by Allen Salkin
Tryg was not being allowed to set the priorities he wanted, so he left.
Despite Colony’s successes, ProJo had foundered ever since Michael Metcalf had been killed in a bicycle accident in 1987. Enticed by Tryg’s availability, ProJo’s board had interviewed him for the CEO job in early 1990. Tryg told ProJo he only wanted to come aboard if they were willing to invest in creating new national basic cable channels. Newspapers are fun, he argued—his mother had been an editorial writer for the Cleveland Plain Dealer—but they were not the future.
Most ProJo stock was owned by descendants of the newspaper’s founders, a gaggle of stodgy New England Brahmins, and no matter how successful Tryg might turn out to be at wringing profits from cable operations, they were not thrilled to hear their beloved business dismissed. One board member told Trygve that starting a new national cable channel was as risky as investing in Hollywood movies, and the century-and-a-half-old newspaper company was not going to get involved in that sort of shady business. They turned him down.
But after a rough year of recession, with classified newspaper advertising dropping off and little sign that the city’s dwindling shipbuilding and manufacturing jobs were coming back, the board was more willing to take risks. If there was some sort of sea change happening in the media business, they needed someone adept to navigate it. They called Tryg back in 1991 and agreed to his terms.
In ProJo’s cable division, Colony, Tryg was not handed a dream team of young media executives. None had worked at television powerhouses like Viacom or arrived with media degrees from newly wired schools like NYU or MIT. Nevertheless, Tryg decided to work with what he had in Providence, to see if he could lay out a vision, set a priority, and have the men—they were pretty much all men—he’d inherited execute it. Tryg believed that if he made it clear that Colony was now a fertile place for new ideas, the ideas would come.
When Tryg arrived, he was encouraged to meet Joe. The head of programming might not have launched MTV, but he had started the Portuguese and Spanish channels, and had suggested that court channel.
Joe had barely been around the Colony headquarters, so that morning at the Sheraton was the first time he had seen Tryg in the flesh. Joe stopped his new CEO in the hall and introduced himself. “Hello, sir,” he said, extending his hand. “I’m Joe Langhan, head of programming for Colony.”
Trygve’s pale blue eyes flashed recognition, and he quickly got down to business. “Great,” Trygve said, shaking hands. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you.” With a CEO’s skill for boiling an idea quickly down to its essence, he gave Joe a mission:
“Joe, we have the opportunity to participate in an extremely promising new business at the company. That business is basic cable programming. I have already received approval from my other board members and the executive committee to participate carefully in this business.”
Joe nodded. This guy is straightforward, he thought.
“The profit potential here is enormous in a way that is understood by very few people. But it can also be exciting to work on—and if done right can make a real contribution to society.”
He told Joe there were three rules to consider in developing a new channel:
“First, it has to cover a category not yet served by television but for which there is demonstrable public interest.” Americans spent billions of dollars annually on pop music and music magazines—thus, MTV.
“Second, the channel has to be able to deliver twenty-four hours a day of programming related to that category for a reasonable cost.” Record companies paid to produce music videos. Putting them on the air interspersed with in-studio news segments and clever comments from young “VJs” was a very economical proposition.
“Third, the channel has to have the potential of being entirely advertising-supported.” Record companies wanted to advertise on it, as did anyone interested in reaching the youth market. Although most cable channels were collecting per-subscriber fees—ESPN was fetching the most, about 25 cents a household, and even MTV charged a small fee—Tryg believed free was key. “The right channel,” he said to Joe, as he had said to others at Colony, “offered for free, will be so attractive to viewers and so easy to pick up that other cable companies will clamor to carry it, and we can sell advertising nationally.”
If it all comes together, Trygve explained, Colony could rival Ted Turner’s CNN and TBS Superstation.
The spiel lasted less than ten minutes. Joe asked him one question: “How do we figure out what kinds of subject areas might be worth looking at?”
Trygve told him just to look at the culture: come up with a number of potential subject areas, then research advertising dollars, the numbers of magazines sold, and the media coverage for each subject. “I am determined to work with you to get us into this business and to do it right,” he said. He nodded and headed into the main conference room for the next presentation.
“We weren’t going to have a smut channel. We weren’t going to have anything that we saw as detracting from society. But on the other hand, I saw any societal benefit as a secondary benefit of being in the business. The first thing we had to concern ourselves with was whether or not we could make any money.”
—TRYGVE MYHREN
It was a revolution in priorities. Suddenly, thanks to Tryg, Joe was being encouraged from the top to think big and according to an exact set of criteria. Everything was in place except the mystery ingredient itself—the subject. Joe felt stirrings of the same excitement he’d had when he held a video camera at that first football game in Woburn. “I’m going to come up with something new,” he thought.
—
During the next half year, Joe tried to dream up ideas. He thought of a 24-hour pet channel. Although Joe traveled far too much to own even a goldfish, he knew a lot of people loved their animals. Unfortunately, research showed that pets and related products—carpet cleaner, collars, air fresheners, chow—were not a big enough industry with enough major brands. A pet channel would never sell enough advertising to cover seven days a week of programming. In fact it was difficult to consistently sell even the eight minutes of ads around a weekly half-hour pet show.
