The Fractured Fairy Tale of Fred Silverman

How rare is it for the public to know the name of ANY network television executive? We know the stars, and sometimes some of the writers/producers/showrunners, but the guys who make the decisions in the back office as far as most of us are concerned are just the Suits. The people in the biz who follow the trades may know who some of these people are. The rest of us are at best mildly curious about how the sausage gets made. Fred Silverman (1937-2020) was a rare exception.

The Time magazine cover above says it all. “Showman”. We do love our impresarios. Most of them are connected to Broadway or Hollywood, though. The broadcast networks by contrast cleave closer to a corporate model of organization, not at all unlike the advertisers who keep their concerns afloat. Ideas and initiatives must run through chains of approval. So many hands are involved that it’s difficult to attribute responsibility to any one person. And most in the field, being risk averse by definition, don’t want such attention. If it’s yours and it suceeds, great! You’re doing your job. If it’s yours and it fails, go clean out your desk. But Silverman made his mark — on all three television networks, and in independent television production besides. The changes he made were so sweeping that he garnered ink in the mainstream press, becoming something on the order of a household name. Can I just take a moment and digress about that Time cover? What a snapshot of the 1970s. Vans! Smoking! A TV mini-series about Watergate (that’s Jason Robards in Washington: Behind Closed Doors). And Silverman himself, whose peak almost precisely coincided with the decade.

Who was Fred Silverman? He was the man who decided what America watched. He took turns doing so at all three networks — in an era when there were only three networks.

He made his first big splash at CBS. He was named head of programming there by network President Robert Wood, who charged him with the task of axing all of the “square” programming with hipper, edgier shows that would appeal to younger, more urban audiences. I wrote in depth about that so called “rural purge” in this earlier post. It was the moment (1970-71) when the variety of shows of Ed Sullivan, Jackie Gleason, and Red Skelton were all shown the door, as were family friendly sitcoms like The Beverly Hillbillies and Petticoat Junction. Silverman was the mastermind who replaced those shows with All in the Family and its spinoffs, The Mary Tyler Moore Show and its spinoffs, M*A*S*H, and several other monster hits, transforming the network and American culture itself. Topical shows! Shows with all-black casts! Shows about single working women! Shows about war!

In 1975, Silverman became the President of ABC, where he engineered a similar transformation. There he was associated with the success of Happy Days and its spin-offs, The Six Million Dollar Man and its spinoffs, Welcome Back Kotter, Charlie’s Angels, The Love Boat, Fantasy Island, and scores of other prime time hits. He oversaw the success of Good Morning, America, the first serious challenge to NBC’s Today show. And there were hit mini-series like Roots. He overhauled Saturday morning children’s programming, bringing Scooby Doo with him from CBS and replacing the Filmation shows with Hanna-Barbera ones. As a tween at the time, I was very much on top of this development, and have blogged about many of those cartoons, among them things like, oh Hong Kong Phooey, and The Oddball Couple, which were riffs on the prime-time shows. He also introduced gimmicky things like Battle of the Network Stars. During this period, I was almost exclusively glued to ABC. It was where all the kids got their catch-phrases. It manfactured the zeitgeist!

At this point, Silverman was riding high. He plainly had the magic touch. He was a television God. He had overhauled and revivified two television networks in succession. What was there left to do? Well, accomplish the same with the third network of course! So in 1978 he became the head of NBC. Where his star…plumetted. It’s all too tempting to regard what happened next through a simplistic lens: “He lost his touch”. Most show biz writers reduce it to that. But the truth is much more complex. Some of Silverman’s projects at ABC foreshadowed what would subsequently happen at NBC. Actually, you can trace the trajectory across networks. At ABC he had overseen the creation of Donny and Marie (a hit), then The Brady Bunch Hour (a flop), then he moves to NBC where he perversely createsPink Lady and Jeff (a super flop on every level.)

The CBS shows had been edgy but tasteful and sophisticated. The ABC shows were edgy but tacky. And the NBC shows…were just tacky. Silverman was already being criticized and ridiculed for “jiggle TV” and low brow entertainment at ABC, but his ratings were so huge he remained the king. At NBC, somehow, it was just bad taste without a payoff. In addition to Pink Lady and Jeff (rightly held up as the upper limit of awfulness) there were things like the sitcomHello Larry with McLean Stevenson, and the all-star Supertrain which was basically The Love Boat on an atomic Amtrak. Comedians like Johnny Carson joked about him on his own network. He punished one of them, Al Franken, by scuttling plans for him to take over SNL when Lorne Michaels left. The result was the disastrous sixth season of SNL. Some of the shows that were generated on Silverman’s watch, such as Diff’rent Strokesand its sequel The Facts of Life, and the “reality show” pioneer Real People, were successful but pretty dreadful, which did nothing for Silverman’s reputation. And then Jimmy Carter boycotted the Olympics (which NBC was to carry) when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, which cost the network major ad revenues.

The hell of it is, Silverman’s record at NBC was mixed, as opposed to unswervingly awful. It’s all in the timing. For example, consider the fact that he greenlit Hill Street Blues, a show just as revolutionary in its way as his transformational shows at CBS and ABC. But that was towards the end of his time at NBC, after his reputation was already sullied and people were dancing on his grave. Another of his successes was his support of David Letterman. Granted, Letterman’s first NBC show, his daytime program, was every bit as peculiar as Supertain (though I considered it strange in a good way). But his instinct about the performer was right.

Silverman left NBC in 1981 and set up his own production company. One of his first projects was his own run in the late night sweepstakes, an attempt to compete with Carson and Letterman. That show was the ill-fated The Thicke of the Night with Alan Thicke. For a short time, he was stymied by the same sort of myopia that had thwarted him at NBC. (Another example: Isabel Sanford’s Honeymoon Hotel, a sit-com starring Weezie from The Jeffersons.).

Then Silverman began to find success again with a series of syndicated shows most of which exhumed over-the-hill stars and assigned them to solving mysteries: Raymond Burr in the Perry Mason revival (1985-1994), Andy Griffith in Matlock(1986-1995), William Conrad in Jake and the Fat Man (1987-1992), Tom Bosley in The Father Dowling Mysteries (1987-1991), Carol O’Connor in In theHeat of the Night (1988-1995), and Dick Van Dyke in Diagnosis: Murder (1993-2001).

The funny thing about these shows? It’s almost like Silverman was returning to the kind of programming that had preceded the rural purge! Comfortable shows for old people! Well, the Baby Boomers were aging, and television has always been about “give the people want they want”. I’m here to tell ya, though: I’m pretty old and I’m still not old enough to sit still for Matlock or Diagnosis: Murder, thank you very much.

Silverman was 63 when the new century came around. By then, the industry had undergone several additional revolutions (cable, the internet, streaming) that made his programming innovations seem quaint. “Time,” wrote that ’70s troubador Steve Miller, “keeps on slippin’ into the future”. When that song came out (1976), Fred Silverman was at the top of the world.