TV Manager

In TV Manager, it's 1954, and you've just inherited a small TV station on the verge of bankruptcy. Each day, you schedule movies, news, and other shows on your regular broadcast hours (noon to midnight), look at the advertising contracts under offer, select ones to accept, and schedule them opposite your programs. Each advertising contract carries penalties if you don't reach enough viewers, so you need to be cautious initially; also, some specify certain demographics (100,000 kids, say), and you want to match them to your programs (probably don't want to broadcast that during the news). Additionally, you can control the content of your news--crank up the entertainment and sports, who cares about international news anyway? Let them eat celebrity gossip.

TV Manager is not a high-gloss game--in fact, perhaps appropriately for its setting, it's largely black-and-white. But it's a pretty good simulation of its topic, and hey, there's not much else on the subject.