‘Pat’ Weaver, Pioneer at NBC-TV, Dies at 93

Sylvester L. “Pat” Weaver, a visionary television executive whose programming innovations, including NBC’s “The Tonight Show” and “Today” show, continue to flourish half a century after their introduction, has died. He was 93.

Weaver died Friday night of pneumonia at his home in Santa Barbara, but his death was not reported until late Saturday.

During his tenure at NBC, which lasted from 1949 to 1955, Weaver dreamed up programming formats that became staples of the medium, including the first network morning program, “Today,” which recently commemorated its 50th anniversary; and the prime-time special, a term Weaver derived from the word “spectacular.”

In a 1999 interview, Weaver, the father of actress Sigourney Weaver, said he had been “hired to guide television into what it had a chance of becoming.”

“I think Pat was one of the programming geniuses of television and really started many of the programming forms that live on today,” said Thomas Sarnoff, the son of NBC founder General David Sarnoff, who elevated Weaver to president of the network in 1953.

Perhaps as notable as the programs he conceived, however, was the manner in which Weaver changed the television business itself.

Breaking from the formula that governed radio, he diminished advertisers’ control over program content by moving NBC toward a model in which the network produced its programs and then sold time to multiple sponsors. Before then, a single advertiser oversaw each show, with networks providing little more than facilities and advertising agencies supplying the programming.

Weaver described the revised approach as a “magazine concept,” because advertisers in print bought space without dictating editorial content. Other networks eventually adopted the practice, which by the 1960s became the industry standard.

“I consciously said it would be better if we build a television service that was not [advertising] agency-run, because there you must do what the client wants, and while a lot of the public interest will be covered, they still won’t want to do a lot of things that ought to be done,” Weaver explained in the book “Live TV.”

Weaver came to that conclusion after working as an advertising executive himself before joining NBC as a vice president. Only a few million people had television sets at that time, and CBS dominated the nascent medium, with eight of the top 10 programs.

Under Weaver, NBC launched such memorable series as “Your Show of Shows,” the sketch comedy starring Sid Caesar. The network also began running “spectaculars”--drawing a huge audience, for example, with Mary Martin in “Peter Pan”--which Weaver saw as a way to create excitement, inspire more families to buy TV sets and challenge the “robotry of habit viewing.”

The executive also championed educational programs that came to be known as “operation frontal lobes,” reflecting his conviction, as he stated in 1951, that one of television’s goals should be “enlargement of the horizon of the viewer.” In more recent years, Weaver lamented the near-absence of such programs on the major networks.

Not all Weaver’s innovations were immediately hailed by his colleagues. Many NBC-affiliated stations at first resisted plans for “Today,” which some labeled “Weaver’s Folly” before its launch in 1952.

The show, hosted by Dave Garroway, became a huge success, as did “The Tonight Show,” which made its debut two years later with Steve Allen as host.

NBC’s current chairman, Bob Wright, called Weaver “the first major creative force in television programming and one of the most innovative executives in the history of television. Pat’s influence on NBC is still seen by millions of viewers every day, from the ‘Today’ show to ‘The Tonight Show’ and much else in between.”

Tall and flamboyant, Weaver was described in Robert Metz’s book, “CBS: Reflections in a Bloodshot Eye,” as “an inveterate memo writer whose outpourings to his staff soon lined the shelves of his office in 40 bound volumes.”

Weaver ultimately headed NBC for only two years before he was replaced by Sarnoff’s son, Robert, and subsequently returned to advertising.

In the 1960s, he also headed an early foray into pay cable, Subscription Television Inc., but the venture failed, in part due to the combined efforts of broadcasters to block it.

“I don’t think he enjoyed the problems of running a company as much as he did creating shows,” said Thomas Sarnoff, who is president of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences’ charitable foundation.

Born in Los Angeles, Weaver was the son of a well-to-do owner of a roofing manufacturing business. Weaver graduated from Los Angeles High School and went on to Dartmouth, where he majored in philosophy and graduated magna cum laude.

He wanted to write fiction and did so on a post-college trip to Europe and Egypt, but the stories didn’t sell, and Weaver returned to Los Angeles. He found work at an advertising agency before taking his first job in broadcasting, at radio station KHJ, where he wrote, sold ads, produced and directed programs and even acted in some radio dramas.

Weaver worked in radio in San Francisco before landing in New York, working briefly at NBC before moving to the ad agency that was planning and producing comedian Fred Allen’s radio program. He quickly became supervisor for the agency’s radio division.

In his 1994 autobiography, “The Best Seat in the House,” Weaver recalled how he became Allen’s on-air foil when, as the producer of Allen’s show “Town Hall Tonight,” he turned to two men talking in the control booth and asked them to leave.

“This is my first show, and you’re bothering me,” Weaver said, only later discovering that the two men he ousted were Deke Aylesworth, president of NBC; and Lee Bristol, president of Bristol-Myers, the program’s sponsor.

According to Weaver, the incident cemented his relationship with Allen, who would periodically put him on the program as a villain, “Mr. Weaver of Young & Rubicam,” when he lampooned advertising agencies.

In early 1941, Weaver did some work for the government organizing the broadcasting of anti-fascist radio programs to South America. After Pearl Harbor, Weaver went into the Navy, where he spent two years in command of an escort vessel. He also produced the radio program “Command Performance,” for the armed forces overseas.

After the war, he went back to work for ad agencies before joining NBC in 1949.

Weaver was one of the first inductees into the television academy’s Hall of Fame and was again honored as a TV pioneer at the 50th annual Emmy Awards in 1998, taking the stage alongside his daughter Sigourney.

“No other person has shaped and molded the look of television more,” John Mitchell, the then-president of the academy, said when Weaver received the organization’s prestigious Governors Award in 1983.

Weaver remained active well into his 80s and has been involved in charitable organizations, among them as a fund-raiser in the fight against muscular dystrophy.

The oldest of four children, his younger brother, Winstead “Doodles” Weaver, was a comedian and actor featured with the Spike Jones orchestra, while his sister, Sylva Weaver Rowland, was fashion editor at the Los Angeles Times in the 1930s.

Weaver and his wife, Elizabeth, marked their 60th wedding anniversary in January. In addition to his wife and daughter, he is survived by a son, Trajan, five grandchildren and a great-grandchild.