Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: They all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round.
They all laughed when Edison recorded sound.
They all laughed at Wilbur and his brother when they said that man could fly.
They told Marconi wireless was a phony. It's the same old cry.
[00:00:21] Speaker B: Welcome back to 100 Years of Television, where for 100 weeks that started in October 2025, we're going to recall the top 100 milestones in the first 100 years of television and video.
The countdown will culminate on September 7, 2027, the 100th anniversary of the day television was invented.
I'm Paul Schatzkin, author of the Boy who Invented Television, the definitive biography of Philo T. Farnsworth, who invented the world's first all electronic television system.
In the last episode, we witnessed the Kennedy Nixon debates in the fall of 1960.
Today is countdown number 55. The thrill of victory and the agony of Defeat.
Throughout the 1950s, ABC was the perpetual also ran network, running a distant third to its older, larger rivals.
With their pedigrees stretching Back to the 1920s, NBC and CBS were the twin tentpoles of American broadcasting.
Abc, on the other hand, was the orphan child of the industry. With fewer affiliates and less capital to invest in infrastructure or prestige programming.
ABC started as part of NBC.
Until 1943, parent company RCA operated two radio networks. NBC Red was the commercially driven flagship, built around big budget entertainment and major sponsors.
NBC Blue was somewhat less overtly commercial, offering more news, public service and lower revenue offerings.
With two national networks at its command, RCA had a hammerlock on America's airwaves. But in 1941, the Federal Communications Commission adopted new chain broadcasting rules designed to put limits on the network's growing monopoly power.
Under the new rules, the commission ordered NBC to divest one of its two networks.
RCA complied with the ruling by selling NBC Blue to Edward J. Noble, who made his fortune turning the peppermint white lifesaver into one of America's most popular confections.
By the early 1940s, Noble commanded broad interests in advertising and consumer marketing. In NBC Blue, he saw a singular opportunity to acquire a national radio footprint and establish a much needed third network.
In 1943, Edward Noble bankrolled the acquisition of NBC Blue for $8 million. That's about 150 million in $2026. And in 1944, he rebranded the network as the American broadcasting company.
Between 1944 and 1946, ABC expanded its radio network by but had none of the resources that its larger older rivals were already pouring into television.
As the FCC began lifting the wartime restrictions, ABC applied for broadcast TV licenses, starting with a TV version of its flagship WJZ radio station in New York.
Applications were filed in Chicago and Los Angeles as well. To match NBC and CBS's Footprint in the nation's largest markets.
ABC started its network TV service in 1948 to a relatively tiny number of affiliates and with a thin slate of offerings.
The few stations the network did have often had weaker signals than their rivals, which, when combined with the weaker program slate, kept the network chronically third in the national ratings throughout the 1950s. ABC's fortunes began to improve in the wake of another pivotal legal ruling.
In May 1948, the United States Supreme Court issued its landmark decision in United States v. Paramount Pictures.
Finding that Hollywood's control of the production, distribution and theatrical exhibition of motion pictures constituted a vertically integrated monopoly, the court ordered the studios to divest their nationwide movie theater chain.
It took nearly two years of contentious negotiations between the studios and the Justice Department to iron out the details.
In 1950, in a series of agreements known as the Paramount consent decrees, Paramount was formally split into two separate companies.
Paramount Pictures Corporation stayed in the motion picture production and distribution business.
A new company, United Paramount Theaters, or upt, assumed ownership and control of the theater chain, formally owned by Paramount at the time of the consent decrees. Paramount's theatrical division was run by Leonard Goldenson, a Harvard educated lawyer and businessman who had rescued the studio's theaters from the worst of the Great Depression.
When UPT was spun off in 1950, Goldinson was named president, putting him in command of more than 1,400 theaters and their consistent, reliable cash flow.
Goldinson wanted to expand, but couldn't go into the motion picture business because of the court ruling that had put him where he was in the first place.
But Goldinson was savvy enough to realize that there was a new screen in town and turned his aspirations toward the weakest of the three television networks.
ABC was at the time cash starved and in third place in everything that mattered. The number of affiliates, quality programming and ad revenue.
But Goldinson believed that with adequate financing and Hollywood production expertise, ABC could compete with NBC and cbs.
Goldinson figured he could forge a whole new kind of integration by merging UPT's capital with ABC's broadcast platform.
United Paramount Theaters merged with ABC in 1953, taking on the name of the acquired network.
The influx of fresh capital transformed the chronically underfunded network into a competitive force.
The merger also gave ABC sufficient financing to form a Pioneering production alliance with Lou Wasserman's MCA Review Productions. And ABC finally had the content pipeline it needed to compete with NBC and cbs.
The impact of the merger was almost immediate. The capital infusion enabled ABC to form its alliance with the Walt Disney Company, which was instrumental in the creation of Disneyland. As covered in Countdown 74, money isn't everything.
After the merger, ABC started building more owned and operated stations as well as signing on more affiliates around the country.
By the late 1950s, ABC was noticeably more competitive. But there was still one critical area where it was still well behind its older larger rivals.
Sports.
NBC had baseball and big college football.
CBS had the NFL, SEC football and heavyweight boxing. And ABC had, well, almost nothing.
In 1959, ABC acquired a company called Sports Programs Inc. From Edgar Schereck, a veteran of MCA Review, the company that Leonard Goldinson had engaged to fill ABC's thin programming lineup.
Schereck operated around one of MCA's core philosophies. If you didn't have the money, you compensated with packaging, ingenuity and clever deal making.
When he left MCA to form sports programs in 1956, the company started supplying ABC with the kind of low cost ready to air sports programming that ABC was increasingly relying on.
