The Book: Here’s TV’s history … going way back

(Here, from the start, is my book-in-progress, “Television, and How It Got That Way.” I’ll continue to post new chapters separately under “Stories.” After that, however, I’ll move each to its spot here.
This is Section One – “The Good Old Days (sometimes)” – and Chapter One.

To see how far TV has come, let’s step back a bit.
We’ll go to 1952 in Clintonville, a Wisconsin town of 4,600, known for big, tough trucks and (back then) big, tough football players.
I’m in the living room with my sister, our parents, a grandmother and a grandfather. Stationed a reasonable distance from the TV set, we are watching … well, a man playing records.
The man says what record he’s playing and starts it. Sometimes, the camera shows the record going around; sometimes it shows the man watching the record go around.
When I recall this, people sometimes ask: “Why were you watching?”
The answer is simple enough: Because it was on TV. And it was happening live. And it was in our living room.
And why didn’t we switch the channel? Mainly because there was nothing to switch to. We could only get one station (WBAY in Green Bay), but if there were others in our part of the world, they would have similar shows.
By 1952, TV had already found glimmers of greatness. It had “I Love Lucy,” Sid Caesar, Jackie Gleason and live dramas. Ed Sullivan was there, introducing us to marvels we would have never known, including Broadway stars and African-American entertainers.
But those were the high points. That year, prime time was also giving us “Youth on the March,” “Johns Hopkins Science Review,””Balance Your Budget” and lots of men fighting. Each week, there were three boxing shows and two wrestling ones, plus “Famous Fights” and “Greatest Fights.”
And that was primetime; at first, networks ignored the rest. “Today” arrived in 1952, “Tonight” in ‘54; soap operas were only 15 minutes long until 1956.
That left vast stretches when stations went off the air or made-do.
In big cities, they could figure out something. In 1949, a Los Angeles station filled its daytime with a talk-and-music show co-hosted by a DJ and newcomer Betty White. The show kept growing.
“’Hollywood on Television’ was now on the air 33 hours a week …. It was us or the test pattern,” White wrote in “Here We Go Again” (Scribner, 1995).
Even commercials were live and (mostly) done by the hosts, she wrote. “Our all-time record for a single day eventually stood at 58 live commercials.”
This makeshift show was for the elite, big-city market. Now imagine what was left for the rest of us.
Some stations filled the holes with whatever was free. “Industry on Parade” simply showed industrial films.
Some had some old movies. And some had men playing records. Hey, it was happening live … and it came right to our living room in Clintonville.

(Now Chapter Two, eyeing early bursts of optimism)

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.

(Now Chapter Three, re-visiting TV’s earliest days)

When it comes to naming the first TV star, choices vary.
Some people might choose the American president (Franklin Roosevelt) or the British postmaster general. Some could say Elma Farnsworth or Betty White or Adele Dixon or Gertrude Lawrence or (shown here) folks at the 1939 World’s Fair. They could also say David Sarnoff; he would.
But for now, we’ll say Felix the Cat.
Back in 1928, General Electric engineers were scrambling to develop a TV system. For two years, Marc Robinson wrote, “a small Felix the Cat figurine was used as the subject. The lighting was too hot for a human to tolerate.”
Overseas, things happened in 1936. In the summer, Germans televised parts of the Olympics; on Nov. 2, BBC Television debuted. It had a talk by the postmaster general, a showing of Movietone News and then a very short variety show – Adele Dixon singing, the Buck and Bubbles duo playing stride piano and tap-dancing (thus launching Black TV) and the BBC Television Orchestra.
Still, Americans might point to Felix in ‘28. Or to the moment Philo Farnsworth transmitted an image of his wife in 1929. Or to 1938, when RCA showed Gertrude Lawrence in scenes from Broadway’s “Susan and God.”
The next year, two fresh graduates from Beverly Hills High, Betty White and Harry Bennett, were asked to sing a mini-version of “The Merry Widow,” for an experimental broadcast in Los Angeles.
“I wore my graduation dress,” White wrote, “a fluffy white number held up by a sapphire blue velvet ribbon halter, which I fervently hoped would be enchanting …. The lights were excruciatingly hot. The beads of perspiration served to give us luster.”
It was a success, apparently – but the only people who saw it were the teens’ parents and a few others, all watching a monitor six floors away. It would be another decade before Los Angeles got its first TV station.
A few weeks before that, however, TV had its first big moment. The New York World’s fair, drawing 45 million people, had television exhibits from RCA and General Electric.
Roosevelt gave a TV address at the opening day of the fair. Ten days earlier, Sarnoff (the RCA chairman) had his own televised announcement.
This would be, he said, “the birth in this country of a new art so important in its implications that it is bound to affect all society. It is an art which shines like a torch of hope in a troubled world. It is a creative force which we must learn to utilize for the benefit of all mankind.”
Mankind would have mixed feelings about that “torch of hope.” But TV was here to stay.
The first two stations licensed by the Federal Communications Commission were RCA’s WNBT and CBS’ WCBW. That was on July 1, 1941; WNBT promptly offered a newscast with Lowell Thomas, a baseball game (Dodgers-Phillies) and a simulcast of the radio quiz show “Truth or Consequences.”
Five months later, Pearl Harbor came and the TV world paused. Throughout the war, WNBT was limited to four hours a week.
But as the war ended in 1945, the station was back:
— On Aug. 14, it aired 15 hours of victory celebrations. The signal linked to the GE station in Schenectady and the Philco one in Philadelphia, creating a sort of network.
— On Dec. 10, the station started airing six days a week.
— And the next Feb. 12, it linked with three nearby stations, to form NBC.
TV was ready to soar … sort of. The line-up, Robinson wrote, was “generally amateurish, populated with cooking shows, B movies and watch-the-artist-paint kinds of programming.”
The evening line-up was no improvement. As Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh pointed out in “The Complete Directory of Prime Time Network and Cable Shows” (Ballantine, 2007):
“Boxing was an institution in early television for several reasons: It was easy to produce, the camera-coverage area was limited … and it had tremendous appeal to the first purchasers of television sets in the late 1940s – bars.”
Also, it paused every three minutes, leaving room for razor-blade commercials. In the fall of 1946, NBC listed only eight hours of prime time; over half went to boxing – four hours of “Gillette Cavalcade of Sports” and 15 minutes of “Fight Film Filler.”
NBC did have one variety hour (called “Hour Glass”) and a half-hour “Television Screen Magazine.” At first, Brooks and Marsh wrote of the latter, guests were “seemingly anyone who could be lured into the studio. NBC employee Walter Law and his stamp collection were an early favorite.”
Other shows were only 15 minutes, twice a week (“Esso Newsreel”) or once:
— “Face to Face.” An artist tried to draw someone, strictly from descriptions.
— “Geographically Speaking.” This had travel films narrated by Mrs. Carveth Wells, Brooks and Marsh wrote. “It ended when she ran out of film.”
— Also, “I Like to Eat,” “You Are an Artist” and (with short documentaries) “Voice of Firestone” and “The World in Your Home.”
That sounds unimpressive – except the only competing network (Dumont, with two stations) had only three hours a week. There was a short cowboy movie, plus two quiz shows (“Cash and Carry” and “Play the Game”), some education (“Serving Through Science”) and “Faraway Hill,” the first grasp at bringing soap-operas to TV.
Those didn’t incite a rush to the stores. In 1945, the median income for non-farm families was just under $50 a week; an RCA TV set cost $385.
The ‘47 line-ups didn’t create much more of a rush.
DuMont still had its cowboy movie. Now it added four half-hours a week of the sweet-spirited “Small Fry Club,” plus a few other half-hours (“Doorway to Fame,” “Birthday Party,” “Charade Quiz”) and a 15-minute comedy with the married duo of Mary Kay and Johnny Stearns.
NBC still had its four hours of boxing, plus “You Are the Artist,” “The World in Your Home” and a couple newsreels. It had dropped the variety hour, but added a half-hour “Musical Merry-Go-Round.” It also added “Americana” (a history game show), “Eye Witness” (a show about TV itself), “Campus Hoopla” and (really) “In the Kelvinator Kitchen.”
Still, NBC had two signs of better times ahead – specials on Sundays and “Kraft Television Theatre” on Wednesdays.
The latter was a drama anthology, with top writers and actors. A year later, there were two more anthologies.
That year (1948) was when CBS and ABC arrived. So did Ed Sullivan, Arthur Godfrey and Milton Berle. TV would sort of be worth watching.

(Here’s Chapter Four, with a sudden surprise – the first Golden Age of drama.)

Imagine scriptwriters losing all of their favorite moves.
No car chases, no foot races. No bursts, blasts, infernos or explosions; hardly any zombies, vampires or space ships.
With such deprivation, writers would have to resort to wit and character and nuance and such. That’s how the first golden age of TV drama began.
Shows were done in small spaces with large cameras. They were done live; there was no room for error … or for second-guessing.
“We had technical freedom, creative freedom, financial freedom,” director Fielder Cook told journalist Gordon Sander, adding: “Nobody could come and take it away from us, because nobody knew how to do it but us.”
That was in the early 1950s, when the odds against them were steep, Marc Robinson wrote. “The studios were tiny, the lights were brutally hot and the tension was often unbearable.”
Yes, some shows failed. As director Buzz Kulik told Sander in “Serling” (Dutton, 1992): “There was a lot of crap around and there was a lot of stuff being badly done. But there was a kind of electricity and energy, a great kind of vitality.”
By some views, that era vanished vanished quickly. By others (more on that later), the era keeps being reborn.
It started in 1947, with the Kraft Television Theatre. Over the next 11-and-a-half years (before switching to music shows), Kraft did 650 plays (none of them cheesy), adapting Shakespeare, Ibsen, Tennessee Williams and beyond.
In 1948, “Philco Television Playhouse” arrived, with a producer (Fred Coe) who knew what he wanted. “He felt the writer was the center of the universe,” writer Horton Foote once said. “Writers like to hear that.”
He also went with rising talent, Robinson wrote:
“Coe and other anthology-show producers relied on untested new directors such as Delbert Mann, Arthur Penn and Sidney Lumet. And on hungry young actors such as Grace Kelly, Sidney Poitier, Joanne Woodward, Steve McQueen, Eva Marie Saint, Jason Robards and Walter Matthau
“When James Dean died a week before starting work on Hemingway’s ‘The Battler,’ Coe replaced him with Paul Newman. Another star was born.”
That happened to be the perfect time to find such people in New York. The Actors Studio had formed in 1947, creating a style that was subtle, not Shakespearean.
“What was then emerging was a distinct New York acting style,” Arthur Penn told Sander. “That’s why live TV was able to function, because these were theater actors, not actors who needed four takes.”
These were eager people, Roddy McDowall told Sander. “All of us were just a bunch of young kids throwing our hats in the air, with nothing to lose. So we were able to commit without fear.”
The resources were limited, Brooks and Marsh wrote. The first Kraft hour had a budget of $3,000. The entire studio was half the size of the space used to produce the commercials a decade later.
Given the limits, the emphasis was on tight tales. Reginald Rose’s 1954 “Twelve Angry Men” was all the better for being confined to a jury room.
Rose’s story was adapted into a play in 1955 and a movie — nominated for three Oscars, including best picture – in ‘57. Other movie versions were made in India, Russia and China; a cable remake was in 1997,
Not everything was tight, though. In 1956, George Roy Hill directed “A Night to Remember,” with 106 actors and the sinking of the Titanic.
But most golden-age dramas emphasized compact stories and complex characters. It was a springboard for Rose, Rod Serling (“Requiem For a Heavyweight”), Paddy Chayevsky (“Marty,” shown here in its movie version) and more. Gore Vidal alone wrote 70 dramas.
The one-hour drama anthologies peppered the NBC and CBS schedules, bearing the tames of their sponsors. In fall of 1956, there was Alcoa, Armstrong, Aluminum, Goodyear, Kraft and Lux.
“It was a vital young industry about which no one knew a great deal,” producer Jerome Hellman told Sander. “It was really dominated by creative people, to whom New York City represented a kind of creative Mecca.”
Alas, a change was coming in both geography and approach.
In 1952, CBS had opened Television City in Los Angeles, designed for live shows. For four years (1956-60), its “Playhouse 90” created classics — “The Miracle Worker,” “Judgment at Nuremberg,” Serling’s “In the Presence of Mine Enemies” – and more.
Later, Television City would range from Serling’s “Twilight Zone” to “All in the Family” and “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.” With a few exceptions, TV was moving west.
ABC – which mostly missed the golden age — had tried to accelerate that move.
“I went out to Hollywood and made the rounds of the major studios,” Leonard Goldenson, an ABC founder, wrote in “Beating the Odds” (Scribner’s, 1991). “I was trying to sell television as an opportunity to rejuvenate the movie business. Nobody was buying. Television was the enemy.”
At Warner Brothers, Goldenson wrote, Jack Warner – who used to make some films for double-features – was adamant about no TV, saying: “I made those quickies 30 years ago and I’m not going to make ‘em again.”
One exception, he wrote, was Walt Disney, who was desperate to finance a theme park. “ABC was really Disney’s last hope. He’d gone to the banks and when he tried to explain what he wanted to build, they just couldn’t grasp the concept.”
So ABC helped finance Disneyland; in return, Disney began making shows for it. That started in 1954; soon, TV had Davy Crockett and Zorro and lots of Mouseketeers.
Other Hollywood people also relented. In ‘56, the Golden Age was still going strong, but ABC was adding cowboy shows – Wyatt Earp, Jim Bowie, Lone Ranger, “Cheyenne,” “Broken Arrow.”
Soon, most TV production was at the movie studios or at CBS’ sites. Even Serling moved west.
“The golden age of television was essentially over,” Sander wrote. “Video had left New York …. Hollywood had won the battle.”
By 1960, only a couple golden-age survivors remained. And yet, the notion of quality drama never totally vanished:
— “Hallmark Hall of Fame” kept lofty standards. It started in 1951 with an opera (“Amahl and the Night Visitors”), followed with three Shakespeare dramas and more. In 1960, it was still doing Shakespeare and a musical adaptation of “Shangri-La”; in ‘86, Quigley wrote, “Promise” became “the most-honored dramatic special in television history.”
— PBS’ “Masterpiece Theatre” opened in 1971. Its first project (“The Churchills”) was no masterpiece, Alistaire Cooke (the host) granted in a 1991 overview of the series. Then things perked up with “dramatizations of Henry James, Dostoyevsky, Balzac, Hardy, Tolstoy and Stella Gibbons, pausing for a three-month bout of rattling costume drama, … before reverting to the Masterpiece form.” It’s a form that continues today, through “Downton Abbey,” “Wolf Hall” and beyond.
— In ‘72, PBS added “Great Performances.” It would eventually focus mainly on music and dance, but at first it had drama in the golden-age tradition.
— Then came the new era. NBC’s “The West Wing” and HBO’s “The Sopranos” both arrived in 1999, forever dueling for Emmys and other honors. Cable channels kept adding more, led by “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad.”
TV dramas were entering what critic David Bianculli dubbed “The Platinum Age.” That would fade a bit, but remind us of TV’s once-golden past.

