DuMont will make TV work: A TL

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Chapter 15: What's Going on in Radio
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    • AnonymousSauce

    Chapter 15​

    Original programming in radio had been on the decline since the end of the 1950’s, and the Mutual Broadcasting System was no exception to this trend. Dramas, serials and comedy programming, once the mainstay of network radio, migrated to television and the programs that were left on radio had increasing difficulty attracting sponsors, leading to the radio networks dropping the programs in favor of news, sports, and increasingly, music.

    Sports were a main focus of Mutual’s programming going forward. Mutual made it a priority to secure the rights to Saturday Night Football to compliment its television partner’s coverage of it. Mutual also made sure to secure rights to broadcast the World Series and Notre Dame college football games, though it would lose the former to NBC in 1957.

    By the mid 1960’s, radio had been deemphasized to a degree that RKO General management felt it would be beneficial to consolidate the branding of its broadcasting properties under its flagship television network, thus the Mutual Broadcasting System, which was by this point a regular network and not a consortium of regional networks anyways, became the DuMont Radio Network. In the early 70’s, ABC would split its radio network into 4 networks targeting different demographics, DuMont would follow suit by creating the DuMont Black Network and DuMont Spanish Network (DuMont Cadena Hispanica) to compliment the main network.

    In the mid-70’s, network news and sports programs would be joined by a new popular show format: the late-night call-in show. DuMont launched its entry into this market with radio host Herb Jebko from KSL in Salt Lake City, whose style was too bland for a format that would soon become dominated by talk about controversial political topics, conspiracy theories and the paranormal. After a brief succession of hosts, DuMont finally found its man in Miami late-night host Larry King. King would make DuMont’s late night show the most popular in the segment until being tapped in 1985 to become the anchor of Lateline on television.

    At the time that ABC, NBC and DuMont were sold in the mid 1980’s, the new owners of all three networks did not want to be in the radio network business, and so in the ensuing few years all three radio networks were sold off, leaving CBS as the sole network still in ownership of its legacy radio network. DuMont and NBC radio networks were purchased by Westwood One, while ABC Radio would be purchased by Infinity Broadcasting. Eventually, all four networks would find themselves under the Westwood One banner, before all being retired by the mid-2000’s.
     
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    • Chapter 16: The "Metromedia Model" and the rise of UX
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    • AnonymousSauce

    Chapter 16​

    By 1986, the number of independent broadcast television stations in the United States had tripled from where it was a decade ago, to over 100 stations. Most of these stations were on the UHF band, since outside of the very few markets that were either big enough or dominant enough over remote areas (e.g. Anchorage, AK) to have more than five VHF station allotments all of the available VHF stations were affiliated with one of the four commercial broadcast networks or PBS. While these stations had traditionally relied on second-run syndication, cartoons, local sporting events and other local interest programming to fill out their schedules, the times were changing as the demand created by the sheer amount of stations that needed programming created new opportunities.

    One of the results of this was an explosion of first-run syndicated programming. Syndication had been a method of distributing shows since the dawn of television, but had been primarily utilized for second runs of programs that had had enough episodes made to be distributed to stations to be strip-programmed, i.e. programmed in the same time slot for several nights in a week. The advent of the Financial Interest and Syndication Rules and the Prime-Time Access Rule in the 1970’s changed that. By limiting the interest that networks could have in the production of shows and taking the 7-8pm EST hour away from the networks for programming purposes, these rules made first-run syndication a more profitable proposition and set the stage for it to satisfy the needs of the independent stations for programming in the 1980’s.

    In the mid-1980’s, Metromedia, the company formed by John Kluge when he purchased the former Bamberger Broadcasting station WOR-TV from General Tire when it bought DuMont, and then bought the other former Bamberger station WTOP from the Washington Post, was the most prominent owner of independent stations in the country, owning VHF independents in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington/Baltimore, and UHF outlets in several more markets. Being the dominant independent station owner in each of the markets that it serviced gave Metromedia a strong interest in acquiring the strongest first-run programming on the market. It acquired comedies that had been cancelled by the networks like Punky Brewster, Webster, and WKRP in Cincinnati and dramatic shows such as Friday the 13th: the Series, War of the Worlds, and Freddy’s Nightmares.

    It also produced its own shows, starting with the late-night program the Merv Griffin Show, originally on CBS late-night from 1969-72 before CBS cancelled it and returned the time slot to its affiliates. Faced with declining ratings in the mid-80’s, Metromedia toyed with cancelling the show before seeing a significant ratings jump under guest-host Arsenio Hall. In 1987, Griffin agreed to retire and hand the show over to Hall, who would helm the show for seven years. Two other shows produced by Metromedia were Cops, whose producers had tried unsuccessfully for years to get a network to pick up their show, and America’s Most Wanted, which had been inspired by true crime shows in Germany and Britain.

