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ABC, Part 2: Road to the ’70s
Tonight! In full color! The incredibly true story of America’s boldest TV network, brought to you as only ABC can! (Music theme of Wide World of Sports) In the battle of the balding billionaires, first they endured the Agony of Defeat. Then, in a blaze of shamelessly popular entertainment, they tasted the Thrill of Victory! It’s all here, the dreamers, the hustlers, the lawyers, the regulators, in the boardrooms and bedrooms of Hollywood and of Central Park West! (Wide World of Sports theme rounds the final turn and heads for home with a fanfare of trumpets), This…is part 2 of the story of the American Broadcasting Company! It’s headed your way, and it all begins…right now!
There’s an expression in show business, “Nothing’s as cheap as a hit.” One hit, if it’s big enough, can turn around a viewer’s impression of the channel it’s on. The Untouchables had been such a hit, a lurid, staccato crime thriller at the turn of the darkening Sixties. By the fall of 1965, ABC was poised to launch another influential hit show, Batman. They chose to make it a mid-season replacement, holding it back until early 1966. It was a wise move. The show’s timing was perfect, riding in on a wave of pop culture and comic-book-based pop art.
ABC wanted to sell itself to ITT, one of Wall Street’s most aggressive conglomerates, headed by Harold Geneen, one of the most famous tycoons of his day. It would be a stock swap, with ABC management retaining some seats on the merged board. The company badly wanted this deal to go through. Washington was their obstacle. Because it involved a broadcaster, it required signoffs from the Justice Department and the FCC. Senior staff of both companies devoted months of their time to the agreement. The legal work ran into tens of thousands of billable hours. And…
The government turned ABC down flat. There was a silver lining: Forced to finance its expansion with its own cash flow, the company discovered efficiencies that other broadcasters hadn’t been pushed to find. Dollar for dollar, they became the most profitable of the Big Three.
ABC was the last of them to embrace color television. All three networks’ costs of converting to color included higher payments to the studios who made TV shows, due to their own higher technical expenses for film, costumes, makeup, lighting, and sets. The ratings of ABC’s black-and-white shows weren’t suffering yet: Burke’s Law, Peyton Place, The Addams Family, The Patty Duke Show, 12 O’ Clock High, Combat. But by 1964, color TV sales were finally taking off, and ABC was forced to catch up.
In 1966-’67, Batman helped ABC in two ways: by giving the network the enormous advertising revenues attached to a surprise smash hit; and by giving other show producers (on rival networks) the fatal temptation to imitate Batman’s wacky, cartoonish style, above all its nodding-and-winking lack of belief in the show’s premise. It worked for Batman; it sank The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Batman was such a hit that ABC scheduled it twice a week, as they’d done with Peyton Place.
The network tried for a follow-up hit with The Green Hornet. They failed, but that show’s second lead ended up going somewhere—Bruce Lee. The color era brought ABC action shows—The Rat Patrol, Garrison’s Gorillas—and kept up ABC’s groove with middle-of-the-road family shows like The Big Valley, Marcus Welby M.D., and The FBI.
ABC did inventive things. They did occasional live prime-time dramas. Lacking their own hit spy show, they imported The Avengers from the UK. They wrung profits from daytime with soaps like General Hospital. They had a paranoid UFO show, The Invaders, three decades before The X-Files. They even filmed a TV movie, Shadow on the Land, that was going to lead to a weekly series about present-day America being run by a fascist government. Hard to picture that as competition for Bonanza or The Dean Martin Show.
Every network’s largest profit centers included their advertising-rich “O and Os,” their five owned-and-operated big city TV stations–in those days, the limit of what each network could outright own. The many hundreds of ABC’s other affiliated stations were, like those of the other two networks, bound to them by no ideology or sentiment but by short-term contracts. Affiliate relations were important to maintaining a tenuous and highly breakable loyalty, based on sharing advertising time and revenue. The most effective conservative protests of the classic TV network era weren’t mass movements of millions of viewers, but of hundreds of representatives of restless network affiliates, meeting several times a year, whose regions didn’t always like what was coming down the coaxial cable from New York.
