With the passing of Mike Wallace, of course, comes the inevitable tributes from every angle concerning his 50-some-year career as an interviewing journalist of the first caliber. To those of us raised on 60 Minutes every Sunday night, his reputation is self-evident.
But what CBS and others are not likely to let on about is the fact that 60 Minutes was quite a fledgling show during its first decade or so, beginning with its 1968 premiere. From what I have read and understood, producer Don Hewitt and Eyeball brass didn't expect too much from it, any more than they expected from the numerous documentaries that the network seemed to issue every month back then. More or less, news and documentaries during primetime were mainly 30-to-60-second promos for the evening news, to establish the integrity and reputation of a network's news division in the public eye. We know, of course, that millions more watched the evening news when there were only three channels in most places than today, and, except for the still-struggling ABC, they frequently got better ratings than primetime entertainment--and were a lot cheaper to produce, thus bringing in a lion's share of a network's revenue.
60 Minutes and the few other shows of its kind like it didn't do that. While the first broadcast in September 1968 (with Wallace and Harry Reasoner) seemed to be a then-novel eclectic mix of hard news investigation and off-beat features, it probably only got an "egghead" audience, if you will, that was predisposed against entertainment programming of any kind and ONLY watched news (forerunner of today's "news junkies" who soak up CNN, Fox, et al all day). I have no idea what its competition was on Tuesday nights against ABC and NBC, but it couldn't have gotten above a deep second place, I'm sure. The public back then, for one thing, was not as voyeuristic as it is now. Public and private had strong walls set up against each other, and people generally respected those boundaries. There just simply wasn't a huge appetite for "reality," as it were. Escapism was the order of the day on the boob tube, and, in reality, networks wouldn't have done so much news if it hadn't been for the FCC breathing down their necks.
So the first few years were rough, with Harry Reasoner leaving after two years to take over the co-anchor slot on ABC's newscast (only to come back in 1978, picking back up where he left off). Ex-foreign correspondent Morley Safer became Wallace's next sidekick and gave a harder edge to story choice and a more authoritative presentation, matching Wallace's style more closely. But the riptide current of the Prime Time Access Rule in late 1971 brought the show to a crossroads. CBS could have let the show go along with the "Rural Purge" and would probably have been justified from a business standpoint for doing so. But the FCC left a loophole in PTAR exempting news and family (read: children's) programming from the ban in the top 50 markets. So CBS chose to fill in the 6/5 Central slot on Sundays, except during the NFL season, with the program.
Here, it started to get a serious foothold on audiences, and this is a case where, sometimes, off-peak slots can reach an important niche audience. From the TV Guides I have in the early 1970s, 60 Minutes had near-universal affiliate clearance on Sunday evenings, something highly unusual for a program not in a block with other shows (it was followed on most stations at 7/6 Central with news or syndie shows). My earliest memories of it were around this period, watching with my father. Of course, I had no understanding of the program's content, but I was struck by the austere decoration and straightforward presentation by Wallace and Safer. Probably the greatest factor in its rise during this period was Watergate, with Wallace, for example, interviewing John Ehrlichman, John and Martha Mitchell, and other figures from that scandal. This, in turn, whetted the public's appetite for that type of investigative reporting, and an audience kept building, enough for CBS to let it on primetime as a summer replacement between 1973 and 1975.
By Fall of 1975, the FCC realized that it had overshot the mark with PTAR, but syndicators and local stations had enough clout to prevent an outright scrapping of the rule, which was universally unpopular with TV critics. Instead, the networks would get back an hour on Sunday nights, with the news/family stipulation. In December, CBS decided to finally fix the program as a weekly show, all year around, at 7/6 Central. At the same time, Dan Rather joined the team, which grew gradually over time.
But back to Wallace himself: when he took the assignment of 60 Minutes in '68, he had no idea it would, in a dozen years' time, eventually became TV's top program. This development was frankly shocking to industry observers, who had never seen any documentary even come close to first place in the Nielsens, ever since the beginnings of the medium in the early '50s. For better or worse (and there are many ways to view it as either), Wallace was the harbinger of the gradual eclipse of entertainment on TV by "reality," although I am sure he viewed the rise of the staged shows of that genre with horror. Cheaper than scripted programming, magazine shows would become dominant by the 1990s, all inspired by the original, 60 Minutes.
