Primetime Propaganda

by Ben Shapiro

  The man who saw it first was Fred Silverman, who shifted in 1975 from CBS, which had nine of the top eleven shows on television, to ABC, which had none. The reason for his shift was simple: He wanted more control over programming. And he was perfectly situated to bring his expertise to bear. “The rules that applied at CBS didn’t apply at ABC,” Silverman told me. “CBS was more of an upper income, a more sophisticated audience. ABC was basically working class. Quite urban—by urban, I just mean big city.”58 By urban, Silverman also meant young.

  Silverman grabbed a couple of ABC’s building blocks that were riding low in the ratings—shows like Happy Days, which had just been converted into a three-camera comedy with an audience, and Starsky and Hutch. He also took up The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman, as well as Laverne & Shirley, a spin-off of Happy Days. He also greenlit a show called Charlie’s Angels, produced by Aaron Spelling and his new partner, Leonard Goldberg. In the same mold, he gave the go-ahead for Three’s Company, which received an outsize share of attention based on Suzanne Somers’s sex-symbol status.

  The emphasis for Silverman was on action and romance. The movement away from politics was obvious, and the move toward sex and violence even more obvious. The media labeled Silverman’s programming strategy “jiggle TV” and condemned the exploitative nature of the programming. Silverman called such programming “the heat,” and Larry Sullivan, who wrote promos for the shows, explained, “We sell the possibility of tits and ass and the possibility of violence. We present the stimuli and the response.”59 Silverman’s strategy worked like magic. By 1976–77, ABC had ten of the top fifteen shows on television.

  Perhaps to quiet those critics, and perhaps as an attempt to find moral worth in his programming, Silverman and his subordinates greenlit some of the most liberal shows on television too. One of his deputies, Marcy Carsey, joined ABC in 1974 and rose to become senior vice president of primetime series. She would go on to become one of the most prolific and powerful producers in television history, creating The Cosby Show, Roseanne, Grace Under Fire, 3rd Rock from the Sun, and That ’70s Show, among others. Her programming strategy was vintage Silverman: by the gut. “I don’t believe in research,” she told me. “What I believe in is the writing on the page.” She sought to create shows that carried entertainment value along with promotion of certain messages. “I don’t think [entertainment and messaging are] competing,” she said. “I think the more you engage somebody’s gut, heart and soul, with something that they’re living or feeling or something that is keeping them up at night, if you get to where their gut is, and where their heart is, then you have a hit show.” She added, “I’m of a liberal bent, so obviously that’s going to come out of the shows that I was involved with.”60 At ABC, the first show Carsey greenlit was Soap, from Susan Harris, a controversial take-off on soap operas that featured the nation’s first openly gay regular character, Billy Crystal’s Jodie Dallas (who would show up in drag in the series pilot).

  Meanwhile, with Silverman gone, the story quickly became grim at CBS. Just as Silverman left, so did Bob Wood, and the programming side deteriorated rapidly. By the middle of 1976, CBS had dropped behind both ABC and NBC in audience ratings.61 CBS recovered the second-place position by the end of the 1976–77 season, but they trailed ABC by a large margin.

  NBC struggled, too. They hadn’t capitalized on the boom in liberal television in the early 1970s, and now they were in serious trouble. During the 1976-77 season, NBC had one show in the top 15. It got so bad at NBC that industry jokers whispered to one another, “What’s the difference between the Titanic and NBC? Answer: The Titanic had an orchestra.” RCA Chief Edgar Griffiths had enough and ordered Herb Schlosser, “Get us into second, or get out.” It didn’t happen—NBC finished the 1977–78 season with a 17.9 average in the Nielsen ratings, as opposed to a 20.7 for ABC and an 18.8 for CBS.62 That was it for Schlosser.

  To replace him, NBC brought in . . . Fred Silverman. They offered him the kingdom. He would be making $500,000 per year (in today’s dollars, about $1.7 million), and he’d be running the entire network. It was “well beyond the scope of my present duties or any I’ve performed in the past,” Silverman reveled as he accepted the job. Former assistant Michael Eisner was more skeptical: “Freddie has now met his mountain. If he climbs this one, he’ll go down in entertainment history.”63 Silverman was aghast when he saw what he was stepping into. “NBC had no identity when I got there,” he told me. “It was a mess. There was nothing there.” He tried everything from classic extravaganzas to blockbuster disasters like Supertrain, which nearly bankrupted the network.

