The American Broadcasting Company wasn’t like the first Big Two networks, both founded in the mid-twenties by pioneers of national radio. A funny thing about ABC: Time and time again, whether on the air or in real life, its history involved Washington hearings and federal task forces of one sort or another. FDR’s “new deal” Department of Justice ruled that the NBC radio network was too dominant, and needed to be broken in two. The lesser part, the Blue Network, soon to be renamed ABC, was spawned by court order in 1943 after five years of federal litigation.

By the laws of the time, the Feds had a point: NBC had so many affiliated radio stations, often competing with themselves in so many overlapping markets, that AT&T engineers needed red and blue pencils to trace the wires connecting them. The red pencils mapped out NBC’s main network, the archrival of the Columbia Broadcasting System. Blue was the next tier down in prestige and audience size, a network for up-and-coming or fading talent. The Blue Network was packaged for divestiture, as the US government demanded. It sold to Edward Noble, who made his multimillions from Life Savers candy. He immediately made plans to get into television.

ABC radio was relatively late to TV, opening five stations in 1948. CBS, NBC, and television technical pioneer Du Mont had all been operating since the end of the Thirties. AT&T was in charge of bringing the TV network signals out into the country, beyond their original homes in the northeast and Midwest. While ABC was still largely confined there, it had a surprising, if advertiser-less “hit” of a most unusual type. Democrat Estes Kefauver became nationally famous holding widely publicized Congressional hearings on organized crime in 1950 and ’51. Since some witnesses objected to being televised, news cameras, including ABC’s live cameras, focused on their nervous wringing hands while testifying, often a strangely dramatic sight. CBS and NBC didn’t air the hearings live, so nationally it was a boost to ABC.

Postwar America now had four television networks, but only enough national advertising, as It turned out, to support roughly two and a half networks. Du Mont was the first loser of this game of musical chairs, and left the TV network business in 1955. (It continued as manufacturer of TV sets and studio equipment, and retained ownership of five stations, which would eventually form the nucleus of the Fox Broadcasting Network.)

By then, cash-strapped ABC had a lifeline. It merged with Paramount Theaters in 1953, which had been separated from Paramount Pictures by yet another industry-busting federal anti-trust ruling. Theater executive Leonard Goldenson was made president of the reborn company. For most of the next twenty years, ABC—with fewer affiliates–would fight to catch up to its two big, better-funded rivals.

Up till then, the major studios refused to sell their films to television, or to make TV shows. The first to break the blockade was Walt Disney, not then considered to be in same league. ABC agreed to invest millions in Disney’s new park, which would open the following year. Disneyland, their weekly prime-time TV show, became must-see TV for anyone with children during those boom years for families. But Disney’s and ABC’s real breakout hit was a filmed show that played every weekday after school, The Mickey Mouse Club.

Also on weekday afternoons, the network began carrying a live program from its Philadelphia station called American Bandstand. 25 years before MTV went on the air, Bandstand was one of the very first television shows with teen appeal. Back in the wholesome era, there wasn’t the level of cultural contradiction between teen values and family values that would soon be familiar.

In the Fifties, the marketing wizard of ABC was Ollie Treyz, a tenacious and crafty bulldog when it came to convincing advertisers to buy. ABC’s evening shows focused on families—The Real McCoys (1957), The Donna Reed Show (1958). For decades to come, ABC, the network of Lawrence Welk and The King Family, would present itself to audiences, and more important, to advertisers as being a little more populist, a bit more politically centrist than NBC or CBS. The competitive weakness of ABC’s much smaller news division was, if anything, helpful to that perception.

By the turn of the sixties, their low-budget sports division, headlined by ABC’s Wide World of Sports, punched above its weight. ABC primetime programs usually had competitive ratings in cities where all three networks were available. Unfortunately for ABC, there weren’t enough of those cities yet. Too often, ABC was carried by less popular stations with weaker or more distant signals, yielding lower viewer numbers for ad selling. Strong popular programming could convince strong independent local stations to join ABC, and occasionally even win over an affiliate of a competitor, but it was a sluggish, decade-long process.

One of ABC’s vice presidents, a man who lived up (or down) to every interpretation of the job title, was James Aubrey, at the beginning of a meteoric showbiz career that would transform the fortunes of ABC, go on to do the same at CBS, and then eventually earn him a rare promotion to the then-Imperial thronelike job of head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The now-forgotten Aubrey was a fascinating television programmer and a repellent character personally, practically the originator of “grab ‘em by the”… well, you know. To this day, you can look him up by his showbiz nickname: “The Smiling Cobra.”

