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.

(Now the start of a section which views the rise of cable and will lead into the second golden age of TV drama. This focuses on two cable pioneers, USA Network founder Kay Koplovitz and Ted Turner.)

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.

(Here’s the second chapter of the cable section. It views the rise of MTV and ESPN.)

In the halls of history, Michael Nesmith actually gets three spots.
He was a Monkee … he was a white-out heir … and he was a music-video pioneer. That last one is important here, but let’s admire the others first.
The world knew Nesmith as a star of “The Monkees,” a bright, Beatle-ish show that had two fun seasons (1966-68) on NBC. It was about a make-believe pop band … which, in real life, then had three No. 1 hits.
Before that? As Nesmith told it, his parents divorced and he grew up with his mom, who was a good artist and a not-so-good secretary. To cover her typing mistakes, she used her art skills to create a white-out. She called it “Liquid Paper,” built up her company … and sold it to Gillette for $47.5 million.
This was the ideal combination for a music-video pioneer: Nesmith was a musical guy who had inventive roots and the financial freedom to dabble.
In 1977, he wrote and recorded the amiable song “Rio “At the time, some countries were showing little “promotional films” of songs; making one for “Rio,” Nesmith included lots of droll, whimsical twists.
The result? “Rio” was ignored in the U.S., but reached No. 28 in England, No. 20 in the Netherlands, No. 4 in Australia and No. 4 in New Zealand. It was a sign that these mini-music-films could work.
Nesmith made a few more, then conceived of a show called “PopClips,” with comedians (Howie Mandell, Charles Fleischer) and DJ’s introducing videos from several people. He tried to sell it and found universal disinterest, with one exception: Nickelodeon – a kids’channel that started in 1979 – was hungry for content. It aired it in 1980-81.
And whether Nesmith knew it or not, “PopClips” was being shown elsewhere – in boardrooms and executive suites. Those times are recalled in “I Want My MTV” (Dutton, 2011).

Warner communications, an offshoot of the Warner Bros. studio, had been in cable since its earliest days. Its Qube experiment in Columbus, Ohio, led to Nickelodeon in 1979 and to The Movie Channel.
That reflected a Warner strategy, Rob Pittman said in the MTV book. People felt “the world of cable TV was going to about specialized networks.”
Yes, a couple early channels – TBS in 1976, USA in ‘77 – tried a something-for-everyone approach. But the others would settle for small niches.
There were channels focusing on Blacks (BET, 1980), news (CNN, ‘80), education (The Learning Channel, ‘81), TV listings (TV Guide Network, ‘81), the weather (Weather Channel, ‘82) , shopping (Home Shopping Network, ‘82) and religion.
Especially religion. The biggest one started as a single station in 1960, became a satellite station in ‘77 and the Christian Broadcasting Network in ‘81. By then, several other religion mini-networks existed.
Most cable networks kept chasing a smaller slice of a very small pie.
At its peak (2018), cable reached 93 million homes. But back in 1980, that was only 16 million. Many of them were in small towns or suburbs; many were reluctant to try something new or odd.
When ESPN started in 1979, it only reached 1.3 million homes. When MTV started in ‘81, the staffers couldn’t see it from their office or homes; they had to retreat to Fort Lee, NJ, one of the few places to carry it. When Daniel Schorr of CBS agreed to work at CNN, Ted Turner gave him a satellite dish so he could actually see the network he was working for.
These primitive networks were scraping by, hoping for corporate backing.
“We were like an Internet start-up,” Tom Freston recalled in the MTV book. “We were lean and mean and didn’t know what the hell we were doing.
“At the beginning, we were working out of a couple of rooms at the Sheraton Hotel in midtown New York. We had no office equipment. My first office was a soda storeroom.”
Others in the MTV book recalled those first offices. Carolyn Baker talked of “puke-yellow walls.” John Sykes described working “in a conference room with no windows and four phones.”
“It was a dump,” Robert Morton said. “The Carnegie Deli was downstairs, so our hotel room stunk like pastrami.”
There were bigger worries, Sykes recalled. “I asked Bob (Pittman), ‘When do we start?’ And he said, ‘Well, we don’t have the money to start yet.’”
This was serious, Baker recalled. “We were all tense and nuts, because we’d given up jobs, and what if we didn’t get the money?”
That money needed to come from a board that was half Warner and half AT&T. There weren’t a lot of rock-n-rollers there.
The MTV people tended to show them Nesmith’s “PopClips” and a few other pleasant-enough videos, while asking for patience and money.

The same extremes happened to the ESPN people, two years earlier. They recalled that in “ESPN: Those Guys Have All the Fun” (Little, Brown, 2011).
Yes, there was a corporate board. The ESPN funding as from Getty Oil.
And yes, there were shabby facilities, in this case in Bristol, Conn.
“The town was nothing but a broken-down shopping center,” Andy Brilliant said. “Most of the stores were closed. I remember there was shattered glass all over the place.”
The real offices and studios were being built, so people crowded into makeshift quarters. “They didn’t have TelePrompters, nobody had computers and they only had one old wire machine,” Bob Ley said.
There were two mobile trailers, Bill Shanahan recalled – one for the tape “library” (except it had no shelves, just tapes on the floor) and one optimistically called the executive office.
“We didn’t have indoor plumbing for at least a month,” Shanahan said. “You had to go outside and find one of the construction company’s Porta-potties. Now, during the day, that’s one thing, but at night, when it’s raining and you’re out in the dark with a flashlight ….”
And yes, there was lots of night work. There were 18-hour days, Chuck Pagano said, with most of the meals coming from a nearby restaurant. “You can only eat so many grinders and soup.”