(Here’s Chapter Five, viewing the rise and fall of variety shows, which were once the core of TV.)

Variety shows seemed to fit cozily into the new TV world.
They 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 at least 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, 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 columnists 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 transform 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 mornings had Godfrey’s 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 ukulele plucker – should become a superstar …. He played 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 during 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 Rivers. 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 back-up 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.
Paulsen’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 – just like 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

(And now Chapter Six, concluding the “Good Old Days (?) section. It views TV’s leap from forgettable comedies to “I Love Lucy.”)

As the 1951 season began, TV had a split personality.
Yes, there were promising signs from Sid Caesar, Ed Sullivan and lots of live dramas But there were also remnants of TV’s primitive start.
Look around prime time that fall and you’d find wrestling (twice) and boxing (twice). You’d find the “Georgetown University Forum” and “Johns Hopkins Science Review”; “Youth on the March” and “American Youth Forum.” You’d find “Marshall Plan in Action,” “Film Filler” and “Lessons in Safety.”
And into that shaky field – on Oct. 15, 1951 – “I Love Lucy” (shown here) debuted. It instantly fulfilled “every promise of the often harassed new medium,” a Hollywood Reporter critic wrote, adding: “It should bounce to the top of the rating heap in no time.“
It did. On a typical Monday that first season, more than half of all TV homes watched “Lucy”; the second year, more than two-thirds did. The night Lucy had her baby, that hit 71.7 percent.
This was a variation of a character Lucille Ball had done on radio – the wide-eyed innocent, forever floating dreams and schemes. It fit her immense range, Jess Oppenheimer (who produced her radio comedy and “I Love Lucy”) wrote in “Laughs, Luck … and Lucy” (Syracuse University Press. 1996):
“Unexpected qualities appeared out of nowhere. Little, human, ordinary, recognizable values. Inflections that were exactly what your sister or your mother or the lady busdriver used. She was the everywoman.”
She had done that on radio; now she was moving to TV, with the same writers (Madelyn Pugh and Bob Carroll, Jr.) and the bonus of sight gags.
There was one catch: Radio was done with a studio audience; at this point, TV situation comedies weren’t.
“Lucy was dreadful without an audience,” CBS executive Harry Ackerman once said. “She absolutely bloomed in front of an audience.”
She insisted that “I Love Lucy” have one. A legend persisted that Desi Arnaz (her co-star, producer and husband) had invented the method of shooting a sitcom before an audience.
“No particular person came up with the idea,” Oppenheimer said in 1973. “It developed in conferences and was dictated by necessity.” In his memoir, he offered details.
Lots of shows were shown live on connected stations on the East Coast. The rest of the country would get a so-so kinescope copy.
But Ball wanted to do the opposite – perform on the West Coast, then send kinescopes east. Back then, that meant 85 percent of viewers would get a bad copy.
The sponsor objected; Ball insisted on LA. Arnaz and others found a compromise — using four cameras, each loaded with film so no one would have to settle for kinescope.
The multi-camera idea “had been around since the late 1920s” in Hollywood, Oppenheimer wrote. It reached TV in the late ‘40s, Coyne Steven Sanders and Tom Gilbert wrote in “Desilu” (Morrow, 1993). It was used on “Public Prosecutor,” “Silver Theater,” “Truth or Consequences” and “Amos and Andy.”
But that last one was the only sitcom and it had a makeshift approach: It shot each episode with three cameras, but no audience. Then an audience was brought in to laugh at the result.
That missed the key part, Oppenheimer said — reacting to the audience. “There is that quality, that response, that comes only from a live experience. And the American audience had learned to expect this, after 25 years of listening to studio audiences laughing on radio.”
Now “I Love Lucy” wanted to do it all – four cameras, each rolling with film, yet not getting in the way of the studio audience. There were adjustments – an overall lighting system … long-lens cameras … and financial moves.
This new system was adding to the budget, CBS said; the stars would have to take a pay cut. Arnaz agreed – but only if he and Ball owned the shows after they aired.
For most shows, that would have been useless. Even Caesar’s comedies or the golden-age dramas had little value as shaky kinescopes.
But these “Lucy” episodes were different – crisp, black-and-white film, shot in Hollywood. “Desi had, in effect, invented the rerun market,” Sanders and Gilbert wrote.
The episodes eventually reran on CBS daytime … and on individual stations … and even in a few colorized primetime specials. They were worth millions and were the basis for what followed.
Buoyed by profits from reruns, the Desilu company bought RKO Studios, eventually expanding to 33 sound stages. It produced “The Untouchables” and (after Arnaz left in 1962) “Star Trek,” “Mission: Impossible,” “Mannix” and more.
After running the company for five years, Ball sold it to Paramount’s parent company in ‘67. The old Desilu shows fueled Paramount’s movie business, with “Star Trek,” “Untouchables” and Tom Cruise’s “Mission: Impossible” empire. Then “Star Trek” became the key piece of the Paramount+ streamer.
There was also an irony: Six weeks before “I Love Lucy” debuted, CBS completed a link that connected its stations. If they knew that was coming, the “Lucy” people might have skipped the idea of using film and owning reruns
But they didn’t, Oppenheimer wrote. They created “the technical innovations that would contribute so much to the success of ‘I Love Lucy,’ the growth of the Desilu empire, and the eventual shift of the center of television production from New York to Hollywood.”
In the years that followed, many sitcoms would use the “Lucy” techniques and some would shoot on the old Desilu stages. By accident or not, some had rhythms and characters that were similar to the “Lucy” ones.
Some of those shows would be awful, but others fueled two comedy golden ages. TV was going far away from “Film Filler” and “Lessons in Safety.”

(Here’s the start of the second section, “How Many Choices: Was three really enough?” It starts with this re-numbered Chapter Seven, viewing the first stabs at a fourth network.)

We’ve always assumed that three is the logical number for anything.
It’s the number of strikes, outs, Stooges, little pigs, blind mice and little kittens that lost their mittens. But is it the ideal number of over-the-air, commercial TV networks?
It seemed that way. Early efforts at a fourth network sputtered, despite such stars as Jackie Gleason (shown here), Ernie Kovacs, boxers and a bishop. Other tries failed. For 30 years, it was ABC, CBS and NBC.
And then it all changed. There were four networks … then six … then seven … and then it went down to five plus some slivers.
We’re talking here about true networks – ones that must assemble stations around the country. Eventually, high-tech methods – cable, satellite, streaming – made it possible to skip all of that.
But before tech took over, the stabs at a fourth network were intriguing. Let’s look at the first tries:

ABC
Yes, there was a stretch when ABC was No. 4.
“DuMont, the third network, had slightly more coverage than ABC,” Leonard Goldenson, ABC’s founder, wrote in “Beating the Odds” (Scribner’s, 1991).
The earliest networks were from companies that made TV sets – NBC (owned by RCA) and DuMont. They were allowed to do limited programming during World War II.
Afterward, two radio networks could put up their first nightly TV schedules. It was a mismatch:
— By 1948, CBS already had Arthur Godfrey, Ed Sullivan and the “Studio One” dramas.
— ABC? It included “Quizzing the News,” “Critic at Large,” “Fashion Story,” “Teenage Book Club” and – six times a week – “Film Shorts.”
Short on cash, ABC was merging with the Paramount theater chain. The government worried about a monopoly and hesitated. For 18 months, ABC was barred from going after new affiliates.
When that was finally settled, Goldenson wrote:
— ABC had just 14 stations, counting the five it owned. NBC had 71; CBS had 74. For commercials, “one hour of CBS programming brought in about five times as much as an hour on ABC.”
— The Chicago station was in good shape, but the others were in shambles. “In Detroit, all the equipment was sitting around some hallway they’d leased. The San Francisco property had been an Elks Club; there was still sawdust on the floor.” The Los Angeles station was a long-vacant movie studio. “It was falling apart; rats scampered across the rafters and piles of droppings were everywhere.”
— And the New York hub was a former riding stable. “The scent of equine manure still permeated the establishment.”
At first, ABC’s only notable shows were radio transplants — “Ozzie & Harriet” and “The Lone Ranger.” It scrambled to land some stars.
“One of the people they desperately wanted was Ray Bolger, a proven talent on Broadway and as a TV guest star,” Danny Thomas wrote in “Make Room For Danny” (Putnam’s, 1991). Bolger’s agent said yes … if ABC also had a show for Thomas.
It was an unusual choice at the time, Thomas once wrote. “It was the day of the White Protestant American United States, and a guy like me wasn’t exactly family fare.”
He was the former Amos Jacobs and, before that, Muzyad Yakhoob. With his Lebanese background, he didn’t seem like the other TV stars. But his show – sharply written and played – was a crisp, funny look at the life of an overstretched family man.
It won the Emmy for best new show and proved ABC could create shows from scratch. After four years (twice as long as Bolger), Thomas jumped to CBS in 1957 — leaping to No. 2 in the Nielsen ratings.
Mostly, however, ABC’s strategy was to lean toward Hollywood. Its Disney show was a quick success … but, for a time, nothing else was.
For its first two seasons (1954 and ‘55), “Disneyland” was the only ABC show in the Nielsen top-20. Soon, it was joined by westerns – Wyatt Earp, “Cheyenne,” “Sugarfoot,” “The Rifleman,” “The Lawman,” Disney’s “Zorro” and more. ABC moved to No. 3; DuMont was fourth and wobbling.

