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No one—not a Freddie Silverman, or a Mike Dann, or a Bill Paley—can tell forever what the fickle public wants. Silverman knows better than anyone that some day his crystal ball will say action when it should have said comedy, or vice versa. And as he turns 40, the strain is becoming clear, even to him. "It isn't fun any more," he says. "It used to be. When I joined CBS, it was terrific. You made a couple of changes in midseason and put on a couple of summer shows, and that was all there was to it. Now it is just like a Turkish bath. Every morning you wake up and they're scheduling this and we're changing that. There are 15 seasons and 180 specials, and it is a totally different business, the most competitive, I would imagine, in the entire world."
But who, Freddie is asked, is responsible for all that turmoil if not Fred Silverman? He pauses, as if to consider all that he has wrought, and then laughs: "That's right, isn't it?"