Those young networks had something else in common – awful debuts.
“The first hour of MTV was a total, unmitigated disaster,” Pittman recalled in the MTV book. “The VJ’s would announce, ‘That was Styx,’ right after we’d played REO Speedwagon. They’d say, ‘This is the Who’ and a .38 Special video would come on.”
Two years earlier, ESPN had the same problem.
“It was a technical nightmare,” producer Bill Creasy recalled in the ESPN book. “It was dark in the truck and you couldn’t see what you were doing.
“We carried a god-awful night game of slow-pitch softball from Milwaukee …. The lighting was just abysmal.” That was followed by an interview from Colorado … except the sound didn’t work.
The saving grace? Only an estimated 30,000 people saw that first night.
The night also included a half-hour “SportsCenter,” plus wrestling and college soccer. It accented the key question for both start-ups: How, exactly,
were they going to fill all that time?

ESPN began with two big advantages: It had bought a prime spot on a satellite transponder and it had a deal for college games, via the NCAA.
That ncluded basketball, which was key. But it didn’t include football, which was what sports fans really wanted.
The problem was obvious in 1982, when the NCAA finally had a two-year package of games from Division II schools (the ones that, nowadays, are rarely on TV). The ESPN people struggled, analyzed, came up with what they felt was the precise number. The result:
— The USA Network bid $900,000.
— ESPN bid $7 million,
— Ted Turner’s TBS bid $17 million.
As it turned out, Bob Gutowski said in the ESPN book, the $7 million was probably right; TBS reportedly lost $10-12 million on the deal. “We believed Turner bid 17 because in Atlanta he was Channel 17.”
Whatever the reason, it showed that early cable was still make-a-guess. It also showed how networks were scrambling to fill all that time.
The ESPN founders had hedged their bets by including the “E.” This was the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network; it was free to wander outside of sports.
It did sign Denise Austin for a half-hour show (twice each morning) doing exercises from glamorous locations. It briefly had a fashion show, an auction of Elvis Presley’s car and more.
But mostly, it scrambled for sports – any sports. “The only rights we had for football were for two- or three-day delays,” Brilliant said in the ESPN book, “and from conferences that no one really cared about.”
At the weekly conferences, he said, ESPN boss Chet Simmons was downbeat. “He would bemoan the state we’re in and say: ‘I’m used to doing the Olympics and now I’m running ping-pong tournaments and slow-pitch softball games.’”

MTV at least knew exactly what it was going to do – show music videos, all day. But how many were they? And were they any good?
Music videos had sort of been around forever. There were “soundies” in the 1940s, showing songs by jazz greats. Scopitone, created in France, offered a sort of video jukebox. And some directors – not many– were merging sight and sound beautifully.
There was Richard Lester’s brilliant direction of the Beatles’ “Hard Day’s Night” (1964) and “Help” (1965) … or the Beatles’ TV work, including “Magical Mystery Tour” (1967) … or John Boorman’s work in the Dave Clark Five’s “Having a Wild Weekend” (1965) … or Jack Haley Jr.’s Emmy-winning direction of his then-wife Nancy Sinatra’s “Movin’ With Nancy” (1967) … or many of the “Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” numbers.
All showed what could happen when music and video merged in clever ways. Others tried to make “promotional films” stamd out. There were enough for Nesmith to make “PopClips” and Todd Rundgren to try bouncing a 24-hour video channel off a satellite; when the satellite failed, his plan died.
So there were videos, but MTV needed permission to use each one.
Pittman estimated there were 250 videos in existence; Freston said there were about 165 at MTV – some from unknowns and many from Rod Stewart.
“We played him like every five minutes,” Gale Sparrow said in the MTV book. “Rod was lucky we didn’t ruin his career. To be honest, we’d play pretty much anyone with a video.”
Some didn’t expect to be there, including Lee Ritenour (a jazz guitarist, not a rocker) and Blotto.
Blotto – a whimsical indie band in Albany, New York — linked with college students to make a video of “I Wanna Be a Lifeguard.” It was in heavy rotation on MTV, as were some of the subsequent videos.
The band members soon went elsewhere (with some reunions); one became a lawyer, another directed operas. But they could tell the world that they were on the first day of MTV, between Iron Maiden and Rod Stewart.
This was wobbly. If a typical video ran five minutes (counting introduction), you could go through all 165 of them in 14 hours. And you had 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That’s a lot of Blotto, a lot of Devo, a LOT of Rod Stewart. MTV was shaky.
Except …

As Brian Graden tells the story, his world transformed when MTV arrived.
He was 16 or 17 at the time, he said, and in a rock band. In Hillsboro (an Illinois town of 6,000), one kid could get MTV via satellite dish.
This became an obsession. Graden quit his other activities and spent long hours in his friend’s basement, staring at the wonders of rock videos. Much later, he became president of MTV.
The story has some flaws. (When MTV debuted, Graden was 18 and a month from college.) But he tells it with such zest that you get the idea: There was a wondrous, obsessive quality to these videos.
Yes, they attracted the likes of Beavis and Butt-Head, fictional airheads who stared for hours. But they also drew folks like Graden, who would go on to Oral Roberts University and then Harvard.
People liked the VJ’s. (“I think everybody in North America had a small crush on Martha Quinn,” Weird Al Yankovic said, quite accurately, in the MTV book.) And they were fascinated by the videos – even the overwrought, overweird ones, of which there were many.
And the videos kept getting better, as record companies saw that MTV propelled sales. From Madonna to Michael, from Bowie to Britney, there were people whose careers soared with music videos.

At the same time, ESPN was creating a huge change.
At first, it begged cable systems to take the channel for free; now it wanted to be paid. The first attempt (with the giant Cablevision system) was heated.
“But at the end of the day, they blinked and agreed to pay a dime (per month) per household,” Brilliant said. “We breathed a massive sigh of relief. It was the first time we actually received validation that our service was worth something to the cable operators.”
It was worth a lot, actually. Eventually, ESPN had college football (including most bowl games), plus pro football (on Mondays), pro hockey and pro basketball. Its “SportsCenter” drew praise; Aaron Sorkin (“West Wing”) became a big fan and created “Sports Night,” a superb ABC drama.
And it became worth more than a dime. A 2023 account in the Sportico website said ESPN was getting $9.42 per month per household. The next closest was Turner’s TNT, at $3.
Those fees brought in $8.1 billion a year, Sportico said. Others weren’t close, but there were six other channels that lean heavily on sports and topped $1 billion a year from cable-0system fees – TNT, TBS, USA, Fox Sports1, NFL Network and even ESPN2.
Cable, it seems, had gone far beyond its days of ping-pong and slow-pitch softball.