The DuMont Network
There was a lot of potential to DuMont, even as it slipped from No. 2 to 3 to 4 and then to oblivion.
Allen DuMont was considered a genius. His labs ranged from creating the first long-lasting TV tube to helping the U.S. develop radar. His company reportedly sold the first consumer TV set, in 1938.
Eventually, its sets were in many places … including upstate New York in 1956. In his memoir, Brandon Tartikoff (the NBC chief during its prime) recalled being “a seven-year-old boy, sitting nose-to-screen in front of a seven-inch DuMont television set, mesmerized by everything.”
That happened to be just after the time when the DuMont network went out of business. Two years later, its TV-manufacturing would do the same.
But at first, this had a key role, alongside NBC, as the first networks.
DuMont set up headquarters in a former department store in Manhattan, then leased a theater for shows. Early efforts included:
— The first network soap opera. “Faraway Hill” ran for 12 episodes in 1946.
— One of the first situation comedies. “Mary Kay and Johnny” was written by Johnny Stearns, who starred with his wife. It debuted in 1947 on DuMont, then moved to NBC, to CBS and back to NBC.
— “The Morey Amsterdam Show,” which started on CBS, then moved to DuMont in ‘49. It was set in a fictional nightclub and its only three regulars went on to bigger things – Amsterdam on “The Dick Van Dyke Show” … Art Carney (who played a doorman and waiter) as Gleason’s sidekick … and Jacqueline Susann (who played the gorgeous cigarette girl) as author of “Valley of the Dolls.”
— “Cavalcade of Stars.” It arrived in 1949, as a standard variety show with a comedian as host. First was Jack Carter, then Jerry Lester … and then Gleason, with his rich array of characters. (Even the classic “Honeymooners” began there.) Gleason would stay on the show for two seasons. Then, like Thomas, he jumped to CBS and saw his show reach No. 2 in the ratings.
— Other key people. Kovacs had a short-lived show. Bishop Fulton J. Sheen gave a weekly talk, winning the Emmy for best TV personality. Ted Mack had “The Original Amateur Hour,” an early ratings success that then jumped to other networks.
— Early nudges toward diversity. There were shows whose stars were Black (Hazel Scott), Jewish (Gertrude Berg) and Asian (Anna May Wong).
— And “Captain Video and His Video Rangers,” a micro-budget show that had a new episode (30 minutes for four years, 15 for two) each weekday.
“Captain Video” sounds like a trifle, but it was more.
You can take my word for it. (The scenes with Tobor the robot were a big hit in Clintonville.) Or you can take the word of Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh; in their guide to primetime TV (Ballantine, 2007), they wrote:
“’Captain Video’ was, in all, a splendid example of innovative programming that was perfect for the TV medium. Had DuMont been able to devise more such breakthroughs, the network might have survived longer than it did. As it was, ‘Captain Video and His Video Rangers’ lasted until the network itself crumbled away in 1955.”
But why did it crumble?
Many of its other shows never came close to the Gleason/”Captain Video” level of entertainment. DuMont’s primetime line-up included “Fashions on Parade,” “Photographic Horizons,” “Fishing and Hunting Club,” “Visit With the Armed Forces,” “Georgetown University Forum,” “Author Meets the Critics” and lots of boxing.
The network had ambition, but it also had built-in limitations.
Its competitors sprang from radio. They used radio stars (Jack Benny, Arthur Godfrey, Lucille Ball, Red Skelton, Ozzie & Harriet) and shows (“Our Miss Brooks,” “Gunsmoke,” “The Aldrich Family,” “Truth or Consequences” and many more). They could promote themselves on radio … and use radio profits to ease the start-up costs of TV.
DuMont had none of that. It also had other limits.
Strapped for cash, it had taken on the Paramount movie studio as a minority partner. Paramount didn’t provide any shows; it also started stations in Los Angeles and Chicago — rarely using any DuMont programs.
At first, the “network” owned only two stations, in New York and Washington. It added a strong one in Pittsburgh and prepared to get ones in Cleveland and Cincinnati; then …
The Federal Communications Commission said no; counting those two Paramount stations, DuMont already had its limit of five owned stations.
So it limped along with three real owned ones and some scattered affiliates – some of them UHF stations, at a time when most TV sets only got VHF.
(There were also “secondary affiliates” — stations that could grab a few DuMont shows, especially if they didn’t conflict with the main network. That left one important benefit to mankind: “Captain Video” ran at 7 p.m., 6 Central, weekdays, a time when CBS and NBC weren’t on the air. Thus, kids in Clintonville could savor Tobor the robot.)
The final DuMont broadcast (a boxing match) was aired just before the 1955 fall season began. TV was down to three networks, and would stay there – despite occasional pushes – for decades.
And the stations DuMont owned? The New York and Washington ones became part of Metromedia, a thriving station group that created successful shows – Merv Griffin, “Wonderama,” etc. — for syndication.
In 1985, the entire group was sold; the next year, that became the core of the new Fox network. TV finally had a fourth network that would last.

(Here’s the re-numbered Chapter Eight, viewing flailing attempts at a fourth network.)
For 30 years, a fourth TV network seemed like mere myth.
That was after the death of DuMont and before the birth of Fox. There were several tries, all imploding quickly.
One such fizzle (a 1967 latenight show led by Bill Dana, shown here) was declared by Jack Gould, the New York Times TV critic, to seal things. It was “further evidence that expansion of commercial TV is little more than a pipe dream.”
Hey, weren’t three enough options? Just look at the choices in ‘67:.
— As primetime started on Wednesdays, you could choose between two cowboy shows (“Custer” and “The Virginian”) and “Lost in Space.” There was nothing set in this era on this planet.
— The next night, you could choose between two more westerns (“Daniel Boone” and “Cimarron Strip”) and “The Flying Nun.”
Surely, three choices would be enough. One network executive said viewers would simply choose “the least objectionable program.” Sometimes, we did.
Except later, it turned out that we really prefer having four choices … or seven … or, as the cable and streaming eras took hold, seemingly hundreds.
But at first, no one could get it right – especially Paramount.
As a studio, Paramount has done a splendid job of making movies (“Godfather,” “Titanic,” “Forrest Gump,” etc.). And TV? After a wobbly start, it bought the Desilu company from Lucille Ball, later adding top comedies from Garry Marshall (“Happy Days,” “Laverne and Shirley,” “Mork and Mindy”) and beyond (“Cheers,” “Family Ties”).
But creating its own network? Paramount kept botching it:
— It could have nudged DuMont to success. It owned 40 percent of the network and had two things that would have helped – stations it owned in Los Angeles and Chicago, plus lots of films that could have been shown. Instead, it withheld both and watched DuMont die.
— At the same time, it tried the Paramount Television Service. That was sort of a syndicator (selling shows, station-by-station), with network aspirations.
A few programs were notable. “Time For Beany,” a children’s show, won a 1949 Emmy; Lawrence Welk was briefly at Paramount, before moving on.
And the rest? The world soon forgot “Hollywood Wrestling” or “The Spade Cooley Show” or “Frosty Frolics” or “Adventures in Music” – which, of course, centered on an organist.
— In 1977, it had a simple plan for Saturdays – a new “Star Trek” series at 8 p.m. and a movie at 9. That one might have worked, but never got started..
— A decade later, that series — “Star Trek: The Next Generation” — finally debuted. Syndicated to individual stations, it was beautifully crafted and a quick ratings success. That brought yet another network scheme: Combine three syndicated shows – the “Star Trek” one plus “She-Wolf” and “They Came From Outer Space” – with three new ones. That, too, was abandoned.
Other new-network plans kept surfacing, some from potent sources: There was Mutual, already big in radio … and Kaiser Broadcasting … and MGM … and a combination of three big station groups, Metromedia, Westinghouse and Hughes Television Network.
Even Pat Weaver, the early NBC mastermind, started a syndicator that could evolve into a network.”Within a year,” he wrote, “we had acquired ‘Ding Dong School’ … and had it widely sold, five mornings a week.” Also, “our nighttime programming showed promise.”
Alas, there’s a huge gulf between “Ding Dong School” and a new network. He never got close; neither did others, including a splashy one:
Daniel Overmyer was dubbed “the king of warehousing.” Expanding a business his father started, he had more than 350 warehouses.
Somehow, he considered that a fine background for starting a TV network. Fortunately, he knew enough to hire a pro.
Ollie Treyz had become ABC’s president in 1956, when he was only 38 and the network was only so-so. “He was brilliant,” Leonard Goldenson, the network co-founder, wrote. “Charismatic, ebullient, a born salesman.”
During his four years as president (and two as vice-president), Treyz molded ABC as an action network. He fostered cowboy shows (“Maverick,” “The Rifleman,” “Cheyenne”), plus “The Untouchables,” “Hawaiian Eye,” “77 Sunset Strip” and more.
When he took over, ABC had one show in the top-30; when he left (after controversy over violence in a “Bus Stop” episode), it had seven.
This was someone who knew TV: He linked with the Overmyer for a plan:
The new network would own seven small-ish stations (the limit at that time) and have affiliate agreements with others, including flagship stations in New York and Los Angeles.
And it would start ambitiously, with “The Las Vegas Show.”
Here was a two-hour show (90 minutes in some markets). It had a clever host (Bill Dana, a writer and comedian, known for the Jose Jimenez character), lots of sketch-comedy regulars (including Jo Anne Worley and Ann Elder, who both became “Laugh-In” regulars) and more.
Guests included comedians (Mort Sahl, Red Foxx, Milton Berle, Don Rickles), musicians (Sarah Vaughan, Della Reese, Liberace) and personalities (Hugh Hefner, John Wayne).
This was a latenight show. It faced Johnny Carson, but the rest of its competition was light. ABC was set to introduce the bland Joey Bishop show; CBS had no latenight, so some of its affiliates carried Overmyer’s show.
Except by then, this was no longer “The Overmyer Network.” Forever juggling finances (he was later sentenced to three years in prison), Overmyer ran out of money. A few weeks before the network opened, he sold it to investors. They changed its name to The United Network and closed its only show after four-and-a-half weeks.
“The Las Vegas Show” had big ambitions, plus flaws. There was no desk, no chairs; Dana and a guest would both be standing, with their conversation seeming stiff and forced.
Much later, the Fox network would also debut with a latenight show. That show also failed; the network didn’t. TV would finally have its fourth commercial, over-the-air network.

(Now Chapter Nine, when Fox finally succeeds at creating a fourth network.)

The TV landscape had become littered with fallen fourth networks.
There were failures by big media companies – Paramount (often), Mutual, Metromedia, more — and by a TV manufacturer and a warehouse mogul. Then, surprisingly, Fox made it work. It would eventually give us “The Simpsons”(shown here), “American Idol,” “The X-Files,” “24” and more.
It made mistakes; people usually do, especially in television. But it also had three key things – persistence, originality and an open checkbook.
Especially that checkbook.
Flush with money from tabloids in Australia and England, Rupert Murdoch went on a buying spree. He bought the Twentieth Century-Fox studio for $580 million, then spent four times as much to buy the Metromedia TV stations.
That gave him prominent stations in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Houston and Washington, D.C. He would soon buy a Boston one; the rest would be a ragtag collection of affiliates.
That was the first burst. It let the Fox network begin in 1986 – seemingly facing a lifetime of being semi-noticed. Then — eight years later – another spree began.
Fox spent $1.6 billion for four years of pro football. It invested in several more station groups, with many of their stations switching networks.
Now Fox had our attention – football does that – and had the stations. But a network needs good programs. At first, that got wobbly.

