Ooh, ooh, me, teacher, me! Let’s see if I can bring this in under 20,000 characters!
NBC started it all with 22 stations on July 1, 1941 just after the Federal Communications Commission ruled that 525-line electronic broadcasting would be the U.S. standard. It still is.
CBS and the DuMont network also showed programs on that date. Who? DuMont, the forgotten fourth network. DuMont sold television sets like like NBC’s parent company RCA and learned from RCA’s history that pushing software (content) was the best way of selling hardware (sets). (CBS later bought the Hytron Radio and Electronics Corporation and sold sets under the Columbia brand, but was never a big player.)
All television was shut down in April 1942 because of the war. Broadcasting resumed in 1946.
ABC now joined in along with Dumont but NBC and CBS were absolutely dominant. Very few cities could afford to have four networks. Even fewer had enough advertising dollars to support an independent as well.
One problem was that the VHF band is actually two separate bands, channels 2-6 and 7-13. Because of interference no more than two channels from the first band and three from the second could generally broadcast in a single area. And if your area was too close to another already in operation you had fewer options. Rochester, NY, where I grew up, had only a CBS and an NBC station until the late 1950s. They each showed a bit of ABC programming and also ran the forerunner of PBS - RAETA, the Rochester Area Educational Television Association - in the mornings.
Most of the country had similar situations. Almost every large city got both NBC and CBS. Small and medium-sized cities got one station or none at all. Larger cities had three networks, big cities had four or five, New York and L.A. had seven. Because of the interference problems, some independents started broadcasting on the UHF band. But few sets could receive UHF. It was a costly option until, IIRC, 1964 when the FCC mandated that all future tv sets made had to have a UHF tuner.
So let’s jump ahead to this question. Television doesn’t get its money from viewers, it gets it from advertisers. They pay more for more viewers so there’s a correlation but it’s not absolute.
And in the beginning NBC and CBS absolutely dominated. The split wasn’t one-third across the board, but more like 50-40-7-3. NBC and CBS had been the two dominant radio networks and had almost all the good shows. ABC actually started because NBC had two full radio networks, NBC-red and NBC-blue, and ABC bought NBC-blue when the network had to divest.
Then came the color wars. CBS was pouring all of its money into a mechanical system of color television. A mechanical system was obviously incompatible with electronic broadcasting, and NBC was working on an electronic color system, both in the late 1940s. CBS’s color looked better than NBC’s beta-tests but the future was in electronics.
So they cheated. CBS got the FCC to call a freeze on new station licensing in 1948 until they could get the issue sorted out. The freeze got extended through the Korean War and didn’t lift until 1953 when CBS capitulated, having used the five years to work on electronic color. For years NBC advertised its programs as being in “compatible color,” a phrase nobody understands anymore.
That meant that in addition to their huge head start, NBC and CBS prevented the other two networks from catching up for those crucial starting five years. Dumont folded in 1956, although they ran a number of programs that are today more famous in memory than because anyone saw them at the time, Ernie Kovacs primarily. ABC didn’t get the financial backing it needed to compete until the 1960s.
Profitability. Through most of the 1950s, corporations were the sole sponsor for a show. Indeed, they owned the shows outright and the shows were made and run by advertising firms for the corporations. The sponsors then paid the networks to run the shows.
They could do this because shows were fantastically cheap by modern standards. $10,000 could buy a full hour show, and that included all salaries and production costs. The networks got additional money, of course, but 30% or so of that went to the affiliates who carried the programs and another big chunk went to AT&T, whose phone landlines connected the various cities into a, ahem, network.
It was still good business for CBS and NBC, because half of an almost monopoly is nice to have. ABC and Dumont struggled because a partial chunk of a tiny chunk ain’t much.
The sponsors made out like bandits when the shows were a hit. All those stories, well most of them, about sponsors stopping their advertising because they couldn’t make enough product to fill demand from a popular show are true. The sponsors who couldn’t sell enough product dropped shows as fast as their contracts would let them.
Yes, many shows didn’t last a full season. A wonderful resource is Rick Mitz’s The Great TV Sitcom Book, which has at least a paragraph on every sitcom ever to be broadcast from 1949 to 1980. Take the 1950-1951 season. You’ve never heard of The Hank McCune Show, Menasha the Magnificent, The Peter and Many Show, The Ruggles, or That Wonderful Guy, none of which lasted a full season, even though the Wonderful Guy of the title was Jack Lemmon.
In the beginning, television followed the radio pattern: 39 weeks of original programming with a “summer replacement show” for 13 weeks. Partially this was due to the difficult of making transcriptions that lived up the original - no video tape until the mid-1950s, and few shows used it even then - and partially because nobody thought that audiences would sit still for reruns.
Syndicators, outfits that made shows on film and then sold them to stations for off-hour programming, moved into selling reruns of older filmed television shows in the late 1950s. Shows aimed at kids, like Superman, were pioneers because it was known that kids would watch their favorites over and over. (Superman’s creators also had the foresight to film the show in color starting in, I think, the second season, so it looked good on the growing number of color tv sets.)
As costs rose, the number of original episodes of a show dropped, with 26 being the new standard. If it was too expensive to make one original, it was too expensive to make two 26-episode originals, and it was hard enough to find one that was good enough. So the networks gradually started rerunning the shows they had already made, and found that a sizable audience existed. Since the shows were already paid for, even a smaller audience was profitable.
Smart producers, like Desi Arnez at Desilu, had already figured this out. He and Lucy owned their show - eventually buying a whole movie studio from the profits - and was one of the first to use filmed episodes as summer reruns. I Love Lucy’s success convinced others that the market was viable.
Your memories are selective. Most everything on tv was crap, just as it is today. Just as you (i.e. everybody) don’t remember those failed sitcoms, you don’t remember the failed westerns, the failed cop shows, the failed variety shows, the failed dramatic shows, the failed kiddy shows. We only remember the good stuff that lasted. Just as we’ll do in the future.
Books. I’ll just list some that I have at hand in my home library. Eric Barnouw’s Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Broadcasting, an abridgment of his three-volume A History of Broadcasting in the United States, is the standard history. It’s from 1975, around the same time that Les Brown put out Television: the Business Behind the Box. Tube: The Invention of Television, by David E. Fisher and Marshall Jon Fisher is newer (1996) and better. The earliest book about the industry in my collection (outside of some earlier technical books) is 1951’s The TV Jeebies, a light-hearted look at that strange new beast infecting the country, by Paul Ritts. Another fun one about the early days is a memoir by Kenneth Whalen, How the Golden Age of Television Turned My Hair to Silver. There are probably a million books with titles like A Pictorial History of Television and all of them have great pictures and memory-joggers.
Hope this jogs a few memories.
