40 years ago today my life changed forever. And, ultimately, so did a lot of yours, too.
I had just taken the reins of the research department of 20th Century FOX Television, and I was beginning to devote my days (and nights) to copiously tracking our syndicated sitcoms, including the reboot of 9 TO 5 which I recently mused about. My inherited staff had apparently never worked that hard or held accountable by my lax and alcohol-obsessed predecessor and were openly bitching about workload when my boss–who rarely left the relative calm and luxury of his adjacent trailer–popped by to advise me that Rupert Murdoch himself was requesting regular updates from our team about a show he recently mandated be upgraded from late night to prime access on our flagship New York station. Apparently that staff was in revolt as well.
A CURRENT AFFAIR, a priority project that had a been a staple of Murdoch’s Australian TV world, had been running for roughly a month at 11:30 PM on the just-rebranded WNYW FOX 5–initially a somewhat irreverent hodgepodge of quirky features not unlike the filler that occupied Page Six and beyond in the NEW YORK POST. It was regularly being beaten by competing independents running more traditional late-night stuff like THE HONEYMOONERS and BENNY HILL, and sometimes even by PBS. It was soft-launched ostensibly to get some of the kinks out and since the FOX network was committed to launching THE LATE SHOW WITH JOAN RIVERS that October it was never going to stay at 11:30 PM long-term in any circumstance. But Rupert being Rupert, his solution was to take this underperformer and place it head-to-head with the strongest syndicated stuff around and even the start times of consequential baseball games–remember this was the year the Mets won it all, and the Yankees were in contention for the playoffs during the month of September as well.
40 years ago today it debuted at 7:30 PM on FOX 5, and my team was assigned to provide more context and depth than the local station was committed to providing him. My boss also had an agenda. Apparently Rupert was hell-bent on this being the second daily strip to be shoved down the FOX affiliates’ throats once JOAN had knocked off Johnny Carson, and had outlined those intentions to network president Jamie Kellner. Kellner and my boss–Michael Lambert– were long-time friends and party animals from their days at Viacom and were close enough that he knew exactly what Kellner thought of that edict. Foolish only scraped the surface of the degree of consternation Kellner expressed. And since Kellner was only beginning to get his own research team set up–with the help and software that my department graciously provided–I was frequently in three-person pow-wows sharing what I learned about A CURRENT AFFAIR.
Lambert believed that as a newsmagazine it was better suited to take on the likes of ENTERTAINMENT TONIGHT in the marketplace. And as I mused several years back, I sold him on the idea that it was far better suited for such a battle were it to be placed on stations with mature signals and news departments. WNYW was one of only a handful of fledgling FOX affiliates that had those assets. They were at least in theory capable of competing for such an audience.
Initially, it was not going well. A CURRENT AFFAIR regularly lost about half the audience that M*A*S*H reruns delivered as its lead-in, and it was down precipitously from the comedies (an aging ALL IN THE FAMILY and then a second M*A*S*H half-hour) that had run at 7:30 PM during the previous four sweep periods. I recall most nights delivering in the range of a 4 rating and a 10 share–massive by today’s standards, puny by those of 1986. But little by little–especially when the baseball season ended and colder weather began to creep in–those inched up to 5s and 6s and 12s and 13s. That was in Nielsen. Arbitron was a parallel service that measured local stations and whose samples tended to skew more inner-city and downscale, was starting to pop with 7s and 8s and occasionally some high-teens shares that took the station from fifth or sixth to as high as second in the time slot. Arbitron was not being used by a majority of New York advertisers and their agencies, so the station wasn’t necessarily making more money from those spikes. But the data still pointed out that the audience was there and it was growing. And more importantly, it gave Lambert something to share with Rupert that he knew he wanted to hear.
We indeed got the chance to sell the show to local stations, and we’ve previously mused about that as well. We began regular meetings–which for lucky me meant a lot more frequent flyer miles–with Rupert’s production team and yes, Maury Povich himself. Povich was the closest thing to a national name that the show had, but at that time mostly because of his local news experience and the fact that his father Shirley was still an active sportswriter with THE WASHINGTON POST more than six decades after he had began–when the Senators actually won a World Series with Walter Johnson pitching. Maury and the Povich name had far more street cred with our aspirational clients than any of us had, and he proved to be a willing and eager bridge between the respective young turks we all were and the judgmental general managers and news directors most of our team had never bothered to pitch M*A*S*H and movies–which made up the majority of their bonuses–before that. I personally was schlepped around the country by our sales team at Lambert’s behest to share the gospel of audience flow, Arbitron upside and qualitative findings in classic “good cop/bad cop” vibe.
The seminal moment for A CURRENT AFFAIR came when it devoted a special series of shows to the “Preppie Murders” and its appealing young protagonist Robert Chambers. When it aired an exclusive video of Chambers cackling under the influence twisting off the head of a Barbie doll and laughingly snorting “Oops, I think I killed her” tabloid television as we know it today was firmly established and the show set ratings records wherever it was being shown. In Arbitron on WNYW that success reached close to a 30 share. My frequent flyer points grew exponentially, and before long so did my salary and title. Most importantly, I was allowed to expand and refresh my staff–as Lambert also did his–to now include people who actually wanted to work and thrived when given the chance.
A couple of those new recruits stayed on after I departed and became part of the eventual nine-year run of the OG ACA. Eventually Povich moved on to his talk show career and was replaced by Maureen O’Boyle, a plucky recruit from Utah television who developed into a credible personality in her own right. Plenty of stories emerged from that era, which had A CURRENT AFFAIR battling tooth-and-nail with aggressively marketed knock-offs like King World’s INSIDE EDITION and Paramount’s HARD COPY as well as ENTERTAINMENT TONIGHT. A good friend of mine has those stories and more and is in the midst of chronicling them and more into a forthcoming book and podcast series. You’ll meet him in due time and yeah, I’ll be along for that ride as well. The story may have begun four decades ago, but we’re both determined to keep it going as long as we can.
So in the spirit of Povich’s signature sign-off (did you really think I invented this?!??!):
Until next time…