He pondered an all-talk-show channel. Phil Donahue’s syndicated daytime show was still wildly popular, as was the five-year-old Oprah Winfrey Show, along with a range of others, from low to high. But after some quick research, Joe concluded that talk shows were too talent-based and therefore risky. Viewers tuned in for the personality of the host. If you didn’t find the right person, you had nothing, and if you tried to poach established hosts, you’d need a dozen of them to fill the day, and it would cost a fortune.
Tryg’s method of winnowing down ideas was working, but so far Joe had nothing to show for it.
Then, in early 1992, a superior at Colony asked Joe to take a meeting with Ken Levy, the director of new business for Johnson & Wales University, whose main campus was a block away from Joe’s office in downtown Providence. J&W had students studying accounting, fashion industry marketing, cooking, and other trades, and it was in the midst of investing $50 million in buying and renovating run-down buildings. One of them, the abandoned home of local Channel 10, WJAR-TV, had an entire floor still outfitted as a television studio, with high ceilings and overhead lights. Ken had been toying with ideas about what to do with it. He had little experience with television, but Colony was nearby, and he discovered that Joe was involved in developing new programming, so . . .
They met in Joe’s office. “One idea we’re thinking of is adding a degree program for TV production,” Ken said. “The students could make some shows and you guys could put them up on your channel.”
Joe sighed. He’d heard such ideas before and thought they were useless. A degree was not a necessary qualification for the few TV jobs there were, even in an expanding industry. Joe, for one, hadn’t gone to TV school. He typically told young people interested in the business,
“Look, if you want to do this, it’s like saying ‘I want to be an actor.’ It’s a business where ten percent of the people make ninety percent of the money. Unless you are willing to work really hard to get into that ten percent, you aren’t going to make much. Besides, you should choose a real major in school. Study something like history or English. You don’t want to come out of college and all you know is television, because there’s not really a hell of a lot to know about it.”
He looked at Ken and told him so.
Ken chuckled. “Hear me out,” he said. “I’ve got another idea that’ll make this more attractive for you. If we start this, the TV production students could film classes taught in our cooking school.”
“What would you do that for?” Joe asked.
“You may not know this, but we’re the largest culinary school in the world.” J&W had about 2,000 culinary students, and Ken had helped expand the program to an extension campus in South Carolina.
To Joe, this seemed like a career with even less likelihood of leading to prosperity than TV production.
“You could take the tapes of the cooking classes and put them on one of the channels you have,” Ken said. “You know, those Interconnect channels?”
Interconnect were two public service channels that were part of Colony’s license agreement with the state—they displayed slides containing local ads and public service announcements such as upcoming junior hockey sign-ups. Unfortunately, cooking shows would not fulfill the purpose of Interconnect. Colony had to deliver those PSAs.
“It may create opportunities for you, but it doesn’t sound like that great an idea for me,” Joe said.
Ken persevered. For the past few years, J&W chef-instructors had been making regular three-minute appearances on local broadcast news, whipping up quick recipes for a feature called “The Dean of Cuisine.” Maybe, Ken suggested, J&W could use the old studio space to produce longer “Dean of Cuisine” segments or even whole cooking shows, the way WGBH, the PBS-affiliate in Boston, was doing. Colony could be a partner somehow, running them on Interconnect.
“You know,” Ken said. “The trouble with these cooking shows on PBS, my wife and I love to watch them, but we don’t want to watch them on the weekends. After cooking dinner on weeknights, we sit down for like an hour or two to watch television. We’d love to watch a cooking show then.”
Cooking shows at night? Joe was trying to be open-minded, but this seemed an extremely unlikely idea to him. Nevertheless, he knew he would be expected to type up a memo for the guy who had insisted he take this meeting, so Joe decided to stop arguing.
Over the next few days, however, the meeting stuck with Joe. Ken had said he and his wife really wanted to watch cooking shows at night. Joe certainly didn’t, especially during baseball season, but Ken did not seem like a guy who would tell you a lie in order to sell you something. If Ken said he and his wife yearned for cooking shows, it was probably true.
Might this somehow fit into what Tryg had been asking for?
At his barbershop not long afterward, Joe asked the woman cutting his hair if she watched cooking shows. “Oh, I like Martha Stewart,” she said. Stewart’s lifestyle magazine Martha Stewart Living had debuted a year earlier, and she was a frequent guest on morning TV shows.
Joe had never heard of her.
One night soon after, Joe was out at a Fall River townie bar, drinking beer with his friend Bill Walsh, a thick-chested probation officer and former high school basketball star. Offhandedly, Joe mentioned that he was thinking about an idea, Colony starting a channel with cooking shows.
“Oooo-weee!” the big man said, adopting a Louisiana accent.
“What the hell is that?” Joe asked, looking sideways at him along the bar.
“You never watch Justin Wilson?” Bill responded.
Wilson, a Cajun, had a cooking show on PBS on which he prepared down-home food and, in a heavy Bayou accent, told corny jokes, among them his boast that he always wore both a belt and suspenders because, “Theah some tings you don’ wanna leave to chance.”