Just as Overmyer had done two decades earlier, Fox would start with a latenight show … and would botch it.
Joan Rivers had become Johnny Carson’s permanent guest host. Then she said she saw an NBC memo listing people who might take over if Carson retired. It had David Letterman, David Brenner, David Steinberg (“all the Davids,” she said) and seven others – but no women and no Rivers.
She fumed … and later began secret negotiations with Fox. The deal, she wrote in “Still Talking” (Random House, 1991), seemed to have everything; she got $5 million a year for three years, plus a promise that everything would match “Carson standards.”
Carson fumed that he hadn’t been warned; he never talked to her again. There was rage and controversy – just what a new network needs
The show’s first hour had had rock ‘n’ roll energy (guests were Cher, David Lee Roth, Elton John AND Pee-wee Herman), big ratings and a festive studio audience.
Too festive. It seemed like every statement was followed by either laughter or applause. This was no way to conduct a conversation or a talk show.
Even before the show started, Rivers wrote, there was constant sniping over everything from studio size to limousine service: “Looking back, I think we all should have taken a week off. In show-business, fights always seem to become overemotional.”
These did, with Fox executives on one side and Rivers and her husband (Edgar Rosenberg) on the other. “The show suffered a terminal version of ‘The Bickersons,” Rivers wrote.
The arguments also involved booking and Rivers’ acerbic humor. Both sides, she wrote, “were behaving like children. (I) had been hired because I could push the limits of TV and was now being told, ‘Don’t make waves.’”
Ratings tumbled, but Rivers argued that was relative: The show did well in the cities, where Fox owned strong stations. In other places, it had modest ratings, often on UHF stations that didn’t get many viewers.
This was eight years before the second spending spree. As for viewers beyond the cities, she said: “They’d watch us if they could find us.”
After seven months, Fox canceled the show and gave Rivers $2 million to go away. It began building “The Wilton North Report,” a complex show that would have hosts, plus a serious interviewer, a comedy interviewer, comedians and more.
In the mean time, it kept “The Late Show” going with a reported 27 guest hosts, some well-known and some not. At one point, an obscure guest looked at an obscure host and asked the question viewers were pondering: “Who are you?” The show had fallen far from its Cher/Elton/Joan days.
To stop the merry-go-round, Fox let young comedian Arsenio Hall host the final 13 weeks before “Wilton North.” This was the opposite of network meddling. In “Arsenio” (HarperCollins, 1993), Aileen Joyce offers Hall’s recollection:
“Whatever I felt like doing, I did. I figured I’d probably never be back anyway, so why not? I had nothing to lose and everything to gain.
“When they left me alone, I realized what I was doing was producing myself. They did what had never been done: They gave this Black kid from Cleveland a chance to do a show.”
And it worked. Hall seemed to have a hip sense of fashion, of humor and of guests. “It was spontaneous, loose fun that turned into a party,” he said later.
Fox reportedly offered to have him host “Wilton North”; he refused and created his own syndicated talk show. It lasted five fairly strong years; “Wilton North” lasted 11 episodes.

Staring at that debacle, one might conclude that these people shouldn’t be running a network. That was only partly true.
On April 5, 1987 (six weeks before Rivers’ departure), Fox laucnhed its primetime schedule, with only two nights a week. It added a third night in ‘89, but then trimmed back to two nights plus a movie.
In those days, Fox sometimes made a key mistake – making shows that were a lot like ones on the big-three networks.
“Mr. President” had George C. Scott, but it was stiff and forgettable. Other comedies — “Duet,” “Open House” (with Ellen DeGeneres in support), “Good Grief,” “Daddy Dearest,” Wild Oats” — were pleasant, but not something that would get you trying a new network.
It was a mistake that Fox quickly avoided. With three networks into same-old, it went in fresh directions.
A prime example came on its first night of prime time. “Married … With Children” was filled with abrasive humor; a co-creator fondly called it “the anti-’Cosby Show.’”
At first, “Married” had the advantage of being on a night (Sundays) when the big networks had no comedies. Then NBC’s Brandon Tartikoff put “My Two Dads” against it, declaring that he might have “put a stake in the heart” of the new network.
Not so. “My Two Dads” lasted three seasons; “Married … With Children” lasted 11, establishing the fact that a fourth network can thrive if its shows feel different.
Fox followed up with genres that were often overlooked by the Big Three:
— Youth-oriented shows. The “21 Jump Street” drama – young cops undercover in high school – arrived a week after “Married … With Children.” Following soon were “Booker,” “The New Adventures of Barry Baxter,” “Second Chance” and, in 1990, the big one: At one point, “Beverly Hills, 90210” was reportedly being watched by 71 percent of all teens. In college, sororities that generally avoided TV gathered to watch the show.
— Science fiction and fantasy. That included “Werewolf,” “Alien Nation” and (in 1993) the superbly crafted “X-Files.”
— Non-fiction. “The Reporters” (1987) was quite awful, but “America’s Most Wanted” (1988) and “Cops” (1989) had an earnest energy. Others included “Beyond Tomorrow,” “Sightings” and David Lynch’s “American Chronicles.” And “Totally Hidden Videos” prospered briefly, before reports came that one segment had been partly faked.
— Sketch comedy. Once the heart of TV, that had been banished to late night. Then Fox boomed in with “The Tracey Ullman Show,” “Haywire,” “In Living Color” and “Edge,” a short-lived show stuffed with clever bits.
(In one, Jennifer Aniston was an aspiring supermodel who called herself Em, “because that’s the letter after Elle.” She added: “I looked it up.”)
— Others, including a variety show (“Townsend Television”) and a whimsical cowboy show (“The Adventures of Brisco County Jr.).
And winding through all of this was another key trend: Even when “The Cosby Show” was No. 1, TV was mostly white. Fox – all-white in prime time for its first four years – saw an opening.
It had “True Colors,” “Martin.” “Living Single” (Queen Latifah’s TV debut) and “Roc,” with the immense talent of Charles Dutton, a two-time Tony-winner. And it had “Townsend Television” and “In Living Color,” one of the shows that made Fox stand out.

“In Living Color” started with a meeting at Fox. At the time, Keenen Ivory Wayans told Nelson George in the show’s companion book (Warner, 1991): “I really didn’t have a desire to do TV. I wanted to do movies.”
But the movie people didn’t show up and Wayans began telling the TV people about just-for-fun videos he made with friends, long ago.
He had grown up in New York as the second of 10 kids. “I was always a weird kid, but I just couldn’t figure out what was strange about me. Watching Richard Pryor, I got a sense that it was my humor.”
For Fox, he crafted a show filled with sharp humor. “It’s institution bashing,” he said. “It’s taking all the sacred cows and making fun of them.”
He included whites (Jim Carrey did quite well afterward) and Latinas. (Jennifer Lopez was one of the Fly Girls” dancers, choreographed by Rosie Perez.) But mostly, this was the home of break-out Black stars — David Alan Grier, Tommy Davidson and four Wayans siblings – Keenen, Damon, Kim and Shawn.

Shortly before “In Living Color,” Fox revived another abandoned genre.
For more than two decades, there were no animated series in prime time. Then came a fresh notion: Take the odd family that had been in one-minute mini-cartoons on “The Tracey Ullman Show”; give them their own series.
Fox hesitated; it would only order a Christmas special, then consider expanding it. The producers – James Brooks (co-creator of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “Lou Grant” and “Taxi”) and cartoonist Matt Groening – insisted on a series.
“The Simpsons” debuted on Dec. 17, 1989, with (shown here) that Christmas episode. (Homer worked as a Santa, to get money to remove Bart’s tattoos; he also inherited a haggard dog named Santa’s Little Helper.) The series has continued ever since, the longest-running scripted show in the history of prime time TV.
That brought a turning point: For the first time, a Fox show slipped into the annual top-30 of the Nielsen ratings.
“The Simpsons” was No. 28 in 1989-90, No. 30 in ‘92-93. It showed up one more time, at No. 30 in ‘97-98.
Others joined in. “The X-Files” peaked at No. 19 in ‘97-98, “Ally McBeal” at No. 23 in ‘98-99, “Malcolm in the Middle” at No. 28 in 1999-2000, “Temptation Island” at No. 17 in 2000-2001, “House” at No. 9 in 2005-6.
By then, Fox had the show that would reach the top.

“Pop Idol” was a British show, with young singers auditioning. As it was being prepared, producers sent three Simons – Cowell, Fuller and Jones — to pitch an American version.
The first network heard the pitch, then gave a flat no. The second only listened to half of it and said no. The Simons retreated to England … then found a surprise.
Elisabeth Murdoch, then 32, lived in England, where she’d seen “Pop Idol.” She recommended it to her father, Rupert Murdoch.
As Cowell put it in “I Don’t Mean to Be Rude, But …” (Broadway, 2003): “For all the time we spent trying to convince those gray-eyed, balding, bags-under-their-eyes execs at other companies, it was Elisabeth Murdoch who helped us secure the deal.”
The notion also clicked with the Fox executives – especially Mike Darnell, the reality-show chief.
Darnell was “one of network television’s most idiosyncratic and polarizing figures,” Bill Carter wrote in “Desperate Networks” (Doubleday, 2006).
Small (generously listed at 5-foot-2) and given to a rock ‘n roll look, complete with long hair and jeans, he was a former child actor with a love for music and a piano in his office.
Eventually, he would give Fox some of its most bizarre shows, including “Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?” and “Who’s Your Daddy?” But for now, what appealed to him was showing the worst “Idol” contestants, plus Cowell’s scathing assessments. Those quickly grabbed Americans’ attention.
Fox wanted “American Idol” to duplicate the British version in every way. It tried to also have four judges – but couldn’t find the right one to join Cowell, Paula Abdul and Randy Jackson. It also insisted on two hosts.
Brian Dunkleman “didn’t even seem as if he wanted to do the show,” Cowell wrote. “Ryan (Seacrest) was the absolute opposite … He was good-looking and enthusiastic, maybe too enthusiastic. I used to say that if he had a tail, he would have wagged it.”
The show debuted in June of 2002, getting huge ratings and propelling a music star (Kelly Clarkson). It was back in January for its regular spot – this time without Dunkelman and with only a brief pass at a fourth judge.
“American Idol” would only have find more star at Clarkson’s level (Carrie Underwood, it’s fourth winner). But it has imbedded itself into pop culture.
In that second season, the two “Idol” nights were No. 5 and 6 in the ratings. The next couple seasons, those nights were at No. 2 and 3 (trailing only “CSI”). Then – starting with the 2005-6 season, “Idol” was No. 1 and 2.
Other Fox shows also were hits, some from Darnell – “Joe Millionaire,” “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?” – and some scripted shows. There was the compelling “24” and “House” (produced by NBC, airing on Fox) and more.
But mostly there was “American Idol.” It did 15 seasons on Fox, disappeared for a year, then returned on ABC.
By then, it had fulfilled its mission: This was, for years, TV’s most-watched show. Fox was now much more than a rag-tag fourth network.

(Here’s Chapter 10, viewing the expanding mini-networks — WB and UPN — which somehow merged into the shrinking CW.)

For decades, few people tried to create a fourth network. Then, oddly, everyone wanted to be No. 5.
There was WB and UPN and Pax – each grasping for a small slice of the audience. It was a race to the bottom that, oddly, everyone lost.
Well, not everyone. Viewers won. These mini-networks gave us Buffy (shown here) and Felicity and Dawson and the Gilmore girls, plus two “Star Trek” series, “Everybody Hates Chris” and Jane the pregnant virgin.
They brought variety to a sometimes-bland TV world. Then they crumbled.
WB and UPN merged into CW, which later dwindled into … well, a lesser version of CW. Pax (that’s the next chapter) became Ion, just another place for reruns.
But at its peak, the race-to-fifth was intriguing.

