In 1971, he was hired to direct Buck and the Preacher but, after a few days of shooting, was replaced by Sidney Poitier, who cited creative differences.

Sargent's directorial work from this period includes The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, the TV movies Hustling with Lee Remick and Jill Clayburgh, Maybe I'll Come Home in the Spring with Sally Field, and Tribes with Jan-Michael Vincent and Darren McGavin, as well as international award-winning ABC film The Night That Panicked America.

In 1974, he won his first Directors Guild of America Award for The Marcus-Nelson Murders (1973), which was the TV movie pilot for the Kojak series.

Roger Ebert called his directing of the climactic sequence "incompetent,"[8] and he was nominated for Worst Director in the 1987 Golden Raspberry Awards.

[9] He concentrated on TV movies after Jaws: The Revenge, including The Karen Carpenter Story, The Long Island Incident, Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, and the 2007 remake of the Sally Field docudrama Sybil.

[10] Sargent spent time as the Senior Filmmaker-in-Residence for the Directing program at the American Film Institute Conservatory in Los Angeles.