  In 1980, NBC still trailed the pack by a mile. In January 1981, the RCA board kicked out Ed Griffiths, effective July 1, 1981. A week before Griffiths was finally thrown out, NBC tossed out Silverman, too. “The moment that Ed Griffiths got fired, I knew that was it,” mourned Silverman. “It was just starting to click.”64

  A few made their mark with politically radical series during this period—Susan Harris’s Soap was the best example—but most bided their time. Garry Marshall, creator of Happy Days, turned out hit after apolitical hit, and he continued to breed future liberal hit makers—men like Gary David Goldberg, a late-1960s hippie living on “food stamps and welfare,” and Bill Bickley, who would later create Perfect Strangers, Step By Step, and Family Matters. Earl Hamner, writer of The Waltons, was an FDR-type liberal, but he was working on a show that was clearly more conservative in tone and tenor than the others on television at the time—in fact, Bill Paley picked up the show as a counterweight to All in the Family, even if Hamner didn’t intend it that way.

  Liberalism on the networks was in retreat. Liberals still dominated the playing field, but the era of Big Leftism was over—it seemed, for all time.

  THE RISE OF CABLE

  Just as the networks retreated from their overt liberalism, cable picked up the ball and ran with it.

  Cable truly got started in 1972, when a man named Charles Dolan built an underground cable system in Manhattan. That company became Home Box Office—HBO for short. The network’s true focus was on breaking the rules. As a subscription service, HBO didn’t have to face the FCC’s scrutiny. Shock value was their selling point. As comedian Robert Klein, one of the first stars broadcast on the network, shouted, “It’s subscription! We can say anything. Shit! How’d you like that? Shit!” Sophisticated content was clearly HBO’s forte.

  In fact, that deep concern for meaningful content was evident throughout HBO’s early programming. Michael Brandman, the first director of program development at HBO, was a liberal, and he was all for pushing the boundaries of taste, even beyond what his bosses wanted. Brandman produced George Carlin’s first HBO special, which featured Carlin’s famous monologue, “The Seven Words You Can’t Say on Radio or Television.” “[W]e chose to do that show because of the freedom that paid television afforded us,” Brandman told me.65

  HBO wasn’t just a content breakthrough—it was a business breakthrough. Brandman lauded “the absence of commercials, the absence of traditional standards and practices.” HBO promoted freedom—freedom to be vulgar or crude or edgy, because the viewer controlled the remote rather than the advertisers.66 Censors were unimportant because there were no advertisers—the viewers were now the only censors. More than that, the channel required envelope pushing. If the networks could provide their programming free to the viewer, the only way to compete using pay-per-view was to provide programming worth paying for—programming that wasn’t usually to be found on television. Hence HBO’s slogan: “It’s not TV. It’s HBO.”

  As HBO began to open the market for cable, a young entrepreneur named Ted Turner took notice. Turner had grown up in Cincinnati, Ohio, son of a Republican businessman. When Ted’s father killed himself, Ted, twenty-four years old, took over the enterprise. In 1970, Turner bought a local Atlanta station which he called Turner Broadcasting System (TBS). In 1976, building on HBO’s succe
sses, he decided to take TBS national, broadcasting Atlanta Braves games and old movies. By 1979, he had launched CNN.67 Turner’s ventures were bold moves that would shape television in heretofore unknown ways. As Turner became more successful, he became more liberal. Over the years, that liberalism would infect his networks.

  The biggest cable player of all, though, entered the American lexicon in 1981, with the stated goal of programming liberalism to youth. That new cable channel was called MTV. It was a reaction to the 1980s Reagan Revolution, a rejection of the spirit of can-do optimism that pervaded the country after Jimmy Carter’s ouster. Instead, MTV promoted a new sort of liberalism—not the idealistic liberalism of the 1960s or the angry, caustic liberalism of the 1970s, but a nihilistic, narcissistic liberalism.

