(This is the second chapter of a book-in-progress, “Television, and How It Got That Way.” For the first chapter, scroll down in “stories.”)
In his busy life, Pat Weaver was involved in many fine creations. They included “Today,” “Tonight,” the Sid Caesar (shown here) comedies and Sigourney Weaver, his daughter.
(There’s a bit more on her at the end of this chapter.)
But he also fell far short of one goal. Television, he once said, could be “the shining center of the home.”
Weaver was a prime force at NBC, including its president from 1953-’55.
“NBC wants America to see operas in English, the NBC Symphony, great theater performances (and) Sadler’s Wells Ballet,” he said in a speech. He also wanted to present “the issues of our times with enough showmanship so that most people will be eager to watch.”
In 1956, he was ousted. Television added a talking horse in ‘61 and a talking car in ‘65. It strayed from the “shining center.”
But for a time, this talk seemed reasonable. TV was young and ambitious.
At CBS and NBC, it was the golden age of live drama. Paddy Chayefsky’s “Marty” debuted in 1953, Reginald Rose’s “Twelve Angry Men” in ‘54, Rod Serling’s “Requiem For a Heavyweight” in ‘56. JP Miller’s “Days of Wine and Roses” in ‘58.
Each draw praise and became a successful movie. So did others.
And Weaver wanted to give variety shows more … well, variety. “I intended to insert an occasional aria or a scene from a popular ballet like ‘Swan Lake’ into high-quality variety reviews,” he wrote in “The Best Seat in the House” (Knopf, 1994).
He even launched “Operation Frontal Lobes.” The idea, he wrote, was to “enrich, inspire and enlighten viewers.”
Amd occasionally, it happened. As Marc Robinson pointed out in “Brought to You in Living Color” (Wiley, 1999): A Margot Fonteyn/Royal Ballet production of “Sleeping Beauty” drew 30 million viewers. The 1951 debut of the Gian Carlo Menotti opera “Amahl and the Night Visitors” did so well that it was repeated every December for 16 year.
“Amahl” was sponsored by Hallmark, which promptly created the Hallmark Hall of Fame. Its next three shows were Shakespeare dramas.
There would be many classy writers, Mark Quigley wrote in “Hallmark Hall of Fame: The First 50 Years” (UCLA, 2001): “Willa Cather, William Faulkner. Graham Greene, Arthur Miller, Rosamunde Pilcher, George Bernard Shaw, John Steinbeck, August Wilson and Lanford Wilson are writers whose work has been adapted by Hall of Fame.”
Today, you won’t find much Shakespeare (or Shaw or Miller or …) on the Hallmark Channel or NBC. What changed?
One clue might come from Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows,” which debuted in 1950. Soon, it was doing 90 live minutes a week, with manic wit and no cue cards.
“The show was brilliantly funny,” Robinson wrote. “And it’s pressure-cooker atmosphere produced some of the mot engaging and vividly memorable moments of the Golden Age.”
It started hot – No. 4 in the Nielsen ratings in its first season. Then it was No. 8 its second, No. 19 its third. After that, Imogene Coca (shown here) left, the show changed its name and fell out of the top-30.
Why the drop? There are plenty of explanations, but one involves the expansion of the TV universe.
In 1950, when Caesar started, there were only 6 million TV sets in the U.S. Most were in bo cities, where his humor – a gleeful blends of international accents – clicked. Most were in upper-income homes, where his parodies worked.
By 1955, there were 39 million sets. The broader audience had different tastes; “The $64,000 Question” was No. 1.
That history was repeated in the start of cable.
Some of the early channels were Bravo in 1980, CBS Cable in ‘81 and Arts & Entertainment in ‘84. Each propelled fine-arts shows
CBS even did an analysis, saying there would only be 10 surviving cable channels, one of them CBS Cable. It missed on both counts: There sometimes seem to be 10,000 cable channels … but CBS Cable barely lasted a year.
The cable world had simply broadened. At the peak, it reached 60 per cent of U.S. homes. As it did, the narrow focus on the arts faded.
Bravo became the home of “Real Housewives” and such. Arts & Entertainment simply became A&E, then ignored the “A” … in the same way that The Learning Channel became TLC and ignored the “L.”
Such changes are frequent … but not inevitable. On the premium-cable side, HBO and Showtime have stuck to their quality-TV approach; many of the streaming networks have done the same.
But regular TV or basic-cable? It seems to have missed Pat Weaver’s goal.
On that note, we should add something: Yes, Weaver propelled huge changes in TV, from “Today” and “Tonight” to a crucial step: Advertisers simply bought commercial spots, instead of creating the entire show. But he did not come up with his daughter’s cool name.
For her first 13 years, she was merely a “Susan.” That’s when she adopted the name “Sigourney,” from a minor character in “The Great Gatsby.”
This turned out to be an ideal name for an actress who has received three Oscar nominations, four Emmy nominations and much praise. It propelled her career … usually.
In “Disney In-Between” (Old Mill Press, 2024), Stephen Anderson quotes Gary Nelson, the “Black Hole” director: “One idea I had was Sigourney Weaver and (the head of casting) said, ‘What kind of a name is that? That’s not a Disney name.’”
She wasn’t cast. And Disney, back then, wasn’t a shining center of our homes.