Even when there was little competition, Paramount had failed its grasps at being a fourth network. Now, oddly, its stab at No. 5 began almost simultaneously with a competitor.
The WB network began on Jan. 11, 1995; UPN began on Jan. 16. Two powerhouse studios – Warner Brothers and Paramount – were colliding.
Both used a similar strategy: Hook up with a station group … start with just two nights a week, two hours a night … hope to gradually add more.
By then, independent stations were eager to join. Cable had started to take away their main draw – movies in primetime and beyond – and the indies that had gone with Fox were thriving.
So Paramount linked with United (the Chris Craft stations), creating the UPN name. WB linked with the stations owned by the Chicago Tribune; WGN – the Tribune’s powerhouse Chicago station – even added an extra service: It had a separate cable feed to markets that didn’t yet have a WB affiliate.
They seemed even, except for one thing: UPN started with the well-crafted “Star Trek: Voyager”; WB started with noisy-but-forgettable comedies.
Early on, WB – with several former Fox people in charge – seemed to be a Fox reflection. “Unhappily Ever After” was from the co-creator of “Married With Children” … “The Wayans Bros.” starred the younger brothers of the “In Living Color” people … “Parent’Hood” starred Robert Townsend, shortly after his Fox variety show.
UPN started strong, pairing “Voyager” with “Nowhere Man,” a compelling story about a guy whose life seemed to vanish. But beyond that, it wobbled.
Like WB, it tried comedies, with little success. Some were pretty good (“Clueless”), some were at least distinctive (“Homeboys From Outer Space”) and one was plagued.
“The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer” took a notion that had worked for “Benson” and “Jeeves and Wooster” and others – a wise butler, surrounded by fools. Pfeiffer (the “p” was not silent) was a Black man (Chi McBride) from England, embedded in Abraham Lincoln’s White House.
There were some neatly off-center moments, but groups instantly protested the notion of Black/white humor in a slavery age. Brooks and Marsh called it “a tasteless, bawdy comedy” with Lincoln as a fool and his wife as “a horny shrew.” The TV Guide’s “Guide to TV” (Barnes & Noble, 2005) called it a “reviled, thankfully brief sitcom.”
It lasted four episodes. UPN has followed one of the key rules for a new network – be different and distinctive. This time, it had failed.
But it soon had a bigger problem: Its competitor, WB, recovered from its slow start and found its groove. It crafted teen dramas – but not like airhead ones of the past. Each show had attractive, likable people in clever situations.
There was “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” in 1997; “Felicity” and “Dawson’s Creek” in ‘98; “Angel,” “Roswell” and “Popular” in ‘99; “The Gilmore Girls” in 2000, “Smallville” in 20001. Previous unknowns – Sarah Michelle Gellar, James Van Der Beek, Keri Russell, etc. — became stars.
UPN had nothing to match that. In the year that the WB surge began, UPN was introducing “Love Boat: The Next Wave”; it sank. The next year it added wrestling and “Blockbuster Video’s Shockwave Cinema.”
In 2001, UPN did make a comeback, mostly via checkbook. It had a new “Star Trek” show (“Enterprise”) to replace “Voyager”; it also outbid WB for the continuing “Buffy” and Roswell.”
Over the next few years, there were some other decent-enough shows on both networks – “Reba,” “One Tree Hill” and “Evergreen” on WB, “Veronica Mars” and “Girlfriends” on UPN. But the luster was fading.
On Sept. 12, 2004, WB aired the pilot “Jack & Bobby.” It was beautifully written (by Greg Berlanti and others), superbly directed (by David Nutter), perfectly acted … and ignored by the younger audience WB had developed.
The next year, secret discussions began. Then – in January of 2006 – came the bombshell:
The two networks would combine into one, called the CW. Half the stations would soon be abandoned; the other half had the best of both networks ….
Except, there wasn’t much “best” to share. One night – WB’s “Gilmore Girls” and UPN’s “Veronica Mars” – had potential. The others had a few good shows — “Supernatural,” “Everybody Hates Chris” – and lesser ones.
Two promising mini-networks had shrunk into a flailing one. Five years later, CW would start to find a new identity … which, a decade later, crumbled.

After fumbling for years, the CW got a new leader (Mark Pedowitz) and a new emphasis.
That started with “Arrow” in 2012 and “The Flash” in 2014. Both had characters from DC, the comic-book company owned by Warner Brothrs. So did “Superman & Lois,” “Supergirl,” “Stargirl,” “Batgirl,” “Gotham Knights,” “Black Lightning,” “Riverdale” and more.
Most were produced by Berlanti. Most were crisply crafted – albeit a bit too similar. (The Berlanti formula even applied to “Riverdale,” with all those cheery characters from the Archie comics. Soon, Archie was cage-fighting in prison and Jughead was a gang leader.)
How could the CW survive? The network might lose money, Petowitz said, but its owners (Warner Brothers and Paramount) produced most of the shows, then made money in three ways:
— First, by airing them on CW. That paid for a good chunk of the cost.
— Then, by a mass deal with Netflix, which was popular with young people and early adapters … the same folks who like fantasy shows.
— And then by sales to other countries. Those countries can make their own quiet dramas and such; they wanted to import big, Hollywood-style fantasy.
It was a formula that worked. CW viewers got a steady stream of shows that were solidly made and sometimes more.
Straying from the “Arrow-verse” shows, CW sometimes went bad. (“Tom Swift” was exceptionally awful.) But it sometimes triumphed.
Long before Rose McIver was seeing dead people in “Ghosts,” she was eating dead people in “iVampire.” As a medical examiner, she munched the brains of victims, helping her solve crimes. We’re not sure why Columbo never thought of that.
And two shows didn’t even need a fantasy element. On consecutive years, tiny CW won the Golden Globe for best comedy actress – Gina Rodriguez in 2015 and Rachel Bloom in 2016.
Rodriguez’s show (“Jane the Virgin”) won a Peabody, plus three Television Critics Association nominations for best comedy. Bloom’s (“Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”) had three TCA best-comedy nominations; it won four Emmys – mostly for its brilliant songs and choreography – and should have had more.
But mostly, CW savored superheroes. “Arrow” ran for seven seasons, “The Flash” ran for nine. “Stargirl” only ran three, but stood out: It avoided the cliché of a reluctant hero; instead, a teen and her colleagues enthusiastically battled evil, with the help of her dad … played by Luke Wilson, no less.
The CW adventures were strongly crafted and entertaining. Think back to those kids in 1950s Clintonville, so excited by a primitive robot in the micro-budget, black-and-white “Captain Video.” If they had time-traveled to CW’s prime, they would have thought they were in paradise.
And then, as often happens, some business guys botched it.

The Discovery Channel people paid approximately a kajillion dollars to buy Warner Brothers (complete with cable channels and half of CW) … then seemed surprised to find they were deep in debt.
They stripped some of the channels and linked with Paramount to sell CW.
The logical buyer was Nexstar, a station mega-group that had bought Tribune Broadcasting (the original cornerstone of WB). It had close to 30 stations that were primarily CW affiliates, plus lots of others that carried CW as a secondary channel.
Nexstar, alas, decided it was going to work with less-expensive shows. That doomed the Arrow-verse and more.
Certainly, CW had already found some cheap-show success. It had aired:
— Shows that were already being made for a Canadian network. Some of them – often airing in the summer – were fairly good, including “Family Law,” “Coroner,” “Burden of Truth” and “Sullivan’s Law.” There were also interesting shows from Australia (“Bump”), New Zealand (“Wellington Paramormal”) and beyond.
— Magician shows – “Masters of Illusion” and “Penn & Teller: Fool Us” – and the comedy-improv show “”Whose Line Is It Anyway?”
— And assorted reality shows, some OK and some not. The awful “H8R” lasted four episodes; the U.S. run of “Taskmaster” lasted one.
Overall, such low-budget shows had been OK. But could you fill an entire network with them?
While finishing its deals with full-budget shows, CW kept trying.
It threw itself into sports – golf, wrestling, beach volleyball, the former cable show “Inside the NFL.” It even made deals involving two college conferences, the ACC and the Pac-10 … which, despite its name, consisted of two teams.
It continued the solid “Sullivan’s Crossing,” added another good Canadian show (“Wild Cards”) and even a clever American one (“Good Cop/Bad Cop”) on a co-production deal with Roku.
It grabbed shows from England (“Joan,” “Sherlock’s Daughter,” “Everyone Else Burns”) and beyond. It showed biographical movies from the “I Am” producers and others.
This new version of CW has had its moments – especially with the light adventures on Wednesdays.
Still, this seems like de-evolution: The networks of Buffy and Dawson and Chris and Jane and two “Star Trek” crews became the home of “Totally Funny Animals,” “FBoy Island,: “WWE NXT” and “The Big Bakedown.”

(Here’s Chapter 11, which wraps up the “How Many Networks?” section. It views the rise and fall of Pax Net.)

Imagine that someone had held a gathering of TV moguls in the late ’90s. (Not a good idea, incidentally.) If so, everyone would have noticed Bud Paxson instantly.
He stood 6-foot-7. He had a downhome manner and was fond of carnival barkers. And he skipped any of the TV-executive notions — no surveys or screenings or such.
He simply leaped ahead. Taking the zillions he’d made from home-shopping, he bought TV stations, bought reruns, had some new shows and created an entire network in his name.
Well, half his name. This was “Pax Net”; it persisted for seven years.
The story would be better if Pax had succeeded. These days, its carcass is Ion – a collection of reruns, as bland as its name. But for a time, TV had an intriguing option as the No. 7 over-the-air commercial network.
As Paxson told it in “Threading the Needle” (HarperBusiness, 1998), he had a boyhood fascination with barkers. “The crowd would gather around to get a closer look at the miracle wax. People enjoyed being entertained by the pitchman.”
The next step came by accident: After growing up in Rochester, NY, and graduating from Syracuse, Paxson tried radio. He owned a small station in Clearwater, Fla., when an advertiser paid him in goods instead of money; he soon saw how well a disc jockey could sell them on the air. That led to a small cable station and what became the Home Shopping Network.
Paxson was unapologetic about his salesmanship. At times, he did 24 straight hours as a pitchman. He would make up reasons for a sudden price drop – suddenly “discovering” a small flaw (which he’d known about all along) … or pretending to be drunk while making reductions.
Then there was the time he had a warehouse full of vases he had bought for $1 and was selling for $8. Sales were slow until he remembered that his aunt hat died recently and wanted her ashes spread afar.
He told viewers he would put one ash in each vasee. “I then looked at the camera with a serious gaze and said, ‘Will you help me fulfill the dying wish of Aunt Esda?’” They did.
Such stunts drew praise from another carnival-barker type. Donald Trump called Paxson “one of the greatest businessmen of the late 20th century.”
It also made Paxson rich, if overbusy. In 1986, he wrote, he was on the road for 260 days; on Christmas Day, his wife left him. Reluctantly going on a vacation with their children, he found a Gideon Bible in the hotel room.
Others have embraced Christianity quickly, but few have done the next step: He sold his radio stations for $633 million and began buying TV stations, starting with one that had been owned by New York City. He bought other stations – mostly ragged little ones – around the country.
Paxson also paid a fortune – too much, others said — for reruns. He grabbed rights to “some of the best shows ever created: ‘Touched by an Angel,’ ‘Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman,’ ‘Promised Land,’ ‘Dave’s World,’ ‘Diagnosis Murder,’ ‘Life Goes On’ and other top-line, family-oriented shows.”
It was all a gamble that the Supreme Court would approve the Federal Communication’s “must-carry” rule, saying cable systems must carry all stations in their area, including ragged little ones.
It did, giving him semi-equal footing. “Today,” he wrote in 1998, “Paxson Communications owns more television stations than anyone else in the United States.” And it had Jeff Sagansky in charge.
“I knew Jeff had produced ‘Highway to Heaven’ when he was president of programming at NBC,” Paxson wrote. Later, at CBS, Sagansky “had developed ‘Dr. Quinn: Medicine Woman’ and ‘Touched By an Angel.’ He certainly seemed to have an eye for the kind of shows we wanted.”
Yes, but …
We now know that Sagansky hated the “Highway to Heaven” pilot. His boss, Brandon Tartikoff, wrote that Sagansky called it “an embarrassment” and suggested they not even show it to a meeting of network executives.
Tartikoff tended to agree. (When he did show it, more than half the executives left the room before it ended.) But his father-in-law loved it and it was worth a try. It ran five seasons, three of them in Nielsen’s top-25.
Sagansky then became president of CBS Entertainment, creating a balanced – and, often, high-quality — line-up. Alongside “Dr. Quinn” and “Touched By an Angel,” it had “Chicago Hope,” “Picket Fences,” “Northern Exposure” and more, returning to No. 1 in the ratings. Paxson wanted him to be a consultant, then gave him a four-year deal as network president.
When that happened, Sagansky said, a meeting with advertisers was just three days away … and Pax was planning to talk only about reruns. “I told him, ‘You can’t go in there with nothing but that.’”
But what could he find in three days? “Little Men” was a small Canadian film that had drawn shrugs. Based on Louisa May Alcott’s sequel novel, it had Jo (from “Little Women”) running a boys’ school with her husband.
Sagansky put together a quick deal for a “Little Men” series, this time with Jo widowed. It would be on both Pax and a Canadian network, trimming the cost for both.
That set a pattern in two ways:
First, the shows would be cost-efficient. Paxson marveled at Sagansky’s ability to get them for less than half cost of ones on the big networks.
Second, they would also be solidly crafted. They were, at the least, pleasantly adequate. They included:
— “Twice in a Lifetime” (1999). Steve Sohmer – a Pax vice-president who handled its early marketing – concocted the show as a neat match for the new network. A young angel-in-training met people who had died prematurely, giving them a chance to change some part of their past.
— “Hope Island” (1999). Based on the British “Ballykissangel,” it was a clever show in the “Northern Exposure” style. It started with a young ministr arriving at a small island filled with quirky souls.
— “Mysterious Ways” (2000). In sort of a cross between “X-Files” and Indiana Jones films, Adrian Pasdar was an archeologist, enthusiastically searching for miracles. It got a huge start from a summer debut on NBC, which then owned one-third of Pax.
— “Doc” (2001). A country guy (Billy Ray Cyrus) became a doctor at a city hospital.
— “Sue Thomas, F.B.Eye” (2002). It was based on the true story of a hearing-impaired woman who became a lip-reader for the FBI.
These were shows made by capable people. Barney Rosenzweig (“Cagney and Lacey”) supervised the first “Twice in a Lifetime” season. Jack O’Fallon, who became a go-to TV director, created “Mysterious Ways.” Both “Doc” and “Sue Thomas” were from Dave and Gary Johnson, brothers who grew up in small-town Iowa and had a knack for regular-folks drams.
Scattered in there, Pax also had unscripted shows –“It’s a Miracle,” a “Candid Camera” revival, game shows and more. It was all promising … and never quite caught on..
Explanations varied, but we’ll pick three:
A WOBBLY START: The notion got out that this would be a narrow, super-retro network. That wasn’t helped by early promotion that some critics took as being anti-gay.
THE WRONG TIME: By now, there were cable networks with a family feel. There was the Fox Family Channel, Disney Channel, Nickelodeon, CMT, and more, including Odyssey, which became Hallmark. Later, streamers and digital sub-channels would have a steady flow of old, family-friendly shows.
AND A TOUGH TARGET: New notions work best when they’re aimed at “early adapters” – young people ready to try something fresh. Pax’s shows aimed for older folks who were in no hurry to change their habits.
For whatever reason, Pax’s grand ambitions failed. NBC took a crack at filling it with reality shows, but got nowhere. Now it’s called Ion, is owned by Scripps and (except for Christmas movies) avoids original shows.
Paxson resigned in 2005 and died at decade later, at 79.
The world didn’t seem to need a seventh network (or a sixth or maybe a fifth). The TV world didn’t have a place for a guy with the height of a power forward, the checkbook of a mogul and the soul of a carnival barker.