ABC’s Leonard Goldenson was a quieter, more methodical strategist than his more famous counterparts at NBC, David Sarnoff, or at CBS, William Paley. He used his Hollywood connections to persuade Warner Brothers to become the second studio, and the first major one, to break Hollywood’s shaky blockade and produce shows for ABC television. Their late fifties/early sixties Warner shows were glamorous and suspiciously similar—77 Sunset Strip, Surfside 6, Bourbon Street Beat, and Hawaiian Eye. In fact, it was true: the studio frequently used the same scripts across their range of nearly identical shows, set in exotic locations but filmed on the same Burbank lot.

By 1959, James Aubrey decided that the likes of The Donna Reed Show wasn’t going to be enough to pull even with CBS and NBC. He bought a pilot film from Desilu, a TV company fronted by Lucille Ball, and largely run by Desi Arnaz. Based on the recent memoirs of a prohibition enforcement agent named Elliot Ness, The Untouchables would affect ABC’s public image, not in a good way. But this one hit was big enough to transform the network’s financial prospects for the better, almost magically.

It would soon become the focus of yet another set of Washington hearings, this time as TV’s prime example, its poster boy of potentially harmful, pointedly immoral TV violence. Backlash to that era led to legislative and network-directed change.

There had been violent TV shows before. Westerns were gun-happy, though in a different era, distanced from present-day life. Cop and detective shows were also quick on the trigger, and more violent than they’d been, not like early fifties hits Dragnet and Highway Patrol. NBC alone had Peter Gunn, M Squad, and The Thin Man. But there was something about The Untouchables that struck a nerve, both with mass audiences and with moral critics. Its style was different, colder, and darker.

The culture of the late fifties was heavily influenced by realistic, cynical postwar novelists like Norman Mailer, James Jones, and paperback king Mickey Spillane. The Untouchables was the first American TV show that reflected a touch of that sensational, sick wave of moral darkness.

The timing was right. There was an ongoing revival in interest in World War I, prohibition, and the Depression. The squarish black cars with running boards, the speakeasys, Tommy guns, and gangster clothes were “in.” The fad for The Untouchables was so big that ABC rushed two other shows set in that period onto the air, Roaring Twenties and Margie.

The show’s timelines were always vague, jumping randomly between the years of prohibition and repeal. The October 1931 conviction of Al Capone, which you might think would be the climax of the show, took place in the first minute of the first episode. The scripting was better than average, and so were the guest stars. Bruce Gordon, who played Nitti, became everyone’s pinstriped image of a bootlegger and gangster.

The show’s first public relations crisis came from incensed Italian-Americans, none too thrilled with the historically correct, but offensively prominent Italian names of Ness’ usual opponents. An awkward situation. Desilu quickly added a brave young Italian who stood up to the mob and was rewarded with a place on Elliot Ness’s Untouchables squad. A few scripts did manage to find villains whose last name didn’t end in a vowel.

The world of Elliot Ness was a strict one. “I don’t make deals,” and he meant it. This uncorruptible federal agent worked in a threadbare office where it always seemed to be the middle of the night. A coffee pot was always on. Desilu was not a rich studio, so the streets of the Forty Acres back lot could only look so much like Chicago in 1931, but they made do. Generally, you only ever saw the street anyway when there was a Duesenberg racing along it, mowing down pedestrians with a spray of bullets.

In its day, The Untouchables was widely considered the most violent show on TV. Almost every episode featured big shootouts carried to the level of a Zucker brothers parody. Opposition to television sex and violence, particularly from parents and clergy, was beginning to bubble upwards.

The intro of almost every episode sets up an act of violence against an innocent person: a crippled newsboy, a movie theater manager, a restaurant owner. It usually happened off-screen, and by the end of the episode, the law usually (though not always) caught up with the perpetrator. But whatever the judicial punishment later, they acted with cold, inhuman impunity. They enjoyed it. This was, to put it mildly, something new for TV.

Newton Minow, the new Kennedy administration’s FCC chief, blasted network TV as a “vast wasteland.” When Congress started grilling network chiefs about excessive violence, NBC and CBS hid behind their polished images of responsibility and public service. But upstart ABC, with less public goodwill to lean on, was cut loose to face the hearings. They were under the gun, so to speak.

Clearly, times were changing, so ABC and Desilu retooled The Untouchables, taking some of the sting, and some of the shine, from the show. The opening credits now open like a history book, titled “The Untouchables 1929-1933.” There were still shootouts, but briefer ones, rationed two per show. The sadism and shock factor was dialed down. A female social worker became an occasional character, and more plots dealt with crime’s victims, the widows and orphans that the Mob created. These changes made it a more honest, less sensationalistic show, but it lost some of its gritty appeal and ended after four seasons. It outlived the fad that it had created.

Next Week, Part 2: ABC finally hits it big, with talent as varied as Adam West, Tom Jones, Howard Cosell, The Fugitive, The Avengers, Marcus Welby, and The FBI. A look behind the scenes: a summer ’70 job at ABC HQ when I was eighteen. The history of America’s rogue network, in color! Tune in next week, same time, same website!