(This next chapter views Ted Turner’s risky follow-up to TBS)

Ted Turner’s business philosophy – and maybe his life – can be summed up in one word: “more.”
That’s an approach that took him through big gambles, big movies and big changes in the cable-TV world.
Turner had one cable channel (TBS) and wanted many more. “It’s all about shelf space,” he told the Television Critics Association.
More channels mean more places to sell ads and (eventually) more money in per-subscriber fees. The catch is that you have to fill those shelves with things people want. You need programs and a purpose.
That had been easy for TBS, which was simply an independent station that went national in 1979. It followed the pattern of other indie stations – reruns, movies and sports. (That last part worked well, because Turner also owned the Atlanta Braves and Hawks .) It was especially big in small towns and the South, so Andy Griffith was big; so was wrestling.
Meanwhile, Reese Schonfeld wrote in his CNN book, some indie-station people felt TBS should add something else:
“We thought it was time for Ted to start a news show in Atlanta. Ted said he never would. He had enough entertainment product to last forever. And beside that, he didn’t watch news; he hated news.”
And then, in 1979, he changed. As Schonfeld describes their meeting:
“Ted is frank. He still doesn’t want to do news, but he says it is the only form of programming left open to him. He would rather do sports, but ESPN has preempted that. He would rather do entertainment programming – sitcoms, dramas and quiz shows – but the networks own all that.”
From those modest motivations, CNN debuted in 1980 and gradually proved its wort. In key times – the Iraq war, 9/11, the first Trump term – it was vital. And in quieter times? Well, it obsessed approximately forever on a Malaysian airliner that was never found.
CNN could go on forever, restocking with news. But how could Turner fill other networks? Ever the gambler, he made two audacious moves; he:
— Agreed to buy MGM/United Artists in 1986, for a then-unheard-of $1.5 billion; and
— Bought the Hanna-Barbera and Ruby-Spears animation studios in 1991 for what ultimately was $415 million.
When the TCA asked him about his staggering debt load, Turner sort of shrugged “I think we’re OK,” he said, unconvincingly.
That turned out to be true. He got about half the $1.5 billion back by selling most of the MGM assets. That left him with what he really wanted – a library that included all the MGM films before 1986 and (due to previous deals MGM had made) everything from RKO and everything Warner Bros. made before 1950.
Looking at what he’d bought, Turner sounded like a kid rifling through his Christmas stocking.
He suddenly owned the favorite movie in his Atlanta home town, “Gone With the Wind.” He had “The Wizard of Oz,” “Casablanca” and “Citizen Kane.” He had Tarzan and Lassie and Andy Hardy and Pink Panther and lots of glitzy musicals and hard-boiled detectives. And, he proclaimed, he had all those Warner cartoons, “including Bugs Bunny.”
Turner’s enthusiasm over Bugs drew some laughter from the TCA, but it was valid. Some of Hollywood’s greatest animation moments came from the Looney Tunes days of Bugs Bunny, Road Runner and director Chuck Jones.
In his new treasure trove, Turner also had one of TV’s best moments, the Jones/Dr. Seuss collaboration on “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.”
And he had the rights to other Seuss books. An anti-war zealot, Turner waved “The Butter Battle Book” and proclaimed it (quite accurately) as one of the greatest books ever. Then he turned it into an animated TV special.
The next job was to convert all of that into new networks and fresh shelf space. Turner:
— Launched a second network, TNT, in 1988. He wanted to start with “Gone With the Wind,” but a previous deal gave CBS the rights for one more airing; he swapped two extra airings of “The Wizard of Oz,” to get it back. This Atlanta-based network could start with the burning of Atlanta.
— Created The Cartoon Network in 1992, starting with all the ones he owned. He had the Hanna-Barbera shows (the Flintstones and Jetsons and Smurfs, Yogi and Scooby and more), the Ruby-Spears ones (Alvin and Heathcliff and such) and Bugs and friends.
— Kept inserting new films into the TNT line-up (starting with Charlton Heston in “A Man For All Seasons”) and licensing others. Eventually, TNT didn’t need the older films. In 1994, they became the core of Turner Classic Movies.
Again, its debut film was “Gone With the Wind.” And again, a previous deal had to be undone: Turner had licensed many of his older films to American Movie Classics; now he had to pay to get them back.
That gave Turner five networks and vast shelf space. He had shown the immense potential of cable. Things were splendid … until deals intervened:
— In 1996, Turner merged with Time Warner (the Warner Bros. parent company) and became, as he put it, “the world’s richest employee.” He would donate much of his money to the United Nations and other causes.
— In 2001, Time Warner had a disastrous merger with AOL.
— In 2018, Time Warner sold to AT&T.
— And in 2022, the entire monolith was bought by the smaller Discovery networks.
The early deals diminished Turner’s role. And each deal left a new owner with fresh debts and reasons to economize.
The Turner networks – created through audacity, risks and big spending – kept trimming down. But at their peak, they had propelled a cable universe.