For a few months, I’d get to see ABC up close.
In March 1970, I registered for the draft, on the morning of my 18th birthday. From 1967 on, cities and college campuses all over the country had been wracked with demonstrations against the Vietnam War. The very next morning, a block and a half from my NYU dorm at 55 East 10th Street, a building at 18 West 11th Street was reduced to rubble when three radical bomb-makers accidentally blew themselves up. By May, even schools without riots canceled classes a month early. This national crisis was screwing up my plans of making some money over the summer. Fortunately, a distant relative got me an interview at ABC, and I was hired for a mailroom temp job. It paid $1.50 an hour; not bad.
ABC’s Manhattan headquarters was a new skyscraper that had just recently joined “broadcaster’s row” on 6th Avenue. NBC was (and still is) in its original, Depression-era home in Rockefeller Center near 50th Street. CBS was in an elegant Eero Saarinen-designed headquarters, nicknamed Black Rock, at 6th Avenue and 53rd Street. ABC was at 6th and 54th. In those pre-cable, pre-internet days, that’s a lot of media power concentrated in four city blocks. The New York Times, the Associated Press, the Hearst company, the Time-Life magazine empire, the head offices of MGM, United Artists, Columbia, and Paramount studios, and many of the ad agencies of Madison Avenue, were a ten-minute walk from ABC’s front door.
I worked noon till 8. The end of the day was busy for send outs, peaking from 4 to 6. After that, volume usually slowed, slacking off after 7. Almost every night ended with a couple of us preparing a case of memos and documents to go air courier overnight to ABC’s offices in Los Angeles, rushed to La Guardia and JFK by ABC News motorcycle messengers, who otherwise spent their days bringing unprocessed news film from airport tarmacs right to the door of the developing labs.
Getting out of work at 8 pm wasn’t always ideal, but it was summertime. My girlfriend often rode into the city to surprise me, waiting in the lobby when I left work. I instinctively knew I’d never take that for granted. We’d make a plan on the spot and go out, to one of midtown’s countless movies or restaurants. Even on the hottest of days, it was usually cooling off by 8.
I rarely saw famous actors at headquarters. British singer Tom Jones walked in. He had a show on the network. Local ABC 7 worked out of studios on the west side, so we rarely saw the Eyewitness News team. But we did see a lot of athletes when they came through New York. ABC Sports frequently did talent signings and press conferences in front of corporate backdrops and symbols. Sports had done far more than their share in making ABC profitable, so much so that Sports division supremo Roone Arledge would later be given a reward he coveted: a controversial promotion to be head of ABC News.
One time, my girlfriend entered the lobby ahead of a pair of men. One had a distinctive voice so loud it boomed off the marble-clad walls. She turned and saw a tall, vague-looking middle-aged man. “Young lady,” he demanded, “Do you know who I am?” My gal had the courtesy not to say, “Why don’t you ask the receptionist? She’ll know.” Instead, she said, no doubt politely, “No, but your voice sounds familiar.”
“I’m Howard Cosell!” he harrumphed before walking away.
Even as ABC entertainment ratings soared, ABC News stayed mired in third place. News Division had its bright spots, like space and science reporter Jules Bergmann, a favorite of the astronauts. The Nixon White House felt the network was the only one of the three that even tried to be fair, and Nixon granted a rare one-on-one interview to ABC anchor Howard K. Smith.
To a greater degree (at the time) than the other networks, ABC ran their TV programming and production out of semi-autonomous offices on the Coast. Chairman Leonard Goldenson didn’t see himself as ABC’s showman, but as its wise man, the dealmaker. The New York headquarters was mostly unglamorous business: ad sales, billing, banking and payroll, government and legal affairs, public relations, and affiliate relations. HQ was impressive, all shiny and new, but functional, not fancy. The whole building understood The ABC Way: keep an eye on costs. Even network VPs kept long-distance calls short. Mail went first class, but not certified or registered.