(And now we start the third section, “Fun Times – or not – at the networks.” This Chapter 12 catches TV’s first Golden Age of comedy.)

In a logical world, “I Love Lucy” would have launched a revolution in clever comedies.
TV, of course, lacks logic. It would be a couple decades before Mary Tyler Moore, Archie Bunker and others propelled the first golden age of comedy.
During the “Lucy” years, networks mostly had minor comedies, often bearing characters’ names. There was “Stanley” and “Sally,” “Willy” and “Meet Millie.” There was “Hey Jeannie” and “It’s Always Jan,” “Dear Phoebe” and “Honestly Celeste,” “Leave It to Larry” and “Meet Mr. McNutley.” And that’s not to mention “Colonel Humphrey Flack” and “Adventures of Hiram Hoke.”
Many lasted for a year or two; most were soon forgotten.
Certainly, there were some clever folks then. Danny Thomas had a situation comedy; so did George Burns and Gracie Allen. Others – Jack Benny, Sid Caesar, etc. — had sitcom elements inside variety shows.
But things were sputtering … and hit a detour with James Aubrey.
Aubrey had boosted ABC with a surge of cowboy shows. Then he became CBS’ president in 1959.
Tall and handsome, he was a former Princeton football player with a nature that was variously described as decisive and arrogant. The good news was he knew what he wanted; the bad news was he just wanted quick ratings.
His formula was described by writer Andrew Grossman as “broads, bosoms and fun.” His soul was described by writer David Halberstam as a “huckster’s huckster.” His persona was described by many people as “the smiling cobra.”
His approach was big on profits, not prestige, Metz wrote. “Under Aubrey’s aegis, CBS attracted the biggest audiences and banked the highest profits in TV history.”
For the 1963-64 season, it had 14 of the 15 top-rated shows. (NBC’s “Bonanza” was the only exception.) But that was built on rural shows and on gimmick ones: “Beverly Hillbillies” was No. 1, “My Favorite Martian” was No. 10. “Mr. Ed” (the talking horse) was also around.
Some of these shows had catchy gimmicks that soared quickly. But, as John Rich (a director of “All in the Family” and other shows) pointed out: “Quick starters tend to be quick finishers.”
Amid all that, Metz wrote: “There were exceptions to the usual pap Aubrey fed the public. The Dick Van Dyke series is still regarded as a landmark.”
Carl Reiner, one of the key people in Caesar’s show, had written and produced a comedy that jumped between Rob Petrie’s two worlds – at home with his wife and son and at work as a comedy writer.
The pilot was rejected, but then Sheldon Leonard – yes, the namesake for Sheldon and Leonard on “The Big Bang Theory” – intervened.
Leonard was already producing comedies built around Danny Thomas and Andy Griffith. This script was good, he said, but Rob needed to be recast
This didn’t please Reiner, because he was playing Rob. He agreed, and instead played (occasionally) the boss.
Van Dyke, fresh from a Broadway musical, became the new Rob. Playing his wife was Mary Tyler Moore … best-known for playing a receptionist – with only her legs on camera – on “Richard Diamond, Private Detective.” This new version was a hit … eventually.
The first season, misplaced behind the half-hour version of “Gunsmoke,” sputtered. Aubrey decided to cancel it.
“CBS was guilty of a network sin that is still being committed today,” Grant Tinker wrote in “Tinker in Television” (Simon & Schuster, 1994). “Lackluster, first-year ratings results were given greater weight than overwhelmingly positive critical reaction” and potential.
Leonard was convinced of the potential. A commanding presence – as an actor, he was best at playing gangsters – he made personal pitches to executives at Procter & Gamble and P. Lorillard.
Both agreed to take a half-sponsorship of the show. Aubrey – wary of offending two big advertisers – relented.
He also nestled the show into a new spot behind “Beverly Hillbillies.” In its second season, the Van Dyke show leaped to No. 3 in the Nielsen ratings. It also won the Emmy for best comedy series … and continued to win it for the rest of its five-year run.
That lesson – if a show has potential, stick with it – was soon ignored by many people, but not by Tinker.
During the Van Dyke years, he was merely a spectator, married to Moore. Later, he became the NBC president and showed the sort of patience that others had lacked.
When “Cheers” started slowly, NBC’s Brandon Tartikoff reportedly suggested it be canceled. Tinker’s reply: “Do you have anything better?”
He didn’t, of course. “Cheers” stayed.
“Throughout its first season, ‘Cheers; ranked near the bottom of Nielsen’s prime-time list, some weeks finishing dead last,” Tinker wrote. The solution: “staying with ‘Cheers’ until the audience found out how wonderful it was.”
In its third year – with “The Cosby Show” starting the night, “Cheers” was No. 12. It would spend the next eight years in the top-five, finishing No. 1 in its ninth season. It was nominated for best comedy series every year, winning in its first two seasons and three more times.
But that was later, during the second comedy golden age. First was a key question: Would “The Dick Van Dyke Show” (like “I Love Lucy”) be a mere anomaly, followed by mediocrity? Or would other worthy comedies follow?
Tinker worked out a deal: CBS would give him a 13-week commitment — no pilot film needed — for “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” The MTM company was born.
There were network objections, Tinker recalled. The pilot did poorly with test audiences. After meeting the show’s writer-producers (Jim Brooks and Allan Burns, fresh from ABC’s “Room 222”), a network programmer told him: “Hire someone else, someone we can deal with.”
He didn’t and the show clicked when it debuted in 1970. In each of its seven seasons, it was nominated for best comedy series; for the final three, it won. It spent three seasons in the Nielsen top-10 and three more in the top-22.
And it kept spawning spin-offs – “Rhoda,” “Phyllis,” even “Lou Grant” … a comedy character spinning off into a drama. By 1977, MTM had shows starring Bob Newhart, Tony Randall and Betty White.
It “had a growing reputation as a place where quality counted …. We were simultaneously beloved by Nielsen and by the critics,” Tinker wrote.
MTM molded TV’s first golden age of comedy … or, actually, half of it.

Two years before “The Mary Tyler Moore” show debuted, Norman Lear read about a British comedy in which a bigoted dad spouted about his family and the world. To Lear, that was a lot like his own father. “I loved him,” he once said, “but I didn’t always like him.”
Lear bought the rights and prepared to Americanize it. The wife would become much more lovable; so would her husband, Archie Bunker.
“It was very important to me that Archie have a likable face,” Lear wrote in “Even This I Get to Experience” (Penguin Press, 2014). “The point of the character was to show that if bigotry and intolerance didn’t exist in the hearts and minds of the good people, the average people, it would not be the endemic problem it is …. I rarely saw a bigot I didn’t have some reason to like. They were all the relatives and friends.”
So he cast Carroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton as Archie and Edith. Lear shot one pilot in October of 1968, recast the daughter and son-in-law and did another four months later. The rest was up to ABC, then led by Elton Rule and Leonard Goldenson.
“Elton and I knew ‘All in the Family’ was funny,” Goldenson wrote in “Beating the Odds” (Scribner’s, 1991), “but felt it would antagonize certain ethnic groups. We also had serious doubts that advertisers would support the show.”
There was another factor, which Michael Eisner – then an ABC clerk, later the head of Disney – recalled in Goldenson’s book.
In an attempt to reach young audiences, ABC had scheduled “Turn On,” a comedy show from “Laugh-In” producer George Schlatter.
The result bombed instantly and was canceled after one episode. (“Not even one,” Schlatter once said, sort of gleefully. “One station owner stopped it at the commercial break.”)
“Everybody was still shell-shocked from ‘Turn On,’” Eisner wrote. “I think if it hadn’t been for that, they would have put the show on the air.”
So “All in the Family” was ditched and Lear was ready to sign a three-picture deal as a movie writer/producer. Then he got a call from Bob Wood, the new CBS president, who said he’d just seen “the Archie pilot.”
Bud Yorkin, Lear’s business partner, had visited CBS on another matter, when one of the people mentioned “All in the Family.” Yorkin promptly brought out a tape and laughter ensued.
CBS ordered one more pilot – the third – this time with Sally Struthers and Rob Reiner as the daughter and son-in-law. Then “All in the Family” debuted on Jan. 12, 1971, just four months after “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”
At first, it was in a mismatch behind “Beverly Hillbillies,” “Green Acres” and “Hee Haw.” The next fall, it moved to 8 p.m. Saturdays and soared. For five years, it was No. 1 in the Nielsen ratings, sometimes by large margins.
The effect was huge, Lear wrote. “Five years later, we had seven series on the air and Mike Wallace was introducing me on ‘60 Minutes’ as the man whose shows were viewed by more than 120 million people each week.”
Some of Lear’s shows – “Maude,” “Good Times,” “The Jeffersons” – shared the “All in the Family” knack for stirring controversy. Some – “Sanford and Sons,” “Diff’rent Strokes” – were just silly fun. At least one, “All That Glitters,” failed instantly with critics and viewers.
But mostly, these were smart, sharp shows, as were the MTM ones.
The two comedy factories were opposites in some ways: Lear’s shows were more topical and more diverse.
But they were similar in the important ways: They were funny, distinctive and mostly immune to network meddling.
Combined with a few other shows – especially “MASH,” which started in 1972 – they gave TV it’s first golden age of comedy.

(And now Chapter 13, with the modern rise of NBC. More will follow.)

