When TV critics remember the show, they write how groundbreaking it was. Moore’s character, Mary Richards, was single, and in 1970, very few single women were the focus of a TV series.

Here’s how popular the show was. In 1975, WFSB-TV3 delayed its coverage of a UConn basketball game so it could present “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” in its regular time period. UConn basketball was popular in those days, but Mary Tyler Moore was even more popular. Here’s something else unique about the show — it aired on Saturday nights for the duration of its 168 episode run. That is something that would never happen in today’s broadcast TV climate — networks would never air one of their best shows on Saturday. Perhaps it would run reruns of its best shows, but not fresh episodes.

The broadcast networks have given up on Saturdays a long time ago, thinking that the young viewers that they are trying to reach are not at home on Saturdays.

Look at this week’s Saturday broadcast schedule — baseball on ABC, college football on ABC, “Love Island” on CBS, and a repeat of “America’s Got Talent” on NBC that originally aired on Wednesday, but NBC is rerunning it three days later. Apparently the network thinks fans of the show don’t own VCRs. No wonder people subscribe to Netflix — broadcast television has nothing for them on Saturdays.

It wasn’t always like this. Saturdays traditionally were one of the significant  nights of television.

Since Saturday was one of the few nights of the week that I was allowed to stay up and watch TV, I watched prime-time from beginning to end.

“All in the Family,” a show that was even more groundbreaking than “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” aired on Saturdays. Here’s how popular the show was when it moved to Saturdays — my friends would wait until “All in the Family” was over before they would go out on Saturdays.

Lawrence Welk owned Saturdays for years. When ABC aired a college football game on Saturdays, it would have to wait until Lawrence Welk was over before the game could start. That’s why the kickoffs started at 9:30 p.m., which was okay for the TV audience, but was inconvenient for the fans in the stands.

One of TV’s best variety shows, “Jackie Gleason’s American Scene Magazine” aired on Saturdays. The highlight took place near the end of the show when Gleason played Joe the Bartender and his guest always was Crazy Guggenheim, played by Frank Fontaine. Crazy talked funny, but sang like an opera star, a technique that Jim Nabors of “Gomer Pyle” fame also used.

A few years later Gleason used that time period to air 60-minute musical episodes of “The Honeymooners” with Art Carney and Sheila MacRae. Those episodes had to be expensive to produce, but CBS still aired them on Saturdays.

There were also many Westerns on Saturday night TV. “Gunsmoke” was a 10 p.m. staple until moving to Mondays.

“Bonanza, one of the most popular Western series of all time, started on Saturday nights before moving to Sundays, where it became the No. 1 show on television.

One of the top Western heroes of all time, Paladin, hung out on Saturdays in a show named “Have Gun, Will Travel.”

Paladin, played by Richard Boone, carried a card with him that said “Have Gun, Will Travel, Wire Paladin, San Francisco.”

I never could figure out what that meant. But I still enjoyed the show.

The sports teams of Furman University are named the Paladins — I wonder if the team mascot looks like Richard Boone?

Other shows, such as “The Carol Burnett Show,” “Mannix,” “Checkmate,” “The Defenders,” “Perry Mason,” and “The Bob Newhart Show” aired on Saturdays.

What’s left today is just rubble. You almost have to go out to have any entertainment.

Fifty years ago, Mary Tyler Moore threw her hat in the air because she was happy to be in Minnesota. That was one of the last times someone was happy to be on Saturday night TV.