One useful life lesson to a teenager: to my surprise, the offices of the top bosses were often the last ones to leave the building each night. What do you know; the big boys didn’t always have it as easy as I thought. An open memo was sent to network vice presidents, including big shots like Fred Pierce, Elton Rule, and Martin Starger, reminding them that Goldenson personally insisted that complaints raised by affiliates get an immediate response. Another open memo to a small group of executives noted that everyone, even the chairman, flew economy class, and expense reports should reflect that.
Sometimes, after much of the staff left for the day, a mail room worker was dispatched to the corner newsstand to buy a copy of the New York Post, an evening tabloid, and bring it to Mr. Goldenson’s secretary, up on the umpteenth floor, so he could read it on his ride home. It seemed like an odd little thing for a teenage kid to be in on, being privileged to see the common man touch in the quietest of TV’s founders. You could never picture, say, CBS’s Bill Paley ending his workday reading anything like the New York Post. Maybe that’s one of the reasons that by 1970 ABC was a respected competitor coast to coast, entering a decade when it would finally reach the top.
The aftermath for me: Working at ABC was a great summer job for an 18-year-old. In the fall, I went back to film school. What about that girl who waited for me so many summers ago, like the one in the lyrics of Five O’ Clock World? She’s sitting across the table smiling while I type this.
The aftermath for ABC: The Seventies would be a golden age for ABC’s golden coffers. Love, American Style begat Happy Days, which led to Laverne & Shirley and Mork & Mindy. Starsky & Hutch were no ratings slouches either. CBS programming phenom Fred Silverman came to ABC in 1975. By the time Silverman left in 1978, ABC was #1, thanks to shows like Charlie’s Angels. Was there schlock on TV? Of course; there always will be. But there were also moments of pop culture greatness.
ABC’s broadcast of Roots was the surprise hit of 1977, a genuine phenomenon. Its reputation and adherence to history look tarnished today, but give some credit to what Roots was in its time. For people old enough to remember those broadcasts, it may be one of the few, fairly-well agreed-on high notes of the vanished age when three networks ruled the commanding heights of television.
Published in General
When Cap Cities bought ABC in 1986, conservatives hailed it as potentially revolutionary. I recall an enthusiastic column written a couple of months later, by Cal Thomas and Jerry Falwell. Its title was “Cap Cities–It’s Already Working!” The sale probably had some effect, but revolutionary it wasn’t.
When they sold to Disney ten years later, it was already clear that it wasn’t Walt’s company anymore, but culturally it was still far from what it is today. So it wasn’t taken as a political betrayal on the part of Cap Cities.
I had a post, “When the Star Gets Fired“, that touches on the Roseanne situation. Basically, I think ABC screwed this up badly, but Roseanne left them with no good choices. The relevance here (if any!) is that there are potential pitfalls in owning a broadcast network if every move you make with it affects the company’s image.
As a kid, I was an avid watcher of Saturday morning cartoons. When Wide World of Sports came on, that was the end of cartoons. My friends and I would go out and play.
I loved the intro. I wasn’t interested in sports.
Absolutely. In the old days the networks paid the affiliates money to carry their programs. Today the affiliates pay the networks. If I’m forking over money to carry your programming AND I have a long-term affiliate agreement, do NOT cannibalize my audience and rob my paying advertisers the ability to reach viewers. Especially if you hiked my affiliate fees to help you bid on rights to carry sporting events. That is betrayal.
I read his memoir many decades ago. He tried like crazy to break out of sports and enter serious news. If anything, he became a snob towards the very media industry that made him professionally.
He started as a lawyer, IIRC, an unusual starting place for a sportscaster. Of course, Cosell never saw himself as a “mere” sportscaster. Clowns always want to play Hamlet someday.
I watched Dick Cavett at the time, and I’ve gone back and watched his shows. He was good, and interviewed some cultural icons of his time like Janis Joplin. He also had William Rusher, National Review publisher and columnist on more than once, as well as Lester Maddox, a racial segregationist and Governor of Georgia in the late 1960’s (Maddox ended up walking off in the middle of the interview).
One time I watched him when he had a daytime show, which went on and on. For me the payload was an interview with a then young Marvel Comics head Stan Lee who turned out to be the last guest. It was a very short interview since they ran out of time. I’ve searched online for his daytime show with disappointing results. I was interested in replaying that disappointing Stan Lee interview.