For TV people, some lessons are learned, unlearned and learned anew.
Flash back to Pat Weaver, who ran NBC from 1953-55.
“Once you’ve chosen the creative people and put them to work, you leave them alone,” he wrote later. “You wouldn’t tell Milton Berle what jokes to use. You wouldn’t tell a producer like Fred Coe how to climax a dramatic story for ‘Television Playhouse.’ At least I never did.”
That’s the same notion Grant Tinker had during his two turns at NBC – first (1961-67) as West Coast programming chief, later (1981-86) as network president. “The mission,” Tinker wrote later, “was to get good producers and let them produce.”
In the in-between years, that mission vanished. Networks swarmed with bureaucracy, Tinker wrote, little of it helpful. “Heaven only knows how many potentially successful television shows have gone down the tubes because their producers were obliged to act on bad network advice.”
He had used his formula – hire clever people and leave them alone – to spark the first comedy gold. His MTM company produced “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and its spin-offs, plus the Bob Newhart and Tony Randall shows and “WKRP in Cincinnati.” Then came two changes:
— MTM showed it could also do great drama – first with “Lou Grant,” then with “Hill Street Blues.”
— At the same time, NBC was crumbling.
In the second half of the ‘70s, “Little House on the Prairie” was often the only NBC show (movies excluded) in the Nielsen top-30. In ‘78, the network hired Fred Silverman to fix things.
Silverman had already been dubbed by Time magazine as “the man with the golden gut.” As CBS’ programming chief (1970-75) he brought in the golden-age comedies – “All In the Family,” “Mary Tyler Moore,” “MASH,” more. At ABC (‘75 to ‘78), he led a youth makeover; by the time he left, the network had the four most-watched shows – “Laverne & Shirley,” “Three’s Company,” “Mork & Mindy” and “Happy Days.”
Then he went from the top to the bottom.
In the next three years, some of NBC’s shows were bland (“Shirley,” “Hello, Larry”) or just bad. The network did succeed with “Real People” and “Diff’rent Strokes,” but few people were impressed by “Games People Play” or “BJ and the Bear” (the bear, of course, being a chimp) or its “Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo” spin-off
“Fred Silverman was justly renowned for the programming wonders he had previously performed at both CBS and ABC,” Tinker wrote. “But as president of NBC, … he was in a frantic, almost manic, period …. Everything he tried went wrong and NBC was sinking fast.”
Brandon Tartikoff had a close-up view of that. He worked at NBC and, at 31, was promoted by Silverman to be the programming chief.
“Failure hung over him like a fog,” Tartikoff wrote of Silverman in “The Last Great Ride” (Random House, 1992). “Fred’s style in those days was to scream a lot, pound his fist on his desk – and constantly take his programming off in different directions.”
Maybe the low point came with:
— “Pink Lady and Jeff,” linking comedian Jeff Altman with a Japanese pop-star duo that looked and sounded great. Tartikoff recalled meeting them:
“They look at me with frozen smiles, then run to get their manager, who says, ‘Brandon, you’ll have to excuse us., but the girls don’t speak English yet.’”
— Or “Speak Up America,” an attempt to discuss serious issues via comments onstage and from the studio audience. One hour involved Madelyn Murray O’Hair, an outspoken atheist. When it was the audience’s turn, a folksy old Irish sea captain said it’s hard to be an atheist amid a raging sea storm.
The audience applauded, of course. Later, people may have wondered how a folksy old Irish sea captain happened to wander into a Hollywood studio.
— Or, perhaps, “Supertrain.”
Desperate for a hit, Silverman ordered a show about a luxury train and its passengers. That concept has worked for ABC, with “The Love Boat, “Hotel” and “Doctor Odyssey” – but this one was being done quickly.
“It managed to look cheap, despite costing over one million dollars an episode – twice what a normal show was costing at the time,” Tartikoff wrote. “The acting was some of the worst I’ve ever witnessed outside of ‘Divorce Court.’”
There were more troubles – and then the turnaround in 1981. First, NBC launched Tinker’s “Hill Street Blues,” and stuck with it amid high praise and (at first) low ratings. Then it put Tinker in charge, ending Silverman’s three-year run.
From the moment he arrived, Tartikoff wrote “Grant Tinker had been gracious and generous in the way he handled power .”
They were a one-two punch – Tinker in New York, keeping the meddlers away, Tartikoff in Los Angeles, stirring the programs.
The tone was obvious at the semi-annual Television Critics Association sessions. Other network people had a dark suit-and-tie look and a stern manner; Tinker was tan sportcoats, no ties and straightforward. Others sometimes had prepared remarks; Tinker and Tartikoff would wing it.
Tartikoff was frank with reporters. He was quick to admit that:
— “Highway to Heaven,” with Michael Landon as a tanned and well-coiffed angel, was dubbed by NBC executives as “Jesus of Malibu.”
— He had one dreadful season, when all nine new shows failed.
— He had opposed the casting of Michael J. Fox on “Family Ties” (arguing that was not someone you would see on a lunchbox) and Don Johnson in “Miami Vice.”
Both got the roles and became stars; their shows sparked an NBC revival.
All of this was hit-or-miss. Tartikoff premiered “The A-Team” after the 1983 Super Bowl and got huge ratings; it spent the next three years in the top-10. The next year, he proclaimed that “Mr. Smith” – a talking-chimp show – would be “the ‘A-Team’ of comedy.” It flopped … as talking-chimp shows are prone to do.
Tartikoff scored with one fantasy adventure – “Knight Rider” – but failed with “The Powers of Matthew Star,” “Manimal” (a guy turns into animals), “Jennifer Slept Here” (a glamorous ghost) and “Misfits of Science.”
That last one included a telekinetic teenager, a rock star who transmitted electric jolts through his fingers and a giant who could shrink to six inches. (Since TV often lies about things, the show cast a 7-foot-2 actor and said he was 7-4.) Tartikoff also suggested, futily, there be a flying robot dog.
There were other failures, but NBC also had an eye for quality.
Dramas? Tartikoff moved “Hill Street Blues” to Thursdays and kept it there. It won four straight Emmys for best drama.
The next year, he added “St. Elsewhere,” which Tinker dubbed “Hill Street in a Hospital.” Others included such sleek, smart shows as “Remington Steele,” “Miami Vice” and “LA Law.”
And comedies? “Cheers” and “Family Ties” arrived in 1982 – good shows, waiting to catch on. Two years latter, “The Cosby” show arrived.
(ABC briefly had a chance to land Cosby, but hesitated. Later, the situation reversed; Tartikoff passed on “Roseanne,” which became a huge ABC hit.)
“The Cosby Show” debuted in 1984 and ignited other NBC comedies. For the season, it was No. 3 in the Nielsen ratings; “Family Ties” was No, 5; “Cheers,” No. 12; “Night Court,” No. 20.
The next year, “Cosby” was dominant. It had one-third more viewers than any non-NBC show. And that was the year (1985) when “Golden Girls” took over, ruling Saturdays.
By ‘86, the Tinker/Tartikoff team was in full control: “Cosby,” “Family Ties” and “Cheers” were 1-2-3, with “Golden Girls” at 5 and “Night Court” at 7. (The only shows in-between were CBS’ “Murder, She Wrote” and “60 Minutes.) “L.A. Law” and “Miami Vice” were 21 and 26.
Even some merely adequate shows – “Amen,” “227,” “Matlock” – were in the top-15. NBC was in its can’t-miss phase.
Tinker left then, completing his plan to stay five years. Tartikoff stayed five more. He had ups and downs, but shortly before he left in 1991, he reverted to his usual joy, introducing Will Smith and “Fresh Prince of Bel Air.”
That same year, he scheduled a modest show originally called “The Seinfeld Chronicles.” Three years later, it would be the core of TV’s second golden age of comedy.

(Here’s the 14th chapter, looking at TV’s second golden age of comedy.)

At times, TV people decide that situation comedies are doomed. One such time came seven years before “Seinfeld” would start a comedy comeback.
In the 1984-85 season, “Dallas” and “Dynasty” were at the top; two more soaps (“Knots Landing” and “Falcon Crest”) were in the top 10. Viewers watched light action (“A-Team,” “Magnum,” “Riptide”), but not comedies:
— ABC – which has had as many as 18 sitcoms – had only four.
— CBS had six, but some were lame. “AfterMash” was a pale, peacetime “MASH” descendant. “E/R” had George Clooney, but in the wrong ER. “Charles in Charge” was … well, “Charles in Charge.”
— NBC did have 10 sitcoms (including “Cosby Show” and “Family Ties”), but that included “Punky Brewster” and “Gimme a Break” and such.
The outlook was so bleak that NBC’s Brandon Tarikoff said he was, “hedging our bets.” He planned “Michael Nesmith’s Television Parts” – a collection of funny videos — as an alternative to sitcoms.
The result? “Television Parts” was hilarious, but viewers weren’t interested; it ran for five summer episodes.
But sitcoms weren’t dying, after all. A decade later, TV had the second golden age of comedy. That began with a meeting at NBC – but not in the comedy division.

By his own count, Jerry Seinfeld had already done NBC’s Jay Leno and David Letterman shows about 30 time each. But no one had talked about doing anything else.
He finally had a meeting with Rick Ludwin, the network’s vice-president of latenight and specials. At the end, he got a deal for a pilot script.
“Then they went to that restaurant you see (in exteriors) on the show and wrote the script,” Ludwin recalled later.
The “they” were opposites, Larry David and Seinfeld.
David is a somber sort. One producer recalls him starting a perfectly fine stand-up comedy set … then saying it wasn’t working and walking away.
Seinfeld is a pleasant soul who grew up around humor (“everyone I knew was funny”) and came to it easily. Joel Hodgson (“Mystery Science Theatre 3000”) said he had doubts about doing comedy until he met Seinfeld and saw that a comedian can be happy.
Seinfold and David emerged with a script that was mostly talk between three guys – Seinfeld (as himself), Jason Alexander (as a variation on David) and Michael Richards (as a variation on an odd acquaintance, Kenny Kramer).
In a book (“Top of the Rock,” Doubleday, 2012) written by NBC’s Warren Littlefield, with comments from others, we see reactions to that script from:
— Alexander: “I thought it was a glorious mess. It wasn’t paying attention to the rules” of sitcoms.
— Littlefield: “The script was very funny, totally unconventional but funny. It didn’t sound like anything else on television.”
— Glenn Padnick, president of Castle Rock Television, which produced “Seinfeld”: “We loved the script, and we loved it for the little stuff. Most shows go for big plots.”
— A report written after showing the pilot to test audiences: “Lukewarm reaction among adults and teens, and very low reactions among kids …. PILOT PERFORMANCE: WEAK.”
— Alexander again, recalling what he told Seinfeld after the screening. “I think it’s really good. The problem is the audience for the show is me, and I don’t watch TV.”
Fortunately, NBC did go ahead … albeit timidly; it approved a four-episode sampling. More fortunately, Littlefield had a change Seinfeld agreed to: “I only had one note for Jerry: ‘Get a girl.’”
Julia Louis-Dreyfuss was added as Elaine, making the show even better. A year after the pilot, NBC aired the four episodes in a cozy summer spot behind “Cheers” reruns.
It held onto the “Cheers” audience, but there was skepticism. “People thought it might be too New York,” Ludwin said. “Or too Jewish.”
That wasn’t an anti-Semitic view. Tartikoff was Jewish and had previously said that, in a way, most TV characters are Jews because they were created by Jewish writers. Still, Littlefield wrote: “Brandon was convinced ‘Seinfeld’ was too Jewish to be widely successful.” Or maybe too Eastern.
Ludwin – who grew up in Cleveland suburbia and went to Miami of Ohio – disagreed. Research backed that up: “Seinfeld” did equally well in all parts of the country.
Outsiders could savor the quirks of big-city life – battling over a single parking spot … pushing to get the one available apartment … getting lost in a parking garage … spending the entire show in line at a Chinese restaurant …
Well, that last one did (at first) seem too much. After the table read for the Chinese-restaurant episode, Ludwin said in Littlefield’s book: “We debated shutting it down and telling them not to film that week.”
David was angry; Ludwin relented. The episode was shot and, he said, “was one of the landmark episodes of the show. Viewers did embrace it.”
That was crucial, Littlefield wrote. “This is a critical difference between how we ran things at NBC and what some networks are like today. We took a risk, a leap with the creator and the show runner, even when our instincts said, ‘This will not work.’”
It was the same approach that both Weaver and Tinker had brought to NBC … the same one that (as producers) Lear and Tinker had demanded from CBS. Now it was followed by Tartikoff – who left NBC for Paramount in April of 1991, shortly after “Seinfeld” began its regular run – and by Littlefield, who became the new NBC chief.
Still, there were doubters. In Time magazine, Richard Zoglin wrote that NBC “has seen its fortunes turn sour almost overnight …. Highly regarded younger shows like ‘Seinfeld’ have not lived up to ratings expectations.”
Littlefield disagreed. “We bet on the network’s comedy future with ‘Seinfeld,’” he wrote. “We used every weapon we had to promote it.”
For that season, “Seinfeld” crawled up to No. 25 in the ratings. The next year it was No. 3 and the show that aired after it, “Frasier,” was No. 7.