  MTV was the creation of Robert W. Pittman, an executive at Warner Cable. Pittman loved rock and roll—he was a 1960s baby, a former disc jockey. And he was a child of the new television, the Laugh-In, Smothers Brothers, All in the Family era, complete with vulgarity and quick cuts. Pittman was a spokesman for “youth”—at twenty-seven, he was creating an entire music video network. “Early on,” he wrote, “we made a key decision that we would be the voice of Young America. We would not grow old with our audience . . . we laid as our cornerstone the concept of ‘change for change sake.’ . . . We would stay ahead of the audience—not follow the TV programming tradition of mirroring the audience.”68

  MTV embodied Pittman’s postmodern politics to a T. Their slogans, bragging about their counterculture status (even as they became the mainstream culture), were legendary: “MTV: We’re Making It Up as We Go Along,” “MTV: Better Sorry Than Safe.”69 They followed in the footsteps of TW3 and The Smothers Brothers and paved the way for Jon Stewart by promoting their liberal agenda in playful, rock-oriented news. On This Week in Rock, for example, MTV used the trappings of network news to promote abortion, rip Oliver North, push AIDS funding, and laugh at flag-burning.70

  Aside from the socially libertine politics of much of MTV’s music—remember Madonna writhing around in full bride-whore regalia at the MTV Awards singing “Like a Virgin”?—the honchos at MTV recognized their power, and they felt a responsibility to use that power to push the “do your own thing” ethos. Doug Herzog, who began working at MTV in 1984 as news director for music news and ended up as president of MTV productions, explained the network’s political vision to me: “We’re talking to young people every day, and a lot of responsibility comes with that. We kind of have superpowers . . . [we] believe that through the medium of television we try to make the world a slightly better place.” For Herzog, that meant programming to the left.71

  Herzog is proud of MTV’s impact on the culture. “I think MTV has been for a long time a cultural bellwether,” he told me. “[It has affected] several generations of young people. It’s had enormous impact, enormous influence. . . . MTV did a hell of a lot on pro-social issues and pro-social causes, and pro-social messages.” MTV, said Herzog, was designed “to be a leader and groundbreaking and first and breakthrough.”72

  NETWORKS IN CHAOS: THE REAGAN ERA

  As cable grew—as Ted Turner’s empire opened before him, as MTV was joined by Nickelodeon, as HBO broke new ground—the traditional broadcast networks were faced with a dilemma. These cable channels were focused on what they called “narrowcasting,” a new strategy designed to seek out specific audiences that would pay subscription rates, then sell those specific audiences to advertisers. In truth, this was merely an extension of the old Bob Wood axiom that you could lose in the ratings overall if you retained the right audience. And it was working. While the networks were still trying to draw the broadest possible audience, the cable channels were gradually chipping away at them by parceling out programming to specific subsections of that audience.

  The traditional networks were stuck in the middle. They responded, predictably, by programming in schizophrenic fashion: They embraced slightly liberal family fare in order to shore up their broader audience while simultaneously greenlighting edgy adult-oriented liberal dramas.

  This wasn’t just a response to the rise of cable—it was a response to the rise of the political right. Not only was Reagan in ascendance, but religious conservatives were beginning to push back against network television’s dramatic shift to the left. In 1979, evangelical Christian leader Rev. Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority, which quickly targeted the social liberalism and political leftism of network television. Soon after, Rev. Donald Wildmon founded the American Family Association, which joined Falwell in condemning sexual and violent television content. Their moral opprobrium drew an initial public response that shocked the networks—it was the first time anyone had effectively countered the leftist domination of television.

  As a solution, the networks sought compromise.

  At CBS, Tom Wyman led the way with programs like The Dukes of Hazzard, which was basically early-1960s-style rural programming, and Magnum, P.I., an action show starring Tom Selleck. Don Bellisario, the creator of Magnum, P.I., was a pro-military conservative who purposefully made Magnum a Vietnam vet in order to quash the antimilitary bigotry that labeled all Vietnam vets Taxi Driver–type crazies.73 CBS still carried a few 1970s holdovers like M*A*S*H and Archie Bunker’s Place, an All in the Family knockoff—they weren’t going to surrender shows that were still bringing in numbers. CBS’s biggest new hit was Dallas, a primetime soap opera complete with all the usual sexual peccadilloes and moral complications. But as the decade progressed, it was clear that the era of openly political programming was over on the network. Detective shows like Simon & Simon, Murder, She Wrote, and largely apolitical Dallas imitations like Falcon Crest and Knots Landing populated the network schedule.