I know its not cost, because FM radio chips include an AM circuit in the same package. Its maybe a cent or 2 a car…
People who design car and car sub systems – are college graduates… So maybe the woke is seeping out of the universities into the corporate world.
I would never expected a woke educational campaign from a beer company, but we’ve had 2 recently…
If I’m in that position, I’d probably get emotional too. I’d also keep in mind that it’s just business, and look to adapt to changing conditions.
If anything, the networks resisted the new media landscape longer than they should have, and lost money as a result. The affiliates probably had time to adapt if they were keeping up. Now local radio and television stations have their own presence on the internet.
If I’m interested in watching or listening to a local television or radio station for some reason, I stream it. My television, it’s about 5 years old, can receive terrestrial TV stations, but more effort has been put into it to receive internet content.
Not a crazy idea by any means. But what would stop talk stations from going FM? It seems like going to an awful lot of trouble to get back primarily at Rush Limbaugh, who is already dead. I still think it’s more likely that this has something to do with squeezing listeners to ultimately pay for radio programming.
I have a 2022 Ford F150. It’s got Bluetooth, and optional Internet. I personally carry a cellular LTE with me and it’s easy to stream or download music on Spotify or other apps, and I also listen to podcasts when driving. You can also get a subscription to Sirius if you want, and listen to their content.
While I choose to use Android Auto, I could use the onboard sound system software and configure it to get internet from that LTE I carry.
Terrestrial anything, whether AM or FM is on it’s way out, and that’s where the money is being spent by those car manufacturers.
Yes, Ford is talking about removing AM from future models. IF they get away with it, other car makers may follow suit.
“It’s just business” is what the mob says just before you get whacked. It’s not “just business.” If I have an agreement with you to be the exclusive distributor of your product in a given market area then, no, you don’t get to undercut me by going directly to the consumer. That’s why the cable nets won’t allow you to use their streaming apps without verifying your cable subscription. But the networks seem to have no compulsion in stabbing their affiliates in the back. Part of the problem is that the largest market stations are owned and operated by the networks themselves. WABC and KABC don’t get hurt by Hulu. It’s the ABC affiliate in Butte, Montana that gets hurt.
I’ve been a cable-cutter for most of a dozen years. The cable companies were once Hollywood’s ATMs. They pressed the cable companies for higher and higher program fees, and the cablers just passed it on, with their own markup, to subscribers. Eventually the channel bundles became bloated, and people balked at laying out approaching $2000 a year. There was a ratchet effect that was very hard to reverse. Goose, golden eggs, it’s an old story.
I saw a documentary about David Geffen and the fall of the music business. With the clarity of hindsight, the moguls and former moguls agree: bundling the singles that listeners wanted inside albums (CD or vinyl) that they didn’t really want only worked up to a certain price point. Listeners were willing to pay something–Apple’s iTunes proved it–provided the price was low, standardized and predictable. But given a choice of paying $25 for an album or pirating it for free, they’d take free. “In retrospect, we should have cut album prices drastically. It’s the only thing that would have saved us. But it would have been suicidal for the first labels that tried that.”
Cable is like that.
Adapt or get overcome. As a consumer, I don’t care. They are a part of an old business model, and they’ve had time to change (maybe they have).
Those affiliates do have access to the courts if the networks are breaking a contract. And the small guys can get together to hire legal help to sue the networks. I’m sure there has been some negotiations behind the scenes to make them whole during the length of those contracts.
BTW, how long are those contracts typically for? If it’s 5-7 years, they’ve had time.
I was nine years old when I first started watching American television. In 1966 we still had a black and white. But the networks were selling color and would precede any program that was done in color with an “in color” intro. My favorite was the NBC Peacock. I though the ABC intro was boring.
Mad Magazine, 1958. This is an amazingly detailed parody–the real ads looked just like it.
