On the Edge at 50

Twenty years after the NBC Radio Network opened an experimental television station in 1928, the company took out a newspaper ad: “After 20 years of preparation, the NBC Television Network is open for business,” it trumpeted. “Nineteen forty seven marked the end of television’s interim period. Nineteen forty eight marks TV’s appearance as a major force.”

The ad breathlessly concluded, “The greatest means of mass communications in the world is with us.”

And indeed it was.

Suddenly there were programs every night of the week on the ABC, CBS, NBC and DuMont networks: variety shows (“Texaco Star Theater,” “Toast of the Town”), dramas (“Studio One,” “Philco TV Playhouse”), comedies (“The Growing Paynes”), news-public affairs (“Meet the Press”) and sports--every night.

In many ways, not much different from today, 50 years later. “1948 was the true birth of commercial television,” says Mike Dann, who entered the industry that year at NBC and went on to work at all of the Big 3 networks, including a stint as programming chief at CBS from 1963 to 1970.

What sparked this programming eruption was that the final technical details of television’s development, stymied during the World War II years, had been worked out, and a 1947 dramatic anthology called “Kraft Television Theatre” had proved television’s effectiveness as an advertising medium by causing a product named Imperial Cheese to sell out at New York City grocery stores. The businessmen behind the new technology knew that to attract more advertising, they’d have to put on programming that would prompt consumers to buy sets.

The young medium had occasional visionaries like Sylvester “Pat” Weaver, who joined NBC in 1949 and served as network president from 1953 to 1955, and whose ambitious goals for television he explainedyears later: “Entertainment was used to get people to watch the medium, but the end would be [to] inform them, enrich them, enlighten them and liberate them from tribal belief patterns.”

Yet as Harry Castleman and Walter J. Podrazik observed in their book “Watching TV” (McGraw-Hill, 1982), network television was conceived by the same people who brought America commercial radio, and its purpose was essentially the same: to attract the largest possible audience for the purpose of selling advertising time.

This did not preclude its creating many of the most memorable moments in contemporary American popular culture, however. Some of those moments will be visible Wednesday night on “CBS: The First 50 Years,” a two-hour special celebrating the anniversary of what was once known as the Tiffany Network because of its (relatively) classy fare--the TV home of Jackie Gleason, Lucille Ball, James Arness, Carol Burnett, Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore, among others.

Golden anniversaries are ordinarily joyful, but that’s not the case for ABC, CBS and NBC, which no longer rule the roost as they did for much of the medium’s first 50 years. They have been steadily losing audience for the last decade and now command the attention of less than half the viewers on any given night. The ever-expanding cable television universe has fragmented the audience into smaller niche markets--history channels, shopping channels, cooking channels, even golf channels. Now it’s only on relatively rare occasions, such as “Seinfeld’s” final episode, that the networks become the kind of touchstone they were in the past.

The evolution of network television from fledgling medium to vital force to beleaguered institution takes place against a backdrop of monumental change that transformed America’s cultural landscape.

In 1947, there were 16,000 television sets in America. By the end of 1948, there were 190,000 and three years later there were nearly 12 million.

If any single show can be said to have established television’s credibility as an entertainment medium, it was Berle’s wacky variety show on NBC, “Texaco Star Theater.”

“In a town like New York, when Milton Berle went on, the restaurant association was besieging me and other broadcast executives to schedule it later in the evening, because there was a noticeable absence of clientele on Tuesday evenings at 8 o’clock,” recalls Dann, now a consultant in New York for a new BBC cable channel.

Most of the nation still turned first to the radio for entertainment. But in the major cities of the Northeast, television was more of a craze than green “chlorophyll” chewing gum, and it proved far more durable.

As President Harry Truman’s whistle-stop campaign to retain the presidency took shape that fall, however, the future of the new medium was no more assured than “Give-’em-Hell Harry’s” lease on the White House. The television industry lost $15 million in 1948, and NBC alone was losing $13,000 a day. Not until 1953 did the CBS television network begin to turn a profit. What kept the company going until then--as with NBC and ABC--was its radio division. DuMont, lacking that other source of income, went out of business in 1955.

At the dawn of the television era, NBC was briefly dominant by virtue of its powerful clear-channel stations, solid engineering base and such popular shows as “Texaco Star Theater,” “Howdy Doody” and “Kukla, Fran and Ollie.”