“I’ve never heard of him,” Joe said, gaping at Bill.
“He’s great,” Bill said. “He tells you how to cook jambalaya and pineapple upside-down cake and he’s funny as hell. He’s got all these catchphrases.”
“You watch a cooking show?” Joe was stunned. As far as Joe knew, Bill’s main hobbies were lifting weights and drinking Budweiser.
“I gar-on-tee!” Bill said, quoting Wilson’s most famous catchphrase.
Jesus, Joe thought, eyeballing his friend. It’s one thing if the ladies at the barbershop watch cooking shows, but if even Bill watches this stuff, this could be something.
Over the next few days, Joe read that the most popular television cooking show hosts ever had been Graham Kerr, known as the Galloping Gourmet, and Julia Child. The most successful new hosts were Jeff Smith, known as the Frugal Gourmet, and Martin Yan, whose joke-a-minute wok-fest, Yan Can Cook, ran on PBS on Sundays after Smith’s show.
Joe started spending some of his weekend hours sitting on his hand-me-down couch and watching these programs on the Proton. Back in his early days with Colony, he’d helped produce some cooking segments for the local news. He remembered a chef in Woburn had once demonstrated how to make frog legs.
“You’ve got to try these,” the fellow had said, lifting a plate toward Joe when the shoot was done.
“I don’t think so,” Joe said. If the legs had been served as a pizza topping, then maybe he might have considered it. He did remember that shooting the segment had been fairly easy, though. The chef showed up with a few ingredients, and it was shot live on two cameras.
At a local newsstand, he saw that many big national food and food-related magazines were stuffed with ads: Bon Appétit, Gourmet, Good Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal. So there was a potential audience—which included a probation officer and a hairdresser. The programming was cheap. Advertisers were interested.
Not long after the meeting with Ken, Joe had lunch with Paul Silva, who was now his boss at Colony. Joe mentioned he had been kicking around an idea that came out of a meeting with an administrator from Johnson & Wales.
To Paul, the birth of Court TV earlier that year had been a direct result of Joe’s insistence on showing the Big Dan’s trial. Joe might behave like an absentminded professor sometimes, his personal life unattended and his house a mess, but he saw things before other people did. He was an idea man through and through.
“Levy is suggesting a daily cooking show on Interconnect,” Joe said. “But this thing might actually be worthwhile to take up the ladder as a cable network.” He told Paul what he’d found in his roundabout research, especially that there was a bigger potential audience than one might think.
Paul admitted he was part of that audience. “I watch cooking shows,” he said, mentioning The Frugal Gourmet. Paul said that as soon as Joe finished his sandwich, he was to go to his office and put together his case for a network about food on a one-page document they could pass around.
“If I hadn’t had the meeting with Paul, if Paul hadn’t told me to go down and write the goddamn thing out, I mean who knows, I may have dragged it out for months, or weeks, and may have gotten distracted with another idea.”
—JOE LANGHAN
Many of the men at Colony had worked together since the 1970s. They trusted and liked each other, and they had all been given the same talk by Tryg that Joe had gotten on Goat Island. They understood what was wanted.
Bruce Clark, the president of Colony, had driven around the Northeast on business trips with Joe many times over the years. On one of them, Bruce had said he was hungry. Joe had gestured to the backseat, strewn with magazines, boxes, spools of cable, and random electronics.
“There’s a great pizza back there that’s only been there a day and a half,” Joe said.
Bruce had st
arted his TV career at age seventeen installing cable in his hometown of Elmira, New York, and then served as a Marine in Vietnam. He had a military man’s ability to make quick decisions: he turned down the pizza that day, but when Joe and Paul came to his office with the one-page idea for a food channel, describing the popularity of PBS food shows and the number of magazine titles, Bruce approved it, suggesting only that Joe add a few lines about potential advertisers before taking it across the street to the parent company.
“If you two guys think it’s a good idea,” Bruce said, “that’s good enough for me. Let’s get it to Jack.”
Jack Clifford, the executive vice president of ProJo, oversaw all of the company’s TV properties, broadcast and cable. Jack had been in the TV business since the 1950s, and shaved his head in emulation of actor Yul Brynner. He was jealous of the profits Ted Turner was making and, even before Tryg arrived, had begun to look into how ProJo could get into the cable channel business. On his own, he had noticed that PBS was getting its best ratings on weekends with its cooking shows. Jack was also a serious amateur cook. He taught bread-making classes on the weekends and hosted chili-cooking competitions sponsored by Colony. He proudly showed off his own “killer chili”—so named because a coworker had once nearly asphyxiated from an allergic reaction to cumin.
As soon as he heard Joe, Bruce, and Paul tell him something about a guy from Johnson & Wales who had proposed a half-hour cooking show, Jack interjected.
“Hell to that!” he said, convinced that a great idea had just occurred to him. “Let’s do a network! Nobody’s doing it!”
Joe knew that the best way to get Jack to act on something was for Jack to think it was a product of his own brilliance.
“Not a bad idea!” Joe replied.
Jack, on a roll, continued. “It’s not just cooking shows. This is a network about food in all its aspects.”