After the acquisition of Schereck's company, he was named ABC's vice president of programming.
One of Sheriff's first tasks in his new post was to fill the gap in ABC's sports coverage.
Well aware that ABC could ill afford the rights to big American sports, he turned instead to the idea of a weekly international sports anthology.
Surmising that he could fabricate must see TV out of lower cost international events, tape delayed competitions and visually striking athletic events.
To develop this wide world of sports, Sharik turned to a 27 year old producer he had recently hired away from NBC, Roon Arledge.
A native of Queens, Arledge was still a student in Columbia University's journalism program when he started experimenting with live broadcasting setups.
He started working at NBC as a production assistant in the early 1950s before becoming an assistant producer for the today's show's occasional sports remotes at NBC. Arledge quickly distinguished himself for his visual imagination and for arguing that sports television should cultivate the underlying human drama, not just the play by play of televised sports.
Arledge's ideas for coverage included slow motion cameras, multiple isolation angles, handheld cameras on the sidelines and pre produced features.
Executives at NBC routinely dismissed his suggestions as too expensive, too complicated and just not necessary for sports broadcasting.
But in Ed Sherek at abc, Roon Arledge found not only a receptive ear, but an executive willing to take some big swings.
When Scherek described his idea for a weekly sports anthology, Arledge started spinning off ideas of his own.
The show had to have a host with narrative authority. It should use pre produced profiles and filmed inserts.
Camera placement had to show the athlete's emotions, not just the action, and editing should shape each episode as a narrative arc, not just an assorted variety of unrelated events.
Most importantly, Arledge felt the show should have a defining philosophy.
To create a mission statement, Arledge turned to ABC staff writer George Meister, who crafted the iconic opening of every episode
[00:11:56] Speaker A: spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sport, the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.
[00:12:08] Speaker B: That intro was delivered by Veteran sportscaster Jim McKay, who became the face and voice of the show starting with its second season, assuming the role of host and storyteller rather than play by play announcer.
After a pilot episode of the show aired in late 1960, ABC's Wide World of Sports made its official premiere on April 29, 1961, featuring two venerable track and field events, the Penn Relays broadcast live from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and the Drake Relays tape delayed from Des Moines, Iowa.
Over the years that followed, Roon Arledge used Wide World of Sports as a proving ground for countless innovations, among them up close camera work to develop emotion and detail, slow motion replays with frame by frame analysis, split screen comparisons, pre produced athlete profiles integrated directly into the live coverage, wireless miniature mics with unconventional placements, dramatic editing and storytelling structure emphasizing the human drama of competition and international remote production on an unprecedented scale.
In addition to Jim McKay, Wide World of Sports introduced many hosts and commentators now familiar in the pantheon of sportscasters like Howard Cosell, Keith Jackson, Bud Palmer, Frank Gifford, Al Michaels, and Becky Dixon, who was the first female co host with McKay starting in 1987.
Among the international events that were popularized by Wide World of Sports were the Indianapolis 500, Wimbledon, the British Open, various Olympic trials and figure skating championships, boxing events like the first Muhammad Ali fights via tape delay, numerous alpine skiing events and world gymnastics competitions.
In addition to such marquee events, Wide World of Sports frequently featured the unique and the unusual cliff diving from Acapulco, barrel jumping, high lie demolition derbies, log rolling and lumberjack competitions, surfing championships, rodeos, table tennis, mountain climbing, camel races, elephant polo and other global oddities.
These events were often filmed in locations in Europe, Central America, Africa and Asia that Americans had never seen before.
By the time its 37 year run ended in 1998, Wide World of Sports had aired more than 600 episodes and presented over 1000 different sporting events from roughly 100 countries around the globe.
Wide World of Sports made Roon Arledge one of the giants of American Broadcasting.
In 1977, Arledge was appointed president of ABC News, a move widely considered radical. At the time, no network had ever turned its news division over to a sports producer.
But Arledge brought with him the same instincts that had transformed sports broadcasting. Dramatic pacing, tight storytelling, bold graphics, muscular field reporting, and an insistence on treating every story as both journalism and human narrative.
Under the leadership of Roon Arledge, ABC News launched 2020, reinvented world news tonight with a three anchor structure, expanded Nightline out of the Iran hostage crisis in 1979 and infused the entire division with a sense of urgency and visual intelligence that reshaped American newscasting.
Roon Arledge remained at ABC for nearly 40 years, guiding first sports and then news until ill health forces retirement from day to day duties in the late 1990s.
He died in 2002 at the age of 71, leaving behind a half century of work that altered the grammar of television itself from the way the country watches football games to the way it understands world news.
In the span of a decade, the once struggling ABC network acquired a sports identity so strong it became a cornerstone of the network's brand.
Wide World of Sports didn't single handedly lift ABC out of the basement, but it provided the foothold, undeniable proof that the smallest of the three networks could originate programming that could attract the kind of audience that advertisers coveted.
This brings us to the end of number 55 in the countdown of the top 100 milestones in the first 100 years of television.
Stay tuned for the next episode when the world turns to TV to see if the world is coming to an end in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.
Thanks for listening to 100 Years of Television, a two year countdown to the centennial of television on September 7, 2027. For more, just aim your gizmo to 100 Years TV.
This podcast was written, recorded, edited, engineered and uploaded by me, Paul Schatzkin and is a production of Farnovision.com if television was invented by somebody named Farnsworth, why don't we call it Farnovision?
[00:17:56] Speaker A: They all said we never would be happy. They laughed at us and how but ho ho ho, who got to laugh at now.