    Seeing the success that it had in distributing shows that it produced, Metromedia began to experiment with other ways of creating programming, partnering with studios to produce programs that it would then redistribute to other independent stations. One prime beneficiary of this new model was animation studios, who thanks to a rise in the popularity of martial-arts and action movies and live-action tokusatsu shows, had begun to experiment in dramatic adult animation. One of the first of these shows would be Reign of Red, a cartoon about the Resistance in a Soviet-occupied America that would be credited with launching the popularity of “mecha-mation” in the United States. Metromedia would also pilot cartoon versions of Mad Magazine’s Spy vs. Spy and Marvel’s Howard the Duck, the latter fresh off the popularity of its 1986 film, though it would need to be toned down somewhat for 1980’s broadcast television.

    With control of this amount of programming, Metromedia was able to create a loyal group of stations that would not only purchase its produced and distributed programs and agree to air them in pattern with when they would be aired on Metromedia’s own stations, but also would purchase the other syndicated programming that aired on Metromedia’s stations and air them in patten as well, creating seamless symmetry between Metromedia’s owned stations and its partner stations, at least in prime-time and late night. It even expanded on this by purchasing the long-dormant United States broadcasting rights to the National Hockey League, broadcasting a Saturday afternoon game of the week, the All-Star Game and the Stanley Cup Playoffs. This model proved to be so successful and profitable that industry pundits began to speculate that the “Metromedia Model” was the future of television broadcasting, as opposed to the “dinosaur” networks with their bloated distribution models, unprofitable news departments and demands from affiliates for compensation even as they insisted on preempting network programs any time they thought that it would benefit them.

    This success put immense pressure on other independent stations already facing stiff competition from the networks and cable. As a result, they began to look at other ways of securing programming themselves. The immediate upshot of this was the rise of “ad-hoc networks” formed to distribute movies or miniseries, such as the MGM/UA Premiere Network and the SFH Holiday Network. Other groups of independent stations began to think of forming a fifth television network. MCA-Universal had partnered with Cox Enterprises to purchase WPIX in New York and KTLA/5 Los Angeles when the erstwhile RKO Media Holdings (formerly Tribune Broadcasting) had to sell them as a result of the purchase of DuMont. They had also purchased WTBS from Turner after his purchase of ABC (Cox did have to put its share of this station into a blind trust as a result of its ownership of WSB-TV, though.) Another large owner of independent stations was TVX, which had started from one UHF station in Norfolk, VA and expanded through the purchase of Taft Broadcasting’s independent portfolio, including stations in Philadelphia, Dallas and Houston (as well as a DuMont affiliate in Miami, the fate of which will be covered in a later chapter) TVX fell into debt as a result of this purchase, and sold a minority share of itself to Paramount Pictures. MCA-Universal and Paramount began to discuss the possibility of forming a network using programming produced by both studios and the MCA-Cox[1] and TVX stations as a core.

    The proposed name of this new partnership was to be the Premier Programming Service and it was scheduled to launch on January 1, 1991. The network, which was legally structured as a joint venture between MCA-Universal and TVX, tapped former Paramount executive Barry Diller, who was the CEO of 20th Century Fox at the time, to be president. Network programming would initially be provided on two nights a week, Wednesday and Thursday, and would only cover the 8 and 9pm EST hours, the 10pm hour being utilized by many independent stations including MCA's WPIX and KTLA for early nightly local news. Paramount was to contribute Star Trek: The Next Generation which it had launched as a syndicated series in 1989[2] and Babylon 5, which itself had been a proposed Trek pilot before TNG was greenlit. Universal would contribute Shades of L.A. and She-Wolf of London. By the time of the network’s launch, the PPS branding would be scrapped and the new network would be called UX, the U for Universal and X for TVX. The first network startup since Overmyer flopped nearly a quarter-century earlier, it would remain to be seen if it could succeed where others had failed.

    [1]Although by the time of the network’s launch, Cox had already divested itself of its share of the stations, which had to be spun off into a shell corporation called Pinelands, Inc. as a result of MCA-Universal’s being purchased by Japanese firm Matsushita. Foreign companies were not allowed to own more than 25% of an American TV station.

    [2]Paramount and DuMont had mutually agreed to end the run of Star Trek: the Continuing Adventures in 1988. Paramount was not happy about RKO’s investment in a certain other company producing an iconic sci-fi franchise that will be discussed in a future installment, and also wanted syndicated programming to support its investment in TVX.
     
  • Index
    • Chapter 17: The Rise of Cable and New Superstations
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    • AnonymousSauce

    Chapter 17​

    By 1991, cable television had expanded from 15 percent of homes in 1976 to 60 percent, and was viewed by 23.5 percent of the nightly television audience, far outpacing the approximately 8 percent of the audience that accrued to the independent over-the-air stations. It thusly represented a significant competitor and potential threat to the four television networks. It also represented a growth opportunity to the parent companies of these networks, as well as an opportunity for synergies between the networks and the cable channels they came to invest in or own outright.

