ABC did not schedule more than two hours of content before 7:00 p.m. until 1956, and it would typically go dark after 10:30. “It was widely believed that ABC could never offer one of the top ten shows,” wrote trade journalist Martin Mayer, “simply because it couldn’t get on enough stations at enough good time periods.” As Goldenson sighed, “We had no hit shows, no stars, and nothing in prospect but struggle.” Because of its limited reach and subpar content, ABC gave discounts to those precious few sponsors it secured. Advertisers treated the network as a supplementary service that would reach additional consumers at bargain-basement rates rather than an entity that warranted consistent investment.12 ABC was consequently dubbed “Hard Rock,” in contrast to CBS’s “Black Rock” and NBC’s “30 Rock.” As CBS’s nickname came from its jet-black headquarters and NBC’s moniker referenced its address at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, ABC was defined by its comparative misfortune.
Most of the sports ABC carried nationally during its early years were schlocky and low-budget events like wrestling and roller derby. In 1948, a group of midwestern ABC affiliates joined to showcase the NFL’s Chicago Bears and Chicago Cardinals games—broadcasts that originated from ABC’s Chicago-owned station, WBKB. This package caught the attention of Edgar Scherick, a wheeling and dealing Harvard-educated time buyer for the Dancer-Fitzgerald-Sample advertising agency. Scherick noticed that the ABC affiliates covered almost exactly the distribution region of Falstaff Beer, a St. Louis–based client whose account he managed. He arranged for Falstaff to purchase half the spots on these regional broadcasts for the discounted price of $2,000 per game—an acquisition he later proclaimed “the greatest media buy in the history of television” because of its ability to capture so inexpensively and effectively the client’s target market.13
Based on his success with the NFL broadcasts, Scherick persuaded Falstaff to sponsor a national Major League Baseball package starting in 1953. ABC struck a deal with the Chicago White Sox, Cleveland Indians, and Philadelphia Athletics to broadcast seventeen Saturday afternoon matches in the program titled Game of the Week. The following year it expanded to thirty weeks and added the Brooklyn Dodgers, New York Giants, and Philadelphia Phillies.14 Because of the MLB’s blackout rules, the games would appear only in markets without a major-league franchise. Faced with these constraints, Game of the Week ensured it would attract a sizable audience by hiring former MLB pitcher Jay Hanna “Dizzy” Dean as its featured announcer. Already a radio star, Dean affected a homespun persona that drew viewers regardless of the featured teams and kept them tuned in no matter the score. Despite the Falstaff-sponsored packages’ success on ABC, Scherick moved both to CBS. “They just didn’t have the good station hookups in enough cities,” he bluntly explained of ABC.15 The network’s inexpensive ad rates, Scherick indicated, did not compensate for its paltry distributional range.
ABC built on this slowly growing identification with sports by securing contracts to air boxing and, more prominently, NCAA football in 1954. Its contract with the NCAA—whose TV rights stood and remain among the most coveted in sports—included twelve contests (along with a Thanksgiving Day game) and would be carried on 150 stations. On top of the football games, the agreement included twenty-six weeks of assorted winter and spring events. ABC made this deal in part by promising the NCAA that its broadcasts would place “emphasis on promoting collegiate football and the college way of life,” an effort waged in part to offset negative publicity college sports had incurred after several recent scandals. Variety identified ABC’s sporting efforts—and the NCAA contract in particular—as a mechanism through which the network might reasonably taper the gap separating it from its competitors.16 Regardless of the NCAA deal’s prestige, ABC was unable to sell sufficient sponsorships. It mistakenly banked that General Motors, the primary sponsor of NBC’s NCAA telecasts, would continue advertising on ABC once it got college football. When General Motors declined—perhaps wary of ABC’s comparative status—the junior network was forced to lower its rates and wound up losing $1.8 million. It dropped the winter and spring programming that accompanied the football games for fear of losing even more.17 ABC’s brief and unsuccessful efforts to establish a niche in sports programming only solidified its Hard Rock status.
THE WOOLWORTH NETWORK
To help ABC form an identity in network television, Treyz commissioned preeminent Columbia University sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld to conduct a study on the habits of TV viewers. The findings were simple but telling: network television’s oligopolistic structure gave ABC space to invest in areas the other two networks were ignoring. Despite broadcast media’s pretensions to cut across and unite disparate demographics, ABC developed a philosophy that a network cannot be “all things to all people.” It counterprogrammed to attract viewers CBS and NBC underserved or altogether overlooked. “Whatever the audience is not watching at any given time makes for new possibilities,” Goldenson explained. “We are not trying to take audiences from CBS and NBC….We are trying to carve our own network character, to create new audiences.”18
ABC found that programming at CBS and NBC was built primarily around stars from the radio tradition, and, as such, appealed mostly to older audiences. “Lazarsfeld recommended we go after the young audiences,” Goldenson recalled. “We should build programs around casts of young, virile people … and create programs with stories that younger people would identify with.”19 They found that older audiences were more set in their viewing and purchasing routines and, as a result, were less likely to start watching new networks or sample new goods that might be advertised. “We’re after a specific audience,” Goldenson concluded. “The young housewife—one cut above the teenager—with two to four kids, who has to buy the clothing, the food, the soaps, the home remedies.” Although younger audiences did not have older viewers’ purchasing power, Lazarsfeld found that they spent more on average and buy more of the small-ticket products that so heavily populate mass-market advertising.20 ABC formalized this process by branding itself as “the Network of the Young.” “Practically all of the programs developed and/or acquired by ABC between 1954 and 1956 were geared toward young families,” explained media researcher turned executive Fred Silverman, who broke into the industry after writing a master’s thesis on ABC’s programming strategies. ABC immediately reduced material that did not coalesce with the image it was forging, such as news and public affairs.
Regardless of these shifts, ABC routinely lost its most successful programs. Goldenson opined that sponsors “brought us only their poor programming. They took their best ones to the other networks and when a good one developed at ABC they took that one away.” This is precisely what happened with Game of the Week. Scherick debuted it on ABC and moved it to CBS after it became a hit with the potential to attract a larger audience than ABC could deliver. The migration of programs, Treyz explained, prevented ABC’s lineup from demonstrating “any central network thinking, philosophy or point of view.”21
ABC prioritized fostering viewing patterns that would stabilize its nascent identity over providing quality content. “First we build a habit factor,” Goldenson said, “get them used to watching us, then we can do something about upgrading the programming. We’re not interested in the critics.” To be sure, critics already had little positive to report about ABC. “The real strength and vitality of television,” Goldenson continued, “is in your regular week-in and week-out programs, the strength of motion pictures was always the habit of going to motion pictures on a regular basis, and that habit was, in part, taken away from motion pictures by television.”22 Goldenson thought TV could similarly become a “habit medium” around which consumers organize their everyday routines. ABC wound up teaming with Hollywood studios to nurture these behaviors.
ABC first joined the Walt Disney Company—an organization that possessed a vast archive of content perfect for young audiences. Disney was seeking revenue to help fund its Disneyland theme park, a dream Walt Disney had been pursuing for years. Most investors, however, considered the venture too risky. Disney identified television as a potential partner after producing two successful Christmas specials: One Hour in Wonderland (1950) for NBC and The Walt
