By Lillie Liska
Sixty-four years ago, ABC swung for the fences. On Sept. 23, 1962, the network premiered THE JETSONS, its very first program ever broadcast in color — and despite that bit of TV history, the Hanna-Barbera sitcom lasted just 24 episodes before the network pulled the plug.
“The percentage of color TVs in American homes hovered under 3% in 1962,” TVLine writer Aaron Perine recently reported, looking back at the doomed debut. “And in a situation where you’re trying to show off a new innovation, that lack of buy-in is absolutely crushing.”
The math really was that brutal. William Hanna and Joseph Barbera built a gleaming, push-button future for the Jetson family, but most American living rooms simply couldn’t see it.
Only ABC affiliates in Los Angeles, New York, Detroit, Chicago and San Francisco aired the show in color, per TVLine. Everyone else got George (voiced by George O’Hanlon), Jane, Judy, Elroy, Astro and Rosie the Robot in the same black-and-white as THE FLINTSTONES. The novelty that was supposed to draw eyeballs never reached most of them.
Then there was the competition. NBC’s WALT DISNEY’S WONDERFUL WORLD OF COLOR already owned the Sunday-night family slot, and Disney had a sizable head start on the very thing ABC was trying to sell. Going head-to-head against the Mouse — in his own arena — turned out exactly the way you’d guess.
ABC canceled THE JETSONS after one season in 1963. The show could’ve stayed buried right there. Instead, Saturday-morning reruns turned it into one of the most-watched cartoons of the 1970s, and Hanna-Barbera revived it for new episodes in 1985.
That second life is the part worth pausing on. THE JETSONS didn’t endure because executives correctly predicted the future of broadcasting. It endured because kids kept finding it, generation after generation, on whatever television their parents already owned.
The show is still running. MeTV airs Hanna-Barbera blocks heavy on JETSONS and FLINTSTONES reruns, and Warner Bros. has been shopping a live-action JETSONS movie for more than a decade. Movieguide® reported in October that actor Jim Carrey is in talks to lead that long-gestating project, despite his recent hints at retirement.
“I really like my quiet life and I really like putting paint on canvas,” Carrey told IGN about stepping back. “I really love my spiritual life and I feel like — and this is something you might never hear another celebrity say as long as time exists — I have enough. I’ve done enough. I am enough.”
Carrey’s reflection is a useful frame for what THE JETSONS has always been about, even when its writers weren’t thinking that way. The Jetson family lives in a world that solved every domestic inconvenience — and the jokes still revolve around George’s grouchy boss, Judy’s homework and the slightly suffocating relief of a robot maid who keeps house better than you ever could.
Convenience didn’t fix the human heart. It rarely does. Christian families watching with their kids can point at that gentle truth without ever having to give a sermon about it; the show makes the point all on its own.
Movieguide®’s review of JETSONS: THE MOVIE once called the franchise “friendly” and “good-hearted” and praised its anti-bigotry message about making the effort to like people no matter how different they are. Six decades after a color broadcast almost no one could actually see, that’s still a fair description of what the Jetsons are doing up there in the sky — folding small, true ideas into bright cartoon shapes, waiting for the rest of us to catch up.
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