Any memories to build upon or clarify the argument I've made here?
But what CBS and others are not likely to let on about is the fact that 60 Minutes was quite a fledgling show during its first decade or so, beginning with its 1968 premiere. From what I have read and understood, producer Don Hewitt and Eyeball brass didn't expect too much from it, any more than they expected from the numerous documentaries that the network seemed to issue every month back then. More or less, news and documentaries during primetime were mainly 30-to-60-second promos for the evening news, to establish the integrity and reputation of a network's news division in the public eye. We know, of course, that millions more watched the evening news when there were only three channels in most places than today, and, except for the still-struggling ABC, they frequently got better ratings than primetime entertainment--and were a lot cheaper to produce, thus bringing in a lion's share of a network's revenue.
60 Minutes and the few other shows of its kind like it didn't do that. While the first broadcast in September 1968 (with Wallace and Harry Reasoner) seemed to be a then-novel eclectic mix of hard news investigation and off-beat features, it probably only got an "egghead" audience, if you will, that was predisposed against entertainment programming of any kind and ONLY watched news (forerunner of today's "news junkies" who soak up CNN, Fox, et al all day). I have no idea what its competition was on Tuesday nights against ABC and NBC, but it couldn't have gotten above a deep second place, I'm sure. The public back then, for one thing, was not as voyeuristic as it is now. Public and private had strong walls set up against each other, and people generally respected those boundaries. There just simply wasn't a huge appetite for "reality," as it were. Escapism was the order of the day on the boob tube, and, in reality, networks wouldn't have done so much news if it hadn't been for the FCC breathing down their necks.
So the first few years were rough, with Harry Reasoner leaving after two years to take over the co-anchor slot on ABC's newscast (only to come back in 1978, picking back up where he left off). Ex-foreign correspondent Morley Safer became Wallace's next sidekick and gave a harder edge to story choice and a more authoritative presentation, matching Wallace's style more closely. But the riptide current of the Prime Time Access Rule in late 1971 brought the show to a crossroads. CBS could have let the show go along with the "Rural Purge" and would probably have been justified from a business standpoint for doing so. But the FCC left a loophole in PTAR exempting news and family (read: children's) programming from the ban in the top 50 markets. So CBS chose to fill in the 6/5 Central slot on Sundays, except during the NFL season, with the program.
Here, it started to get a serious foothold on audiences, and this is a case where, sometimes, off-peak slots can reach an important niche audience. From the TV Guides I have in the early 1970s, 60 Minutes had near-universal affiliate clearance on Sunday evenings, something highly unusual for a program not in a block with other shows (it was followed on most stations at 7/6 Central with news or syndie shows). My earliest memories of it were around this period, watching with my father. Of course, I had no understanding of the program's content, but I was struck by the austere decoration and straightforward presentation by Wallace and Safer. Probably the greatest factor in its rise during this period was Watergate, with Wallace, for example, interviewing John Ehrlichman, John and Martha Mitchell, and other figures from that scandal. This, in turn, whetted the public's appetite for that type of investigative reporting, and an audience kept building, enough for CBS to let it on primetime as a summer replacement between 1973 and 1975.
By Fall of 1975, the FCC realized that it had overshot the mark with PTAR, but syndicators and local stations had enough clout to prevent an outright scrapping of the rule, which was universally unpopular with TV critics. Instead, the networks would get back an hour on Sunday nights, with the news/family stipulation. In December, CBS decided to finally fix the program as a weekly show, all year around, at 7/6 Central. At the same time, Dan Rather joined the team, which grew gradually over time.
But back to Wallace himself: when he took the assignment of 60 Minutes in '68, he had no idea it would, in a dozen years' time, eventually became TV's top program. This development was frankly shocking to industry observers, who had never seen any documentary even come close to first place in the Nielsens, ever since the beginnings of the medium in the early '50s. For better or worse (and there are many ways to view it as either), Wallace was the harbinger of the gradual eclipse of entertainment on TV by "reality," although I am sure he viewed the rise of the staged shows of that genre with horror. Cheaper than scripted programming, magazine shows would become dominant by the 1990s, all inspired by the original, 60 Minutes.
Any memories to build upon or clarify the argument I've made here?