(Now a chapter continues the cable story, looking at the constant changes that left viewers perplexed)

For a brief, pleasant time, the cable universe seemed logical.
A few networks tried to do everything. Those were the early arrivals — TBS in 1976, USA in ’77 — plus TNT in 1988.
The others settled for handy niches. Cable was like a magazine rack or a radio dial, filled with specialized choices.
You could find channels for rock music (shown here) and country music and classical arts; for young kids and old movies; for religion and Playboy; for news and weather and sports; for food and travel and learning and more.
And then? Well, everything got jumbled.
MTV and CMT seemed to forget the “M.” A&E ignored the “A,” TLC scuttled the “L,” IFC dismissed the “I.” Others – Bravo, AMC, Nashville Network – shed their entire purpose.
Some seemed to keep zipping through a revolving door The Christian Broadcast Network became The Family Channel, then Fox Family, then ABC Family, then Freeform. The Nashville Network became the National Network, then Spike, then the Paramount Network.
Cable TV became many things, but not logical and not steady.
Why the changes? A few of them were similar to the earliest TV days.
Back then, most TV stations (and most viewers) were in cities. Networks did well with Sid Caesar’s ethnic accents, Ed Sullivan’s Broadway numbers or the golden-age dramas.
But as TV spread out, cowboy shows soared. Much later, it was “Beverly Hillbillies,” “Green Acres” and “Petticoat Junction.”
For cable?
— At first, some people assumed this would mainly be for upper-income homes. Bravo (1980), CBS Cable (1981) and Arts & Entertainment (1984) all focused on the arts.
— Others noted that cable was popping up in places that needed better reception (small towns) or where cable lines were easy to install (suburbs). The Nashville Network and Country Music Television started almost simultaneously in 1983; they were eventually joined by Great American Country (1995) and RFD-TV (2000).
But those trends were temporary, vanishing as cable grew. The number of cable homes went from 16 million in 1980 to 41 million in ’87, 50 million in ’90 62 million in ’95 and a peak of 93.4 million in 2018.
Some channels did manage to stay steady. That was true of the pay-extra channels (HBO, Showtime and such), the news channels and some others — ESPN (1979), the Weather Channel (1982) and the practical ones owned by Scripps, including Food (1993), HGTV (1994) and DIY (1995).
But for others? Changes kept bubbling, for two strong reasons:
1) Deals. Each time a network is sold, the new owners have fresh debts to worry about; they also have the iffy notion that they can improve things.
2) Human nature. Some people just change things a lot; some are quite foolish.
And that takes us to the prime example: CBS.

In most ways, CBS has been terribly clever.
From Edward R. Murrow to “60 Minutes,” it has had great news people. It has soared in daytime and in late-night. It fueled the first golden ages of drama and comedy.
And in modern times, it found a workable formula of dramas that wrap up a story each hour. That’s paid off; the 2024-25 season (when CBS had the top seven shows in the Nielsen ratings) was the 17th consecutive one in which CBS finished in first place.
But when it comes to cable, these clever folks kept getting it wrong.
At an early point, their research team announced that only 10 cable networks would survive. One, of course, would be the arts network, CBS Cable.
In truth? CBS Cable was one of the first channels to fold. That was back in 1982; it only lasted 14 months.
Much later, CBS tried again with Eye on People, in 1997. This one did better; it lasted almost two years.
In between those failures, CBS took the alternate route: Its affiliated companies simply bought control of:
— The MTV networks, in 1986. That included MTV, VH1, BET and Nickelodeon.
— The Nashville Network and CMT, in 1997.
— And the TV Guide Network, in 2013.
Before and after those deals, channels discarded their original purpose. MTV and VH1 drifted away from music videos (except for odd hours). The Nashville Network and CMT drifted from country.
Eventually, those two had only a couple strong reminders of their music roots — the “MTV Video Music Awards” and the “CMT Music Awards.” Then both of those became simulcast on CBS.
By then, an identity crisis had set in. The Nashville Network tried to keep its initials and become The National Network. Later, it announced that it was Spike and was “the first channel for men” — a fact that may have surprised some ESPN or Playboy Channel viewers. Then it took the name of CBS’ parent company, becoming the Paramount Network.
Also changing was the TV Guide Network. It became Pop.
As luck would have it, the P-networks each had one great idea.
For Paramount, it was “Yellowstone.” A sharply crafted drama by writer-director-producer Taylor Sheridan, it put Kevin Costner amid the sprawling beauty of Montana and the sprawling greed of family and neighbors. It jumped to No. 1 overall, drawing more viewers than the big networks.
For Pop, it was “Schitt’s Creek,” a droll Canadian co-production. In 2020, it won nine Emmys, including best comedy and all four acting categories.
These were the kind of shows someone can build on. CBS didn’t.
The “Schitt’s Creek” success came after its final season had ended. The Pop people started efforts at other interesting comedies — “Florida Girls” and (after Netflix dropped it) the Latina reboot of Norman Lear’s “One Day at a Time.” But that was hampered by the pandemic … and then by CBS’ decision to have no more scripted shows on Pop.
And Paramount? Fresh from “Yellowstone,” it had a TV version of the movie “Heathers.” A dark comedy set in high school, the series had lots of dark and little comedy; it was mostly repulsive. It was delayed twice because of school shootings, then quietly aired in one Halloween-week burst.
Sheridan continued to make terrific series, but most were diverted to the Paramount+ streamer. The Paramount Network was mostly a one-hit wonder.

That revolving-door approach hasn’t been confined to CBS networks, of course. Other cable examples include:
— Bravo, which began as an arts network. Later, it was stuffed with “real housewives,” prone (as housewives really are?) to shouting insults and tipping tables.
— TLC. The “L” used to stand for “learning.” Laterm the channel gave us polygamous marriages, hurry-up marriages (after 90-day courtships) and 600-pound people. Also, “MILF Manor” and “I Love a Mama’s Boy.”
— IFC and Sundance. Both were going to focus on independent movies. Now they have reruns and standard films … sort of like the reruns and films on other channels.
— A&E. Originally, that was “Arts & Entertainment,” strong on the arts. It gave us “Jane Eyre,” “Pride and Prejudice” and “Tess of the D’Ubervilles.” Later, there was little “A” and lots of efforts at “E.” There was “Duck Dynasty” and “Dog the Bounty Hunter” and documentaries about wrestlers and Playboy.
— The Christian Broadcast Network. It was sold twice (first to Fox, then to ABC) and changed its name four times. It eventually became Freeform, with strong potential, especially from such shows as “Good Trouble,” “The Bold Type,” “Alone Together” and the sometimes-brilliant “Cruel Summer.” But by mid-2023, ABC had quashed all of Freeform’s scripted shows.
— AMC, which used to be American Movie Classics. A competitor to Turner Classic Movies, it was showing films from the safe old days. Now it’s the home of zombies and witches.
Then again, it’s also the home of “Dark Winds” and the former home of “Mad Men,” “Breaking Bad,” “Better Call Saul” and more.
That’s where this story diverts. Sometimes (really), a cable-network shift cane be a good thing. AMC, FX, HBO and others became pieces of the second golden age of drama.