But the “Paley Raids” of 1948, in which CBS Chairman William Paley spirited away top NBC radio stars such as Jack Benny and Red Skelton, eventually led to CBS’ becoming the No. 1 television network in the mid-1950s, a position it held for two decades with such classic shows as “Playhouse 90,” “Studio One,” “I Love Lucy,” “The Honeymooners,” “The Defenders,” “Gunsmoke” and “All in the Family.”

Frank Stanton, president of CBS for nearly 30 years, says RCA Chairman and NBC founder David Sarnoff had great technical vision but lacked Paley’s programming instincts. Dann agrees:

“Sarnoff believed, and this was the great tragedy, that technology was king. When Jack Benny left NBC, he said, ‘It will be too bad for him.’ ” But it was too bad for NBC, which saw Benny drive several of its early Sunday evening shows off the air after he made the jump to television in 1950.

Further evidence of Sarnoff’s inability to divine the future of the medium came when the NBC founder had lunch with Leonard Goldenson, the head of United Paramount Theaters, shortly after United Paramount acquired the struggling ABC television network in 1952.

“He asked me what I planned to do for programming,” Goldenson recalls. “I said, ‘I intend to bring Hollywood into the field as soon as I can.’ He said, ‘Hollywood? Who wants to see film? Television is a live medium.’ ”

But filmed shows like “Disneyland” (later “Disney’s Wonderful World of Color”) and Warner Bros.-produced westerns such as “Cheyenne” and “Sugarfoot” gave ABC its first successes in a long uphill struggle against CBS and NBC. Those networks would also increasingly use filmed shows, leading to the death of live television, which had produced such dramatic standouts as “Marty,” “The Trip to Bountiful” and “Twelve Angry Men.”

“Live drama was very much indebted to Broadway,” says broadcast historian Erik Barnouw. “That meant indoor drama deriving from the Ibsen tradition, with psychological and social conflicts. Sponsors were always a little nervous about them, because they were always introducing social issues.”

But by the end of the 1950s, sponsors had nothing to be nervous about as far as live drama was concerned. Goldenson, whose main concern was getting his network on its feet, says he never had any regrets about helping to bring about the death of live television.

As the ‘60s began, television assumed an increasingly important role in American culture and business. In 1945, television was a largely noncommercial medium in New York City, Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles and Schenectady, N.Y. Fifteen years later, there were some 500 stations, and annual TV ad revenues were significantly more than $1 billion. As the stakes grew higher, programming for the networks became a higher-stress occupation.

“You were successful [as a network programmer] in the ‘60s and ‘70s if you won your time period,” Dann says. “In the ‘50s, you were successful if the picture was clear.”

Although NBC was usually No. 2 in the ratings behind CBS, “Les Brown’s Encyclopedia of Television” (Visible Ink Press, 1992) notes that it was usually more innovative than CBS, introducing specials (or as then-network president Weaver called them, “spectaculars”), talk-variety shows like “The Tonight Show,” dual-anchor newscasts like “The Huntley-Brinkley Report,” one-hour soap operas, free-form comedies like “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In” and rotating dramatic series like “Sunday Night Mystery Movie” and “Name of the Game.”

When another network stole CBS’ ratings crown in the mid-’70s, though, it wasn’t NBC but ABC, which traditionally lagged so badly that Milton Berle quipped recently, “It was the fourth network. There was no third network.”

When ABC reached the top, it did so largely on the programming vision of Fred Silverman, whose Queens, N.Y., family was one of the first in the neighborhood to have a television, because his father, a TV repairman, had built one: a 7-inch Trans-Vision set. Silverman was a TV wunderkind: Having written a thesis about the medium in college, he took charge of daytime programming at CBS by age 25 and then succeeded Dann as head of network programming there from 1970 to 1975, when he left to become president of ABC Entertainment. His legacy there included “Charlie’s Angels,” “Three’s Company” and “Mork & Mindy.”

Hoping lightning could strike three times, third-place NBC made Silverman president of the entire network in 1978. He was unable to work the same magic, however, and a string of disasters such as “Supertrain” and “Pink Lady” led to his ouster in 1981. NBC turned then to Grant Tinker, a former network executive who had gone on to form with his wife one of Hollywood’s most successful production companies: MTM Enterprises, maker of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” (starring the then-Mrs. Tinker), “The Bob Newhart Show,” “Rhoda,” “Lou Grant” and “Hill Street Blues.”