I live in a city that had ‘enjoyed’ a cable TV and Internet monopoly for decades. Rates kept going up, often without any announcement. Every year it got worse and worse. Finally we got fiber optic lines. I ordered the fiber the first day I could. Cut my total costs in half with youtube TV and 3x the Internet speed. Service so far has been perfect. As John Fetterman might say, it’s a no-brainer.
Pro tip: if you cut the cable cord, take the cable company boxes back to their storefront, and make them give you a receipt for each item. Because if your cable company is like ours, they will try to get you to dump the equipment into their drop box; sometimes they claim subscribers didn’t return the equipment and bill them for the stuff. I’ve seen multiple complaints about that behavior on local social media.
1945. Note that ABC was still reminding everyone that they are the familiar Blue Network with a new name. The text is “image” advertising, promoting the idea that 1) they’re America’s youngest network; 2) TV is really really costly, so we’re taking our time jumping in; and 3) Unlike those other snooty networks, we’re not going to charge you an arm and a leg for “costly experimentation”.
That’s the NBC peacock you grew up with, the one from the early Sixties. Here’s the original, complete with gong and fanfare:
I watched American television every chance I got from late 1966 to maybe 1977, when my screen time started dropping off.
I have fond memories of all the network programs I watched. Because Roots preceded commonly available video recorders, if I missed an episode, well too bad. The OP talks about what a sensation it was at the time. It made the cover of Time magazine which also was a very big deal in 1977. Back then, Time was the most read weekly magazine in the U.S.
I also watched another mini-series, I think the first one, Rich Man, Poor Man and I only recently read the Irwin Shaw book. I’ve re-watched Rich Man and of course the book is better.
The OP mentions General Hospital, and I did watch it with my mom during the summer when I wasn’t going to school. But for me, that wasn’t the main attraction. GH preceded Dark Shadows, also on ABC. And when Dark Shadows started featuring Barnabas Collins the vampire, it took off. It’s mostly forgotten today, but it still has a loyal fan base and is considered a cult classic. Dark Shadows played late enough in the day where I was able to run home from school and watch it during the fall and spring.
Most GH fans probably remember the sensation it made when Luke and Laura came on the scene. By then I had stopped watching it, and taken aback when it started making the supermarket tabloids. Today, General Hospital is the longest running American soap in production.
On Saturday morning, I watch quite a few ABC cartoons. By then, I was probably a little old for Casper, but I did grow up reading Harvey Comics, so…
But then there was Spiderman, Fantastic Four, George of the Jungle (watch out for that tree!!), and some American Bandstand, but I was a little young for that and wasn’t interested.
And yes, during prime time, I certainly watched Batman. I was obsessed with Batman. And it still holds up because there was some adult humor mixed in. One time my parents were watching it with me, they mostly weren’t interested, but I remember wondering what they were laughing at.
Oh, and watch out for that tree:
Heh. Joke’s on them. They’d have saved money having you take it to the dump for them.
Huh. That would explain why the apparent criticism doesn’t actually go anywhere. It just complains, but does not enlighten.
Did you see how the audience in the black and white section looks about thirty seconds away from a Bosch painting?
The ‘woman’ looks like an orc in a wig.
You weren’t interested in barrel jumping from Sweden, curling from Canada or jai-alai? They had some funky sports.
As Mad Magazine parodied the show, “Championship Lava Surfing”
When Dark Shadows first went on the air, even before Barnabas Collins made his appearance, it was in black and white. TV critics thought it was a daring creative touch that added to the gothic quality of the vampire-themed show. Actually, it was because it was on ABC, the cheapskate network that was last to spend money on converting to color television.
Re: GH and Luke and Laura–I recommend EJ Hill’s comments in a thread about soap operas. In retrospect, it’s a head-shaking achievement, getting Apollo landing-type ratings out of a wedding between two people who, per EJ, did not begin their relationship under a Good Housekeeping seal of approval.
Particularly for something whose timeslot and topic should eliminate 75% of the country from the word go.
Daily Dismal Disney:
Disney has priced itself out of the middle class, and has become a luxury brand. Unfortunately they dont have the content or merchandise to justify the luxury prices.
Even Dandy Don Meredith told Howard once on the air to shut up.