The series was created by Ethel Winant[1] and Lewis Freedman[2] of CBS, who had overcome the objections of network executives who considered it to be an unworthy use of program time.

After the series ended, the time slot of the Bicentennial Minute came to be occupied by a brief synopsis of news headlines ("Newsbreak") read by a CBS anchor.

The long-running television program Hee Haw parodied Bicentennial Minutes as "About 200 Years Ago", with musician Grandpa Jones (wearing a mockery of a tri-cornered hat) giving a weekly monologue of humorously fractured historical "facts", about figures from the American Revolution and the colonial era.

A sketch on The Sonny and Cher Show aired in early 1976 featured guest star Jim Nabors portraying British King George III, offering a comic rebuttal to the always pro–American Revolution Bicentennial Minutes.

[5] The character Brenda Morgenstern (Julie Kavner) refers to the Bicentennial Minutes in the Rhoda episode "If You Don't Tell Her, I Will," broadcast in December 1975.

Panelist Charles Nelson Reilly makes a joke that a moment on the New Year's Eve 1976 episode of Match Game 76 is "the last one, thank god."

On the April 24, 1976 episode of the NBC show Saturday Night Live, host Raquel Welch appears in a sketch entitled Bisexual Minutes.