Perhaps I don't fully understand your question. I don't think any spaceflights, other than the early brief Mercury flights, were ever broadcast live from blastoff to splashdown. My cable package has a NASA channel, but I don't think even it covers the International Space Station missions nonstop for weeks at a time.

In an era when there were only three television networks, coverage was typically a 30-minute "News Special" for the blastoff, and another for the splashdown and recovery. Others might be scheduled for the novel achievements of particular missions, such as docking, spacewalks, and translunar injections. The occasional unusual event or false alarm about a problem would be handled with a "breaking news bulletin" that interrupted regular programming for a few minutes, as the movie shows. Morning news shows such as "Today" would have feature segments about whatever flight was up that might go deeper into the science.

Indeed, by the time of Apollo 13, even blastoff had become so routine that none of the networks chose to broadcast it live. Instead, they stuck with their regular daytime programming of primarily soap operas and game shows, and videotaped or filmed the liftoff for a segment that night on the evening news.