(Now the next chapter, looking at the second golden age of drama)

All in all, the 20th century was quite interesting.
It sort of started (in January of 1901) with the death of Queen Victoria. It ended (in 1999) with the birth of both “The Sopranos” and “The West Wing.”
In short, the century began with the end of the Victorian era and ended with the start of a TV golden age. In between, other stuff happened.
For TV, the era has gone by different names. John Landgraf, the FX networks chief, calls it “Peak TV.” David Bianculli, a TV critic calls it “The Platinum Age.” I’ll go with the second golden age of drama.
As the new century took hold, comedies were fading, overwhelmed by reality shows, cops, “ER” and even a game show. By the 2005-6 season, no comedies were in Nielsen’s top 12.
But quality dramas? The trend was propelled by those two shows in 1999 … and foreshadowed by the early days of cable, when Bob Cooper coined the phrase “quality noise.”

Cooper was a Canadian who made HBO’s first original film, “The Terry Fox Story” (1983). It was the true story of a Canadian who lost his leg to cancer, then made a 3,000-mile walk across the country.
Michael Fuchs, the HBO chairman, soon put Cooper in charge of original movies. As Cooper later recalled, Fuchs told him: “All I ask from you is, ‘Don’t do middle-of-the-road vanilla. I need you to help brand (HBO). And find content that makes sense.”
Indeed, when one early film sputtered, Cooper recalled, Fuchs said: “At least it wasn’t vanilla.”
They were going for “quality noise” — strong subjects, controversial people, done with intelligence and skill.
HBO made movies or mini-series about Murrow, Mussolini and Mendes (a rainforest activist), about Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal and Roy Cohn and many Russians — Stalin, Sakharov, Yuri Nosenko and more.
It made fictional films about global intrigue, plus epics — “And the Band Played On,” “Angels in America” — about gays. It found fun in surprising places, via “Barbarians at the Gate,””The Late Show” and “The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader Slaying Mom.”
And soon, other cable channels were aiming for some of that.

In their early days, many cable channels wanted to look like a real network … or, at least, like an independent TV station.
They loaded their line-ups with low-cost, low-impact shows. They took few risks and stirred little excitement.
Ted Turner took that route with TBS, but when TNT started in 1988, he went a different way.
At first, Turner told the Television Critics Association, TNT might have only one new show a month — but it would be the best thing on TV that night. Then it would have one a week, then more.
It was a fine notion … but what qualifies as the best show of the night?
The first TNT project — Charlton Heston in a 1988 remake of the powerful “A Man For All Seasons” — qualified. For another example, Turner planned a two-night mini-series on the life of Donald Trump. “You’d want to see that, wouldn’t you?” he asked.
When a TV critic responded that no, he wouldn’t, Turner seemed surprised.
The Trump idea was eventually scuttled, but the general idea stayed: Only do a few new shows, but do them well.
TNT made plenty of movies and mini-series that could fit that standard. There was John Milius’ “Rough Riders,” “Martha Coolidge’s “Crazy in Love,” Tommy Lee Jones’ “Good Old Boys.” There was Patrick Stewart in “A Christmas Carol” and “King of Texas,” William H. Macey in “The Wool Cap” and “Door to Door.” There was “The Heidi Chronicles” and “Pirates of Silicon Valley” and lots of terse, taut cowboy films.
Other cable channels — and, at times, broadcast networks — joined the quality-movie trend. But the big change came with t

“The Sopranos” started as a movie script, then as a pilot script for a Fox series. When Fox passed, it reached HBO, which meant there would be no limits for language or violence.
As Bianculli wrote in “The Platinum Age of Television” (Doubleday, 2016): “On HBO’s unrestricted playing field, following the path paved by Tom Fontana’s ‘Oz,’ David Chase’s ‘Sopranos’ defied one convention after another.”
And this wasn’t just curse words and beatings, Chase told Bianculli. On HBO, “you could write English that sounded like really contemporary English …. You were free to depict human behavior much, much more realistically.”
In the fifth episode, Tony Soprano did some consummate multi-tasking: While taking his daughter to look at colleges, he departed briefly to kill an informant. TV protagonists don’t usually do that.
And there were other kinds of freedom. “The Sopranos” had no rigid rules for when a season would start, how many episodes it would have and how long each one would be.
When a critic told Chase that a network TV “hour” was under 42 minutes, he just shook his head in disdain. His epioodes might run 47 or 49 or whatever.
And they weren’t rushed. The start of the fourth and fifth seasons each came 18 months after the previous ones began; the sixth season started two years after the fifth.
This was a luxury that broadcasr networks couldn’t match: For HBO (or Showtime), the prime product was fresh movies after they ran in theaters. For TNT, it was that vast MGM treasure trove; for FX, it was the Fox library. The new series were bonuses; they came at their own pace.
The networks, by comparison, had to fill out schedules; they needed shows to crank out at least 22 episodes a season, all the right length. There was no way a network show could match cable, Except ….

