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As recently as a decade ago, there was virtually no competition in sight. The networks were fat and happy, with surging ratings and profits, and a flock of series that melded quality and popularity into the Golden Age of Sitcoms: All in the Family, MASH, Mary Tyler Moore. Then, in 1975, two little-noted events conspired to trigger the revolution. Time Inc.'s fledgling pay-TV company, Home Box Office, bounced a clear video signal off a satellite orbiting 22,300 miles above the earth, paving the way for national cable networks; and Sony introduced the U.S. consumer to the first successful home videocassette recorder, the Betamax, thus freeing the viewer from indentured servitude to network scheduling whims. By 1977 the portents were becoming clear: HBO broke into the black, and the networks suffered the first erosions in their share of the total audience.
Few network people read these tea leaves; they were too busy sipping champagne. This was, after all, the year of Roots, the twelve-hour mini-series that earned the highest ratings in TV history and helped propel ABC to No. 1 status for the first time ever. It was quite a coup for Fred Silverman, ABC'S programming chief, and in 1978 NBC, which had slipped to a gentleman's third place in the ratings, hired him as network president. By 1981 Silverman had pulled off an even more spectacular feat. He had demonstrated that with enough hard work, even a TV network could lose money. In his three years, NBC's earnings plunged from $51 million in profits to a $40 million loss.
Enter NBC's second putative savior: Grant Tinker, former president of the MTM production shop (Mary Tyler Moore, Lou Grant, WKRP in Cincinnati, Hill Street Blues). Tinker had made his reputation at MTM as THE the velvet-gloved champion of creative personnel, but at NBC he was unable to stanch defections by Newsman David Brinkley (to ABC) and Sports Chief Don Ohlmeyer (to independent production). He did woo many of his old MTM employees to develop relatively sophisticated new series, like the sitcom Cheers and the hospital drama St. Elsewhere. With these shows NBC has asserted its image as the "quality network," though the one new NBC show to perform reasonably well against tough competition — Knight Rider, in the suicide slot opposite Dallas — is just another burning-rubber melodrama, a CHIPS of Hazzard.
Daytime is a disaster area at the network; the Today show and NBC Nightly News continue to lose ground to the competition; and NBC's prime-time ratings are still in the slough, with only one show in the top 20 (18th-ranked Hill Street Blues, which Silverman had commissioned from Source: MTM), and twelve in the bottom 20. Still, the network is attracting more trend-setting urban viewers with shows like the dramatic musical series Fame. This "narrowcasting" approach may win NBC an unusual distinction: it could become the first boutique network.