(This is the fourth chapter of a book-in-progress, “Television, and How It Got That Way.” For the previous chapters, scroll down in “stories.”)
Variety shows seemed to fit cozily into the new TV world.
The were simple and straight-forward. People looked at a camera and sang or told jokes; occasionally, they danced. Little could go wrong.
And still …
Some of the biggest stars had variety shows that sputtered. Frank Sinatra went two seasons and 62 episodes; Eddie Fisher went two and 27. There was only one season for Judy Garland (26 episodes), Sammy Davis Jr. (14), Jerry Lewis (11) and Mary Tyler Moore (also 11). All of those topped “The Paula Poundstone Show,” which lasted two episodes. As it turns out, variety shows are easy to do, but hard to do right.
Ironically, TV was finally getting the hang of it — peaking with “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” (shown here) when it quit making them. More on that in a bit.
The first regular variety show, “Hour Glass,” arrived in May of 1946,Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh wrote. The competition that night was light – a cartoonist, a news show and “Famous Jury Trials.” So was the potential; only a few thousand TV sets had been sold.
Still, that first episode tried a lot – two songs by Evelyn Knight, two comedy sketches, a stand-up comedian, a film about South American dancing and some coffee commercials … one which ran for four-and-a-half minutes.
In the weeks that followed, the show had guest stars – Peggy Lee, Dennis Day, Jerry Colonna, Bert Lahr, Edgar Bergen – and even a chorus line.
It ran for 30 weeks and showed what might work on TV. In 1948, variety shows found a foothold:
The “Texaco Star Theatre” didn’t start with hints of grandeur. Four guys in gas station uniforms sang: “Oh, we’re the men from Texaco/We work from Maine to Mexico.”
Then came the show’s alternating hosts, mostly comedians of the vaudeville era – Henny Youngman, Morey Amsterdam, Jack Carter and more … including a semi-known chap named Milton Berle.
By the end of the summer, Berle had become the permanent host, getting broader, goofier and more successful.
“The Berle phenomenon was unbelievable,” Pat Weaver wrote. “During his first two years, there were ratings periods when the pollsters found that virtually everyone watching television was watching him.”
Weaver feared that CBS would lure him away – as it did with Jack Benny and others in the radio day.
“We were so alarmed at the possibility of losing Milton that my whole staff romanced him,” Weaver wrote. “I talked to him backstage at every opportunity and even gave him what I called a ‘lifetime contract.’”
It wasn’t really for a lifetime, but Berle did eight seasons on NBC, paused for two years and did one more, nudging TV through its early years.
Ed Sullivan was the opposite of Berle in every way – no silly costumes, no old jokes, no … well, anything.
He will go down as possibly the worst host in TV history, but also one of the best producers.
Sullivan fit the general view that newspaper columnist should never be on TV. Stiff and somber, he simply pointed to his next act.
But they were an amazing collection of acts. The first night (June 20, 1948) included two opposite duos –Martin and Lewis, Rodgers and Hammerstein. It also had another comedy duo, a singing fireman, another singer, a ballerina and classical pianist Eugene List.
This led to Sullivan’s three big strengths:
— His big-tent approach expanded the viewers’ world. In smalltown Wisconsin, for instance, I could see opera singers, scenes from Broadway musicals … and Black people. There were no Blacks in Clintonville, but I knew Louis Armstrong and Peg Leg Bates were stars.
— He insisted on actual singing, at a time when some shows would settle for lip-syncing, Sullivan gave us the real thing.
— And he was open to rock ‘n’ roll. On Feb. 9, 1964, Sullivan had acrobats, a magician, an impressionist, a comedy duo, and singer Tessie O’Shea, who was sometimes fondly dubbed Two Ton Tessie. But it also had the Beatles; 73 million people watched.
The Beatles did five more Sullivan shows; the Dave Clark Five did 12. Sullivan helped transforming pop culture.
In the second year of the Nielsen ratings (1951-2), a typical Berle hour was seen by more than half the homes that had TV’s.
Still, that only put it at No. 2. Arthur Godfrey was No. 1 … and No. 6 … and tops in radio.
On Mondays, his “Talent Scouts” introduced such unknowns as Tony Bennett, Patsy Cline, Roy Clark, Leslie Uggams and an accordian-playing Connie Francis. (Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly failed in auditions.)
On Wednesdays, “Arthur Godfrey and His Friends” had regular duty for some “Talent Scout” winners (Pat Boone, Carmel Quinn, the Chordettes, the McGuire Sisters) and others.
And every morning, he had his CBS Radio show. At one point, Robert Metz wrote in “Reflections in a Bloodshot Eye” (Playboy Press, 1975), Godfrey accounted for 12 per cent of all CBS income.
“It was strange,” Metz wrote, “that a man so without talent – except as a ukelele plucker – should become a superstar …. He sang passably and sang about as well.” One of Godfrey’s writers, he said, called him “the dumbest genius I ever met.” And one executive, Metz wrote, was considered “the vice-president in charge of Arthur Godfrey.”
There was a lot to keep charge of, peaking when Godfrey told singer Julius LaRosa – live, on the air – that he was fired. The kind-old-uncle image faded; “Talent Scouts” remained quite strong, but by 1955-56, “Arthur Godfrey and His Friends” had fallen out of the top 30.
And LaRosa? For three years, he had summer replacement shows – a 15-minute one on CBS, then an hour one on NBC.
In the ‘50s, there were some variety shows that reached the top-30 – Berle, Sullivan, Godfrey, Jack Benny, Jackie Gleason, Red Buttons, Red Skelton, Perry Como, George Gobel, Phil Silvers, a few others.