“The West Wing” had none of the HBO advantages. It needed to arrive on time, on budget and at the right length. And it had nothing to jolt the viewer.
“My feeling was that it was too good to succeed on network television,” Martin Sheen, who starred, wrote in “The West Wing” (Simon & Schuster, 2002). “I’d explain, ‘There’ll be no car chases, no fist fights, no gun battles, no special effects. There’s no sex.’ It sounded like the kiss of death.”
What it did have, however, was the genius of writer Aaron Sorkin.
Sorkin had already written three excellent movies — “A Few Good Men” (adapted from his play), “Malice,” and “The American President” — plus the sharp ABC series “Sports Night.” He wrote about workplaces where eloquence seemed natural. He could unleash the full, Sorkinian touch.
“Ir’s very disciplined, with very, very specific dialog,” Sheen wrote.
At first, Sheen — like many actors — would say something close to the words on the page; he soon learned that you say them precisely.
As D.L. Hughley (co-starring in Sorkin’s later “Studio 60 On the Sunset Strip”) explained it, other scripts are like jazz, open to improvisation; Sorkin’s are “classical — you play every note.”
“West Wing” and “Sopranos” were opposites in many ways, but the same in ways that counted: They were brilliantly written, perfectly produced and acted with skill and subtlety. There were five times that they collided as Emmy nominees for best drama series. “West Wing” won three of them, “Sopranos” won once, then they both lost to “Lost.”
That was in 2005, after Sorkin had moved on. He soon found the more gradual approach of writing movies (including “The Social Network”) and “The Newsroom,” a brilliant HBO series. “My last season of ‘The Newsroom’ was six episodes,” he told Bianculli. “And it seemed worth it to me.”
But his “West Wing” had proven that quality drama can work, even on a broadcast network. It spent its first six years in the top-30 of the Nielsen ratings, peaking at No. 8.
And “Sopranos” showed that anything was possible on cable. One of its writers, Matthew Weiner, created “Mad Men” for AMC — which followed with Vince Gilligan’s “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul,” then detoured to the scary precision of “The Walking Dead.”

FX also jumped in. Landgraf had arrived shortly after it debuted “The Shield,” with the most intriguing anti-hero this side of Tony Soprano. He has followed with a rich mixture of series and mini-series, including “Reservation Dogs,” “What We Do in the Shadows,” the “Shogun” reboot, fresh rounds of “Fargo” and the amazing O.J. Simpsons mini-series.
Other cable channels also grabbed that idea of doing a few series very well. They included::
— USA, from the amiable “Monk” to the sleek “Suits” and “La Femme Nikita” and two brilliant bursts of whimsy — “Resident Alien” (originally on its sister channel Syfy) and “Mr. Robot.”
— TNT, with lots of fantasy (“Babylon 5,” “Witchblade,” “Falling Skies,” “Snowpiercer”) and several brainy shows — “Leverage,” “The Closer” and David E. Kelly’s “Monday Mornings.”
— HBO’s competitors in the pay-extra world, especially Showtime and Starz.
— And HBO itself. Once “The Sopranos” showed the way, top dramas kept flowing — “Six Feet Under,” “The Wire,” “True Blood,” “Boardwalk Empire,” “The Newsroom,” “Big Little Lies,” “Succession” and many more.
HBO seemed to have no limits … including budgets.

George R.R. Martin had spent years writing for TV, often being told that his ideas were too expensive. He decided to write books instead.
“I wanted to put all that behind me, to pull out all the stops,” he wrote in ‘”Inside HBO’s ‘Game of Thrones'” (Chronicle Books, 2012). “Huge castles, vast dramatic landscape, deserts and mountains and swamps, dragons, gigantic battles … characters who were complicated, conflicted, flawed.”
The books became best-sellers. Then he was surprised that producers wanted to turn them into an HBO series. “”You’re mad,’ I told them. ‘It’s too big. It’s too complicated. HBO doesn’t do fantasy.'”
But then it did. “Game of Thrones” won 59 Emmys, plus a Peabody. In separate years, the Television Critics Association picked it as best new program, best drama and program of the year.
HBO had proven that spending big can pay off. By then, it had competitors with big checkbooks.
Yes, this drama golden-age was propelled mostly by cable and occasionally by broadcast networks. (The networks never quite matched their “West Wing” peak, but had their moments, from “House” to “Elsbeth.”) But it was soon joined by the streaming networks.
The streamers eventually ranged from Netflix to HBO’s own companion Max. They continued the basic ideas: Do fewer shows, do them well and, if need be, spend more. And that pushes us to the next chapter.

(Now the next chapter, looking at the rise of Netflix and the screaming surge)

