

The modern equivalent to that kind of overexposure, in a more concentrated dose, can be seen on cable. Beginning Satruday night at 8, TBS repeats 1983′s “A Christmas Story” for 24 straight hours. That allows people to tune in and have it on the background, like a video Yule log.

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David Bianculli: davidbianculli@comcast.net

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(c) 2005, New York Daily News.

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