Over the span of four nights, between April 16 and 19, 1978, approximately 120 million Americans watched at least some of an NBC miniseries that graphically portrayed the genocide of six million Jews during the Nazi era. Commercial prime-time television may have seemed an unlikely venue for this kind of subject matter, but Holocaust appeared during a moment in American network history when more serious subject matter threatened to get a toehold in prime time. The phenomenal and unprecedented success the year before of the miniseries Roots paved the way for Holocaust. In fact, NBC gave the production its go-ahead during the week that Roots aired. That series' record-breaking Nielsen numbers apparently gave the network confidence that if American viewers were willing to sit through night after night of brutal, realistic depictions of slavery in America, then those same viewers might also brave the images of genocide.

Producer Herbert Bodkin, director Marvin...