Frasier Crane had been just one piece of “Cheers,” but on the new show he became much more.
“There was still the vestige of the original character,” director James Burrows wrote in “Directed By James Burrows” (Ballantine, 2022), “always insecure and angry, but with the foundation of warmth and decency …. He loved fully, wholly, deeply. He fell hard.”
And he was part of the new NBC, filled with sharp, verbal wit.
“Mad About You,” with Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt, debuted in 1992, “Frasier” in ‘93 and the next big one in ‘94.

What TV needed, Littlefield felt, was a show about young people’s city adventures.
These were “the twentysomethings, just beginning to make their way. I imagined young adults starting out in (cities), all facing the difficulty. It was very expensive to live in those places as well as a tough emotional journey. It would be a lot easier if you did it with a friend.”
Then Marta Kaufman and David Crane came in with just such a pitch, focusing on six friends and, at times, a New York coffee shop.
Burrows had already committed to directing four pilots that spring, he wrote. “(I) knew two things immediately. One, I didn’t have time to direct it. And two, I had to direct it.”
Then the casting fell into place remarkably. Consider:
— Matt LeBlanc had done three series, two of them awful. Both had a dim-witted character he’d played on three “Married With Children” episodes.
— Courteney Cox had done “Misfits of Science” (as a telekinetic teen) and “The Trouble With Larry” (a show so troubled that it was canceled before the main TV season began). She’d worked with Michael J. Fox (in “Family Ties”), Bruce Springsteen (in a music video), He-Man (in “Masters of the Universe”) and more.
— Matthew Perry had done three series and was committed to a pilot about a futuristic baggage-handler,. Burrows gambled that it would never be picked up as a series; it wasn’t.
They joined David Schwimmer, Lisa Kudrow (playing the twin of a waitress she’d played in “Mad About You”) and Jennifer Aniston. This was a rare blend, Burrows wrote – “six really good-looking people who were funny.”
Most shows have one or two central characters, he wrote. “We had six centers …. It had never happened before or since with a cast that large.”
The show soared in a good timeslot (between “Mad About You” and “Seinfeld”) and then – at mid-season — in a great one, between “Seinfeld” and “ER.” It was No. 8 its first season and No. 3 (behind “ER” and “Seinfeld”) its second.

In the next few years, the top 10 had other NBC comedies – “Caroline in the City,” “The Single Guy,” “Suddenly Susan,” “The Naked Truth, ,” Jesse,” “Union Square” “Veronica’s Closet” – that shared a few things:
— None had the fresh wit of “Friends,” “Frasier,” “Seinfeld” and “Mad About You.”
— But many had pilots that were directed by Burrows. They were smartly crafted; they balanced verbal and visual wit.
Then Burrows had one show to dig into.

The idea started with David Kohan and Max Mutchnick, who had been friends since Beverly Hills High. While running “The Single Guy,” they tried another project.
“They wrote a pilot about four couples,” Burrows wrote. “Warren Littlefield … said, ‘I don’t like the pilot, but I like one of the couples, Will and Grace.’”
He asked them to build a show around them – two best friends, one gay and one straight. It “captured a genre and a group of characters that no one had ever seen on television,” Littlefield wrote.
And these two writers knew the subject well. One (Mutchnick) is gay; one is not. “I think they probably are Will and Grace, more than they even know,” Eric McCormack, who starred with Debra Messing, told David Wild in “The Showrunners” (HarperCollins, 1999).
By then, NBC had two chiefs, Littlefield and Don Ohlmeyer. “Don had been fighting me on the idea from the beginning,” Littlefield wrote. “He didn’t think the country was ready for this relationship on broadcast TV.”
But Littlefield sent Burrows to meet with the writers. It was, Wild wrote, “a move that led them to a powerful friend and collaborator and did wonders to earn them a pilot order.”
And he stuck with it. For most shows, Burrows soon left. He directed only 32 episodes of “Friends,” 15 of “Frasier.” But this one – like “Taxi” and “Cheers” – were his projects. He did all 246 episodes, including the original eight seasons and the three-season revival.
And it turned out that the country was ready for the show, after all. “Will & Grace” had four seasons in the top-15, peaking at No. 9.
When asked about same-sex marriage in 2012, Vice-President Joe Biden said, “I think ‘Will & Grace’ probably did more to educate the American public than almost anything anybody’s ever done.” Burrows called that “one of the proudest moments of my career.”

NBC’s shows propelled the comedy surge. “Seinfeld” arrived in 1991, “Mad About You” in ‘92, “Frasier” in ‘93, “Friends” in ‘94, “Will & Grace” in ‘98.
But they weren’t alone. ABC’s “Roseanne” and CBS’ “Murphy Brown” had both arrived in 1988; CBS’ “Everybody Loves Raymond” came in ‘96.
Add them in, mix in lots of other shows that were quite good, and you had the second golden age of comedy.

(This is the latest chapter in a book-in-progress, “Television, and How It Got That Way.” To catch the full book, so far, scroll “News and Quick Comments” to “The Book.”)

As a star student, Kay Smith could have picked almost anything for her Master’s Degree thesis. She chose satellite communication.
It was an odd choice, because … well, there was no satellite communication.
This was 1967, just a decade after Sputnik and just two years after the Early Bird became the first commercial satellite. But Smith felt bigger things were coming.
Ten years after that thesis, she created the Madison Square Garden Network. By then, she was Kay Koplovitz; soon, it would be the USA Network; she and Ted Turner (shown here) would pioneer a cable-TV era.

The cable idea had been floating around for decades, but it was just a plan to get better reception. The first attempts were around 1948 in distant parts of Pennsylvania, Arkansas and Oregon.
In ‘50, the first full-scale effort came in rural Pennsylvania: Build a big antenna on a hill and connect it to subscribers’ homes.
The next step – providing extra shows for those subscribers – was far away.
When I was in Fairmont (a Minnesota town near Iowa) in 1970, our cable system offered:
— One station apiece (from Minneapolis or Austin, Minn.) for ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS.
— An independent station from Minneapolis. This allowed us, for instance, to see a guy (dressed as a railroad conductor) show cartoons at noon. An old movie followed at 1.
— And the only made-for-cable contribution – a rotating wheel that showed us a thermometer, a barometer and a wind gauge.
It wasn’t much, but in Minnesota, the weather is sort of important. And a few years later, some mischievous chaps in small-town Michigan came up with an improvement: They snuck into the cable office and put Playboy centerfolds over the rotating weather wheel. Chances are, some little old lady, checking to see if it was a good day to garden, was shocked.
By then, I was in Michigan, witnessing the next step in cable – public access.
That was for anyone. There was Uncle Ernie, who showed his travel films … and Sloucho Barx, who put on a Grouch mask and opined … and, well, me.
Matt Ottinger is a brilliant guy who later got eight consecutive “Jeopardy” answers correct while facing Ken Jennings. (Really.) He wanted to do a show in which we reviewed and discussed movies and TV, sometimes while the camera was panning black-and-white photos.
Viewers could phone in; there was no waiting. The show was, of course, called “Matt and Mike’s Media Meanderings”; it’s hard to resist alliteration.
Some people watched us, for roughly the same reason I once watched a man playing records: It was live and there weren’t a lot of other choices.
Except the alternatives soon emerged.

HBO began with a simple notion. Cable subscribers would pay an extra monthly fee and get Hollywood movies, unedited and uninterrupted.
It was a regional service in 1972 and went national in ‘75. Only later would it turn to what it’s now known for – original, made-for-cable shows.
Some of those arrived gradually – “Fraggle Rock” (a witty Muppets offspring) and “Not Necessarily the News” (a “Daily Show” ancestor) in 1983, “1st & 10” (newcomer Delta Burke as owner of a pro football team) in ‘84, the “Far Pavilions” mini-series in ‘85.
But at first, HBO was known strictly for movies and sports. On its opening night, in ‘72, it showed a hockey game; in 1975, it showed “the thrilla in Manilla,” a boxing epic with Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier.
That was the first TV program sent by satellite. One of the people working on it was Kay Koplovitz … who soon found investors for her own plan, using satellite to propel her network to cable systems.

This began in 1977 as mostly a sports channel, two years before ESPN. As its name (Madison Square Garden Network) suggested, it started with games at the Garden, gradually adding others.
In 1980, it became the USA Network and added more – wrestling, reruns, movies, talk shows, a kid-oriented collection of shorts and more.
Its first comedy (Don Adams in “Check It Out”) was quite awful. A music-video show (“Radio 1990”) had the odd notion of packing in more songs by chopping their length. A better bet was to revive anthologies – Alfred Hitchcock, Ray Bradbury, “The Hitchhiker” –adding occasional new episodes with the old ones.
Much later, USA had an era of excellence. It debuted “La Femme Nikita” in 1997, “Monk” in 2002, “Psych” in 2006, “Burn Notice: in 2007, “White Collar” in 2009, “Suits” (later a hit via reruns on Netflix) in 2011 and the brilliant “Mr. Robot” in 2015.
Koplovitz also launched the Sci Fi Channel (later renamed Syfy, just to be peculiar). It provided a superb “Battlestar Galactica” reboot, plus such gems as “Warehouse 13,” “The Magicians” and “Eureka.”
Syfy also launched one of the truly great shows, “Resident Alien” – which, after three seasons, was sent to USA for 2025.
By then, USA and Sci-Fi had been sold often. Koplovitz was in charge for 21 years, before leaving to become a consultant and run an agency that boosts start-up businesses, particularly ones run by women.
But her main contribution was to show that cable networks could thrive. More proof of that was emerging from Atlanta.

When independent stations had their conventions, we’re told, it was easy to spot Ted Turner.
“Ted would have a blonde on his arm, a couple of drinks in him, and he would deliver a wonderful rant on why he detested news,” Reese Schonfeld wrote in “Me and Ted Against the World” (HarperCollins, 2001).
He has a lot of words and a lot of fun, Schonfeld wrote. “In those days, nobody took Ted seriously.”
But there was a deeply serious side to Turner. He was 19 when his parents divorced, 22 when his younger sister died after a five-year struggle with lupus, 24 when his father committed suicide.
There were more extremes, Schonfeld wrote, for bad or good: “Ted Turner was manic-depressive, although he was not diagnosed until the mid-’80s …. Anyone who’s ever been around a manic-depressive knows that in his manic phase, he had more courage and tenacity than is good for him.”
Except in this case, Turner’s manic gambles paid off.
His father had sold the billboard business, leaving Turner with millions and the prospect of a playboy life. Instead, he bought back the business, prospered and began buying Southern radio stations. In 1969, he sold them and bought a floundering independent TV station in Atlanta.
Like most indies, that had a shaky collection of old comedies, older movies and cartoons. But in ‘72, Turner bought the rights to Atlanta Braves baseball and Atlanta Hawks basketball games.
Four years later, he took two big steps: He bought the Braves and he received federal permission to bounce the station off a satellite to cable systems around the country. On Dec. 17, 1976, WTCH (soon WTBS) went national.
The USA Network arrived nine months later and, Koplovitz pointed out, had one disadvantage: Turner worked it both ways – landing some deals as a local station and others as a national network.
Eventually, that would be worked out; WTBS (now just TBS) can’t deny it’s national. And soon, the cable world would get crowded.

The first arrivals were generally pay-extra channels (HBO in 1972, The Movie Channel in ‘73, Showtime in ‘76) or religious networks. But others were emerging.
In 1977, the Time Warner people (who also had HBO) started an experimental cable system called Qube, in Columbus, Ohio. One portion was “Pinwheel” – simply the same kids’ shorts, in constant rotation.
That led to Nickelodeon, a kids’ network, in 1979 … the year ESPN was bphoorn. Many more would follow in the ‘80s.
And in 1982, the Playboy Channel began. It was a step beyond simply taping some centerfold pictures to rotating weather gauges.