People thought television would kill the movies. It didn’t.
They thought cable would kill television. It didn’t.
Then streaming came along and killed (or seriously wounded) all of them.
That started in 2013, when Netflix suddenly had “House of Cards” and a Marvel surge. It broadened two years later, with “The Crown” and more.
Or you could say it started in 1997. Under the shadow of Blockbuster, Reed Hastings — a computer scientist and math guy — had the quaint idea of rent-by-mail DVD’s.
Even back then, it seems, Hastings thought Netflix would eventually have original shows. He may not have realized how many there would be and how dominate they would become. Ted Sarandos, the company’s chief content officer, discussed that with the Television Critics Association in 2015.
“Less than 30 months ago, we only had two shows — just 21 episodes of (original) content.” Now they were making 475 hours in a year.
In that 30-month span, Netflix had gone from 40 million subscribers to 70 million. A decade after that, it topped 300 million worldwide; more than half of its library involved original productions.
That came as Netflix made the right moves early:
— “House of Cards,” a British series about political intrigue, was being remade with Kevin Spacey as an American manipulator. Netflix outbid cable networks and had its first hit. The show drew 56 Emmy nominations, including five straight as best drama series. It won seven Emmys, a Peabody and an American Film Institute award.
— “Orange is the New Black” was a richly diverse show set in a women’s prison. It drew 21 Emmy nominations — including, on consecutive years, ones for best comedy and best drama — plus a Peabody and two AFI’s.
— “Arrested Development” was a much-praised series that Fox had canceled eight years earlier. Netflix got two more seasons and three Emmy nominations.
You could call this sheer luck … or smart decisions … or the way Netflix did business. Sarandos talked about that in three TCA sessions in 2015 and ’16.
Like two NBC regimes (Pat Weaver and Grant Tinker), Netflix gave its creative people full rein. “To coach the creatives wasn’t our wheelhouse,” Sarandos said. “It was going to be our role to pick the right projects, pick the right talent to run those and (let) them do the best work of their lives.”
Like HBO and others, it didn’t have to worry about quantity. It simply needed shows to supplement all the movies that were already there. There was no reason, Sarandos said, to have pleasantly adequate shows. “Our members come to us looking for something great.”
And more than any of the others, Netflix didn’t have to worry about shocking or offending. CBS might fret about someone’s fragile grandparents seeing the wrong show; with the streamer, a viewer has to specifically choose a show.
“There’s not a passive way you are going to stumble on something that offends you on Netflix,” Sarandos said. “So that gives us a lot of license to push the envelope.”
Early on, “Orange is the New Black” was doing that. In 2014, Laverne Cox was the first trans actor to receive an Emmy nomination; she got three more on the show.
But the key advantage may have been the fact that viewers can watch episodes — even an entire season — whenever they want.
“The ultimate benefit of all-at-once is consumer contol,” Sarandos said. People used it in different ways. “It could be a couple hours, or it could be the whole show in one sitting
But who were those viewers?
“Netflix was born on the internet,” he said. “So our demographic was younger and more male when we were beginning.
At first, he played heavily to that. A 2015 deal with Marvel brought four separate series — “Daredevil,” “Jessica Jones,” “The Punisher,” “The Iron Fist” – that also could interweave.
That same year, Netflix added “Bloodline,” “Sense8,” “Narcos” and more. The next year brought “The Get Down” (Baz Luhrman’s look at the birth of hip hop) and “Stranger Things.” Those young males were signing up.
But there were also steps to broadened the audience. “‘Orange is the New Black’ really served a big, underserved audience of female-centric programming that … features people of color,” Sarandos said.
Others would do the same, including “Dear White People” in 2017 and the elegant “Bridgerton” in 2020. But for female appeal, the big change came with “The Crown.”

English monarchs tend to come and go quite briskly. There have been more than 60 of them; one (Lady Jane Grey) lasted nine days.
But Elizabeth II was different from most, writer-producer Peter Morgan told the TCA. His “The Crown” series “starts with her assuming, quite reasonably, that she has a long time before her father will die.”
The previous monarchs had died at 70, 69 and 81. Elizabeth could “have expected 20, maybe 30 years as a young woman married to a young naval officer.”
Then her dad died at 56. At 25, Elizabeth was suddenly in the spotlight. “It’s a very difficult thing to have to deal with, while also grieving for the loss of your father,” said Claire Foy, who portrayed her.
This was someone, Morgan said, “who wanted to live in the countryside with her husband and have horses and dogs and childern and who was a shy, retiring sort. (She was) very close to her lovely sister, who was sort of the opposite and vivacious and full of energy.”
Morgan has already captured Elizabeth at 70, with his Oscar-nominated script for “The Queen” (2006). Now he found the drama of a young queen.
“The Crown” debuted in 2016 and ran for six seasons, with three Elizabeths. It won 24 Emmys, including two for best drama series.

Once a home for young males, Netflix was quickly adding women.
Tina Fey co-created “The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” (2015) … Natasha Lyonne co-created and starred in “Russian Doll” (2019) … Darren Starr — the “90210,” “Melrose Place,” “Sex and the City” guy — made “Emily in Paris” (2020).
And Shonda Rhimes — producer of “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Scandal” and more — signed an overall deal. Most of her Netflix shows had major Black characters; all had strong female appeal. There was “Inventing Anna” (2022), “The Residence” (2025) and even a documentary about the making of “Hot Chocolate Nutcracker” (2020).
Most importantly, Rhimes had the “Bridgerton” series and all its offshoots.
Both “Bridgerton” and “The Crown” proved that older viewers could find Netflix. So did “Grace and Frankie” (with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin), “The Kominsky Method” (with Michael Douglas and Alan Arkin) and “Longmire,” a droll cowboy-cop show that had been dropped by the A&E network.
Netflix had gone far from its teen-guy roots … and very far from its DVD-by-mail days.
But then — as the pandemic took hold — it got fresh waves of competition.

(Now the next chapter, looking at the surge of streamers competing with Netflix))

For a cozy time, streaming networks were just a bonus fringe.
They were kind of like an Imax theater in a multiplex or a luxury box in a stadium: They offered appealing alternatives, without affecting the masses.
Then Covid came and spun everything into overdrive.
In less than nine months, four major streamers were born — Apple TV+. Disney+, Max and Peacock. Streaming seemed like a made-for-Covid phenomena.

In 2019, streaming was mostly confined to Netflix and Amazon Prime. Globally, they had 167 million and 126 million subscribers; Hulu had 23 million, CBS All Access had 11 million.
Now jump ahead six years. In mid-2025, it was 300 million for Netflix, 200 for Amazon, 126 for Disney+, 113 for Max, 78 for Paramount+ (replacing CBS All-Access), 55 for Hulu and 41 for Peacock.
That’s quite a jump — from 227 million for the big four in 2019 to 907 million for the top seven in ’25. Add lots of smaller streamers and the total hits a billion subscriptions.
Some were overseas, some were multiple subscriptions, but the effect was there: If you have Netflix, Amazon and Disney, there’s little time for CBS.
And, due to Covid, much of this happened at hyperspeed.

The early pace was leisurely, as technology developed. YouTube and Apple iTunes started in 2005, Amazon Unbox in 2006. In 2007, Apple TV began and Netflix started streaming. In 2008, Roku began and NBC and Fox combined to create Hulu. The next year, CBS tried TV.com.
Then, in 2012, the industry standardized its technical details and production increased. Streamers used the same approach that propelled cable: Don’t worry about quantity; instead, do a few things that make an impact.
The first streaming shows to win the top Emmys might seem like polar opposites — the darkly angry “Handmaid’s Tale” and the giddy “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”
But both had a rich, cinematic feel. They had strong female and cross-generational appeal. And they reflected two unique women.
One is Margaret Atwood, who wrote the 1985 “Handmaid’s Tale” novel, then saw it become a movie, an opera and Hulu’s potent series. The other was a sort of show-biz cyclone.