But there were plenty that didn’t. Some were hosted by major stars of the past or future – Steve Allen, Ray Bolger, Pat Boone, Johnny Carson, Dick Clark, Imogene Coca, Jimmy Durante, Eddie Fisher, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Dave Garroway, Betty Hutton, Patti Page, Mickey Rooney and Ed Wynn.
And others? Well, in the fall primetime schedules in the ‘50s, there were variety shows hosted by Jack Carter, Paul Dixon, Dotty Mack, Gisele MacKenzie, Tony Martin, Don McNeil, Vaughn Monroe, Patrice Munsel, Dell O’Dell, Peter Potter and Martha Wright. And that’s not to mention “The Arthur Murray Dance Party,” “Circus Time” and “It’s Polka Time.”
Variety shows – with or without big stars – vanished quickly. There are many explanations, but I’ll offer one theory: Many of them weren’t very good.
They often fell into a steady pattern – star sings, guest sings, some easy-to-ignore patter, star and guest sing together.
There were stand-up comedians, but many of them reflected the days before the fresh perspectives of Bob Newhart or Joan Riv. There was music, but it was often in the narrow confines of what was called “popular music” – music that, in the rock era, became increasingly unpopular.
The rock song “Hound Dog”? Como tried to sing it as a mid-temp pop tune; it was not a pleasant experience. Allen let Elvis Presley sing it … but only to a solemn-faced basset hound that was wearing a top hat.
(Allen later said he sometimes bought a Rolling Stones record, just so he could turn it off. And when he hosted “I’ve Got a Secret,” he had panelists do a dramatic reading. None guessed the secret – that they had just read the words to “Leader of the Pack,” the No. 1 song in America.)
At times, bands were treated with disinterest by the directors. A camera might be on the bass during a lead-guitar riff, on the singer during a drum burst.
Even the Sullivan show, with its big-tent approach, had its limits. It asked Mick Jagger to change “I want to spend the night with you” to “I want to spend some time with you”; it asked Jim Morrison to drop the line “Girl, we can’t get much higher.” Jagger assented, Morrison didn’t … and was never booked again.
As variety shows kept seeming older and stiffer, there was a handy accident.
In 1967, CBS moved “The Garry Moore Show” to its 9 p.m. Sunday slot. That sort of made sense; this was a long-running variety show, plunked into the spot behind Sullivan. But it no longer had Carol Burnett and now it was facing “Bonanza,” the No. 1 show on television.
Mike Dann, CBS’ programming chief, needed a replacement in a hurry. The only quick-fix idea he heard was to hire the Smothers Brothers.
“Everybody was saying it took a lot of courage to do it,” Dann said in David Bianculli’s “Dangerously Funny” (Simon & Schuster, 2009). “It didn’t take a lot of courage. They were the only show I could get ready.”
Much later, the brothers would be remembered for battling CBS censors. At first, there were no hints of that. “We wanted traditional stuff,” Dick Smothers told Bianculli. They wanted dancers and background singers. There was even a marching band, with bass drum, for the opening credits.
“Nothing at all in that first hour was topical,” Bianculli wrote, “much less controversial.”
That would come later: Pete Seeger singing a metaphor for slogging into an unending war … David Steinberg delivering a sermonette that included grabbing someone “by the Old Testaments” … Pat Paulsen delivering a gun-rights editorial (“If you’re old enough to get arrested, you’re old enough to carry a gun”) that pointed out: “A gun is a necessity. Who knows, if you’re walking down a street you’ll spot a moose.”
But even if none of that had happened, the show would have been revolutionary. It simply had fresh ways of doing everything.
Paulson’s first piece on the show had nothing to do with issues. He merely looked official and mumbled in an incoherent – and hilarious – fashion.
The comedy kept getting sharper. After starting with veteran writers, Tom Smothers added a fresh layer of young ones – Steve Martin, Rob Reiner. McLean Stevenson, songwriter John Hartford and Bob Einstein, the future “Super Dave Osborne.” It was, Bianculli points out, “the best bullpen of young writers” since Sid Caesar had Neil Simon, Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner (Rob’s dad) and, later, Woody Allen.
The comedy was sharp and the music was presented in fresh ways. For one piece, Mason Williams performed all the instruments; the camera darted between cut-outs of him at every spot in the orchestra. For another, there were “topless dancers” – chorus girls’ legs (with everything else blacked out) cavorting behind the singer.
“The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” kept showing how good a variety show can be. Then, due to censorship battles, it was canceled.
In the half-century since then, there have been several “variety shows” that were basically comedy ones with a token bit of music. Some have been brilliant – “Laugh-In,” Carol Burnett, “Saturday Night Live,” “In Living Color.” But with the rare exception (“The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour,” for instance), none has been a true variety show.
Much of that involves the stratification of music tastes. Comedy can still gather large audiences, but no music genre seems to do that.
The latenight shows even set hard rules: No music guest – not even a Garth Brooks or Whitney Houston – would sing in the middle of a show. Music is only for the final segment, because some viewers will scatter.
These days, music rarely shows up in prime time unless there are awards or – as in Godfrey’s day – a talent contest.
Over the years, there have been TV specials that showed just how good TV music can be. They’ve included “Color Me Barbra” (1966), “Movin’ With Nancy” (1967), the stunning “Liza With a Z” (1972) and “Adele: One Night Only” (2021).
The latter was produced by Ben Winston, the next great hope for variety TV. He’s an Englishman who came here with James Corden, but don’t expect all their fellow countrymen to be equally clever.
In 2009, the Fox network launched what was going to be the next new variety show, “Osbournes Reloaded.” One example of its humor was to blindfold an audience member and have him kiss an elderly woman.
Mercifully, the show was canceled after one episode, but the point was clear:
Primetime TV had once reached the Caesar/Smothers/Living Color peaks; now it was into kissing-old-ladies humor. We may have to wait a while for the next great variety show.