After two years as chairman of NBC, Tinker and his programming chief, Brandon Tartikoff, hoped the fall 1983 schedule would produce a breakthrough for the beleaguered Peacock Network. It didn’t.

“We put on nine new programs in the prime-time schedule, and every one of them failed,” herecalls. “But in midseason, the audience began to find things in which we had faith, like ‘Cheers’ and ‘St. Elsewhere.’ ”

The next fall brought “The Cosby Show,” and within a year NBC was on top--a position it held for six years with staples such as “Family Ties,” “L.A. Law” and “Golden Girls.”

Who wins the seasonal ratings race is no longer big news--the Big 3 networks are all losing what matters most: viewers. The foundation of network television is crumbling, putting its future in question.

For the fact is that today the Big 3 networks are no longer so big. Fox has carved out a strong No. 4 slot (and sometimes No. 3) with irreverent shows like “The Simpsons,” “King of the Hill” and “Ally McBeal.” The hottest new shows of this season--Comedy Central’s “South Park” and WB’s “Dawson’s Creek”--weren’t even on the networks. Cable offers scores of alternative channels, including premium HBO and Showtime, as well as pay-per-view. There’s home video, the upstart UPN and WB networks and, on the horizon, networks of UHF stations overseen by Barry Diller (who as Fox Inc. chairman played a key role in developing the Fox network) and Florida entrepreneur Lowell Paxson.

Legendary programmers like Tinker, Dann and Silverman say their successes would be much harder in today’s cluttered TV environment.

“It’s become a much more difficult business,” says Tinker, now a self-described “interested observer” from perches on the boards of KCET and the Museum of Television and Radio. “In a three-network universe, which is what I lived with, there were never enough good creative people to populate all three networks. Today we’ve got six networks, going on eight, and they’re spread thinner than ever.

“In 1979, the 90% coverage [of the television viewing audience] that the three networks had together began to erode because there were new players on the field, and it’s down to--what?--in the 50s now,” he adds. “The networks no longer own the ball. They just get to play with it sometimes.”

Silverman, whose production company makes “Diagnosis Murder” for CBS, says that if he were entering network programming today, he wouldn’t even want to go to ABC, CBS or NBC. “I think I would probably want to work for one of the cable networks,” he says. “You’ve got a little more freedom. At a regular network, the stakes are so high that you’re really loathto take any chances.

“There’s such caution that all the fun has gone out of the game,” he adds. “When I was at the networks, we would take some chances and try a show like ‘All in the Family’ or ‘MASH.’ I don’t see very much of that now.”

Despite their waning fortunes, the broadcast networks are expected to remain fixtures of American television, although not necessarily in their present forms. Tinker notes that the Big 3 networks are still the best means for an advertiser to introduce a product on a national basis because 30% of American homes don’t have cable. And while their overall share of audience is declining, even their lowest rated prime-time shows generally outdraw the highest rated programs on their cable competitors.

Still, Silverman sees the situation in Darwinian terms, with the networks having to adapt if they don’t want to die.

“I think network television will continue in some form, but it will be drastically modified,” he says. “I’m not sure that in five years, you’ll have television networks broadcasting 22 hours a week in prime time. There may be considerably less. Audiences continue to decline and costs continue to increase. That’s a really lethal combination.”

A possible solution, he says, is for networks to lease out evenings that they find unprofitable.

“Take ABC,” he says. “ABC can’t get arrested on Saturday night. They may come to the conclusion that they’re better off not programming Saturdays, at which point they can either give the time back to their stations or go to a company like Sony, which doesn’t own a network. Sony can buy the time and put their own shows on.”

Other ways Silverman says the networks may reinvent themselves are by airing five-time-a-week shows in prime time, developing lower-cost programs and programming 52 weeks a year, rather than turning summer over to reruns that encourage further audience migration to cable channels.

So, Happy 50th Birthday, Big 3. It’s anybody’s guess how you’ll look in another 50.

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Jon Krampner writes about television history for the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and Emmy Magazine. He is the author of “The Man in the Shadows: Fred Coe and the Golden Age of Television” (Rutgers University Press, 1997).