Ballerinas and comedians don’t seem to blend much, but Amy Sherman-Palladino was both.
Her father (Dan Sherman) was a comedian from the Bronx; her mother was a dancer from Mississippi. Sherman-Palladino grew up in Los Angeles, started studying ballet at 4 and had a unique career detour — quitting dance when she had a chance to write for “Roseanne.”
She created two shows about dance — the clever drama-comedy “Bunheads” for Hulu and “Etoile” for Amazon Prime. And she made one about comedy … which is her wheelhouse.
“Stand-up comedy is its own very strange world of desperation and pain and anger,” she told the Television Critics Association.
Like many good comics, Sherman-Palladino can seize a room. She wears big hats, spews big gushes of words.
“We’ve been doing comedy for about 30,000 years now, I believe,” she said, adding: “I know a lot about Joan Rivers …. I knew Sally Marr, who was Lenny Bruce’s mother.”
So when she created Midge Maisel -(a 1950s housewife who tries stand-up), she didn’t need much research.
Sherman-Palladino had already established her machine-gun dialog with “Gilmore Girls.” It did well for the CW, but she and her husband (Dan Palladino) quit before the seventh and final season, over budget issues.
Amazon Prime wasn’t like that. “For the first time in our career,” she said, “we have the support from the brass …. We have all the pieces to go big.”

“Mrs. Maisel” had a richly cinematic look. It laid out the 1950s beautifully; then Sherman-Palladino added the pain, anger, wit and joy.
In 2018 (a year after “Handmaid’s Tale” became the first streamer to win the best-drama Emmy), “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” won for best comedy. Sherman-Palladino was also named best comedy writer and director — the first woman to win in either category.
The next year, 2019, another Amazon comedy (“Fleabag,” from British writer-star Phoebe Waller-Bridge) won. And in 2020-21, a streaming comedy won twice in a row.
That was “Ted Lasso” for Apple TV+ — one of the Covid-era arrivals.

The timing was mostly a coincidence, but it worked neatly.
Eyeing the early success of Netflix and Amazon, others wanted to jump in. But they had learned a lesson from (as usual) CBS’ mistakess: It has to be something big.
CBS All Access had a great library of old shows, but new ones were scarce.
It started well in 2017 with “Star Trek: Discovery” and “The Good Fight” (a beautifully written “Good Wife” spin-off). But its 2018 shows — “Tell Me a Story,” “One Dollar,” “Strange Angel” — were quickly ignored. With only 11 million subscribers in 2019, CBS All Access was sputtering.
Others felt they needed size to compete with Netflix. Disney took that to an extreme, buying the Fox movie studio and its cable channels. Now it had:
— The Marvel franchise, one of the two sci-fi giants. It had already bought the other one, the “Star Wars” franchise.
— A majority of the Hulu streamer; it would later buy the rest.
— The National Geographic Channel, which makes the sort of first-class nature films that Disney savors.
— FX, a cable channel that was already known for high-quality drama, from the “The Shield” and “Justified” to the O.J. Simpson and “Fargo” mini-series.
Combining all of them, Disney had the heft it wanted; the rush began:
Apple TV started in November of 2019, Disney+ in December. Then came Max in May of 2020 and Peacock in July. In March of 2021, CBS All Access became the much more ambitious Paramount+.
It was a sudden streaming surge … that fit neatly into the pandemic.

Americans’ first national warning about Covid came on Jan. 31, 2020. A national emergency was declared (a bit tardily) on March 13.
At the time, Apple TV+ was barely four months old, Disney was three months, Max and Peacock were coming. Tragedy and opportunity merged.
Some of the broadcast-network shows had finished their production for 2019-2020, but some hadn’t. For its final three episodes, “Saturday Night Live” had cast members filming themselves from home. For summer and fall, the TV schedules were in tatters.
Sports events were held in empty stadiums. Movie box-office totals tumbled — from $11.4 billion in the U.S. and Canada in 2019 to just $2.1 billion in 2020, nudging ahead slightly to $4.5 billion in 2021.
So people had a lot more time to watch this new streaming notion. Then Disney went further: Major movies — intended to draw big crowds in theaters — were diverted to Disney+.
There were animated films — “Soul” in 2020, “Luca” in 2021, “Turning Red” in 2022 — plus Tom Hanks’ “Pinocchio” in 2022.
Other streamers bought movies that were originally meant for theaters. There was Hanks’ “Greyhound” in 2020 on Apple TV+, Eddie Murphy’s “Coming 2 America” in 2021 on Amazon, Will Smith’s “Emancipation” in 2022 on Apple and many more.
Long-term, that might have been a mistake. Families fell out of the habit of going to movie theaters; some theaters closed forever.
But short-term, it propelled this new streaming surge.

Along the way, streamers stuck to the formula of doing less, but doing it well.
Disney+ found that short seasons — often just six episodes — worked for “Star Wars” and Marvel spin-offs. It had “The Mandalorian” in 2019; “Loki,” “Hawkeye,” Boba Fett” and the remarkable “WandaVision” in 2021; “Obi-Won Kenobi” in 2022.
But it also turned youth novels into top series. “The Mysterious Benedict Society” arrived in 2021, “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” in 2023.
Others had pre-pandemic success, mostly with fantasy. In 2019, Amazon had “The Boys”; Apple had “For All Mankind” (from Ronald D. Moore, creator of the “Battlestar Galactica” reboot) and Jason Momoa’s “See.”
And 2019 was when Apple TV+ launched “The Morning Show” — one step in Reese Witherspoon becoming the queen of streaming and beyond. Which, of course, is another story.