  ABC continued its tradition of Silverman holdovers with The Love Boat and Three’s Company, but most of its groundbreaking programming was relegated to movies of the week under the auspices of Brandon Stoddard. Stoddard was entertainment oriented, but he liked to insert social issues into the programming, too. “I was fascinated in my career with that [balance],” Stoddard told me. “Being able to say something but also putting something on the air that was entertaining.”74 Stoddard aired controversial movies of the week like The Day After, which many argued was blatantly anti-Reagan, a piece about America being nuked that drew the ire of conservatives—and drew huge ratings.

  The biggest story in network programming during this era, though, was at pitiful NBC. After Silverman met his premature demise there, the network brought in Grant Tinker to take over. Tinker had been a busy man over the past thirty years. He was an old-school outspoken liberal, a man who had risen from the TV department at McCann-Erickson Advertising Agency in the 1950s to vice president in charge of West Coast programming at NBC in the 1960s. During that meteoric rise he met Mary Tyler Moore, whom he quickly married. In 1970, with Moore out of work and Tinker’s career on the skids, he decided to form MTM Enterprises, using Moore as the face of the organization. After collaborating with Jim Brooks and Allan Burns to write a pilot for Moore, he got CBS to bite on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. He followed that success by recruiting talented writers like Gary David Goldberg, Joshua Brand, Steven Bochco, Bruce Paltrow, and others. MTM was a writer’s paradise, according to everyone who worked there. “Grant Tinker was someone who really valued writers,” Josh Brand told me.75

  Tinker had always loved social messaging. “Most television (and movie) writers are somewhat left-leaning,” he acknowledged. And they had an obligation to put their talents to work in favor of the common good, with the acceptance of the executives, according to Tinker. “I have considerable impatience with the maximum profit fixation of the current network owners,” Tinker said.76

  Tinker’s first shows at NBC, unsurprisingly, were liberally oriented pick-ups from MTM Enterprises. He renewed Hill Street Blues, Bochco’s gritty cop show, despite that show’s dismal ratings. Then he picked up St. Elsewhere, a far-left show about medical schoo
l that featured a sex-change operation during the first season. The idea was to build up NBC’s prestige in the industry, create programming of substance. After all, Tinker snorted, “so little sticks to your ribs.”77 (Lee Rich, the man behind Lorimar and Dallas, responded to Tinker in colorful terms: “Tinker sets himself up as a god of what television should be. And what is this bullshit about sticking to your ribs?”)78

  Tinker’s deputy was a young kid named Brandon Tartikoff. Tartikoff was actually a Fred Silverman holdover—Silverman had recruited the self-professed “child of television” in 1978, and Tartikoff had remained after Silverman’s departure. Tartikoff’s strategy wasn’t numbers focused, it was talent focused, just like that of his two bosses. “Despite volumes of research,” Tartikoff once wrote, “renewal decisions ultimately come down to instinct.”79 Like Tinker, Tartikoff saw an obligation to program in the “public interest.” Tartikoff’s favorite moments as a broadcaster included the production of Roe v. Wade, about the abortion case; the made-for-TV movie Special Bulletin, a rip-off of The Day After; and Unnatural Causes, a made-for-TV movie about crazy Vietnam vets.80

  Tinker and Tartikoff were stunningly successful. From 1981, when Tinker took over, to 1986, NBC’s profits jumped from $48 million to $400 million. That wasn’t because of his prestige programming, though, even if revisionist history would tell us otherwise. Neither Hill Street nor St. Elsewhere ever cracked the top 20 in programs, and it took Cheers two years to crack the top 30. NBC’s success was a result of two action shows in the mold of ABC, and two sitcoms with a conservative bent.