    Of the major networks, ABC was one of the first to dabble in ownership of cable properties, forming a joint venture with Hearst Properties to start the Lifetime and (in the case of the latter, also in partnership with then-NBC parent company RCA) the Arts and Entertainment Network (A&E) in 1984. These ownership stakes would pass to Turner Broadcasting when it completed its purchase of ABC from Coca-Cola in 1986, thus expanding Turner’s repertoire of cable properties that already included the Cable News Network (CNN) and the former superstation WTBS, which upon Turner’s purchase of ABC and subsequent sale of the Atlanta station to MCA-Universal was decoupled from the station uplink and converted into a conventional basic cable channel TBS. TBS would from that point forward exist primarily to serve as a reservoir for movie rights that Turner had purchased that ABC did not have time to air as well as legacy syndication purchases and eventually sports deals that Turner would make exclusively for cable.[1]

    Another property that primarily dealt in sports that arose at the dawn of the cable era was the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network (ESPN). ESPN was conceived by three former communications employees of the NHL’s Hartford Whalers who believed in the idea of a cable network that could be devoted to sports programming 24 hours a day. They initially were able to secure equity financing from Getty Oil, and went to air with a lineup of eclectic sports programs such as college football and basketball, amateur slow-pitch softball, Australian rules football and other obscure sports, which would later in the 80’s be joined by the NBA and NHL. Though they would later lose both of those leagues, they would in 1987 secure rights to share the Sunday Night Football NFL package with TBS, and in 1990 would add a Major League Baseball regular-season package to its repertoire. In 1986 Getty Oil would sell its interest in the network to cable provider TCI[2], while the minority stake of 20 percent would go to Nabisco and eventually to Hearst.

    A network that started out in sports that would become one of the largest general-entertainment channels was the USA network. Founded in 1977 as the Madison Square Garden network, it would primarily air a mix of college and lesser-known professional sports until it was purchased by a consortium of MCA-Universal and Paramount. Time, Inc would also buy into the joint venture. The joint venture was written in a way to preclude the participants from owning other cable ventures outside of it, this caused Time to later drop out of it when it wanted to purchase a stake of Turner Broadcasting. Time would sell its stake to TVX, which Paramount owned a portion of at the time. USA would air a mix of cartoons, exclusive off-network syndicated programming and original programming, as it aspired to be the flagship cable channel and compete with the broadcast networks and Metromedia.

    Other cable networks in the era included the science-focused Discovery Channel, SportsChannel America, which briefly held NHL rights, and the Viacom-owned MTV and Nickelodeon networks, as well as the Disney Channel.

    Finally, two new contenders entered the national superstation race after it had been vacated by WTBS and WFLD. WSBK/38 Boston was owned by Storer Broadcasting and had been a superstation in the Northeast and down the Atlantic coast since the late 70’s with a lineup of cartoons, movies, syndicated programs and Boston-area sports (the Red Sox, Bruins and the Beanpot college hockey tournament). Once WTBS exited the superstation space, many nationwide cable providers replaced the channel with WSBK, giving it superstation reach. On the other hand, the other new entrant, WUBZ/62 Detroit, took a much more unconventional path to national reach. Originally launched as the third independent in the Motor City and owned by a group of African-American Freemasons, the station would eventually fall into receivership as it faced fierce competition from the former Canadian DuMont O&O CKLW, which albeit officially affiliated with the CBC had begun to program as an independent, as well as the other independents in the Detroit area. Purchased by former late-night horror film “ghoul” Ron Sweed, the station began airing a series of wacky original shows including a children’s show hosted by a former station janitor, an animated series called Conan the Librarian that was a spinoff of popular PBS children’s show Reading Rainbow, and several Detroit-area public-interest programs such as Arab Voice of Detroit and area dance show The Scene. It also bought the rights to B-movie lampoon show Mystery Science Theater 3000 from fellow Midwestern independent KTMA/23 Twin Cities in 1989. These, as well as acquiring the rights to the Detroit Tigers in the midst of their 80’s success and the notorious “Bad Boy” Detroit Pistons, would vault WUBZ to dominance in Detroit’s independent market and also enable it to take advantage of the void in the Midwest superstation market left by the exit of WFLD. By the late 80’s it would join WSBK as the only superstations with national reach.

    [1]Effectively the role of TNT IOTL, hence TNT is never formed.

    [2]IOTL, Getty would sell to Cap Cities/ABC, here Turner is not interested.
     
  • Index
    • nick_crenshaw82

    nick_crenshaw82

    While it's probably too late to add to your TL I still want to share some head canon for it:

    Atomic Bunny/Rabbit - A 1960s single season animated show based on the Charlton comic of the same name; also borrows from Atomic Mouse
    Black Fury - A Black Beauty style TV show on for a single season in the 1960s?
    Fightin' Five - A late 1960s war show similar to The Rat Patrol or the A-Team.
    Gunmaster - A single season western perhaps partly inspired by the 1966 Batman TV show
    Johnny Dynamite - Hard boiled PI
    Many Ghost Stories of Dr. Graves, The - A 1970s horror host show staring Vincent Price as Dr. Graves
    Sarge Steel - A semi campy spy show inspired by The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Danger Man/Secret Agent
    The Young Doctors - A daytime soap opera, may include Cynthia Doyle, Nurse in Love, Doctor Tom Brent, Young Intern, Nurse Betsy Crane, and Three Nurses.
     
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