(This is the latest chapter in the book-in-progress, “Television, and How It Got That Way.” The full book, so far, is in “News and Quick Comments”; this is Chapter 11, concluding a section on the search for a fourth network and beyond.)
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 (include “Sue Thomas, F.B. Eye,” shown here) 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 he-ight of a power forward, the checkbook of a mogul and the soul of a carnival barker.