Sylvester L. "Pat" Weaver: Hall of Fame Tribute

"For me, problem-solving is the most interesting thing in life. To be handed something that's a complete mess and straighten it out to organize where there’s no organization. To give form to a medium that has no form.” — Sylvester (Pat) Weaver, Jr.



Sylvester (Pat) Weaver, Jr., perhaps the medium’s most creative executive, virtually fashioned television as it exists today.

During the days when the new medium was still the plaything of sponsors and their advertising agencies, Weaver determined that the control of television must shift to the networks. To achieve that end, he espoused the concept of multiple sponsorship of programs to be controlled by the network. In the process, he created Today and Tonight and pioneered the TV talk show. He promoted the concept of the spectacular, or what is now called the television special. He groomed imaginative program directors who influenced the entire industry. He put Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca on the air, and gave Fred Coe the freedom to create a new art form in television anthology drama.

When Weaver was selected by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences to receive its prestigious Governors Award in 1983, John Mitchell, president of the academy at that time, said, “No other
 person has shaped and molded the look of television more, nor has anyone matched … the quality in programming.”

In a headline to a story that recently summarized his achievements, the Los Angeles Times simply announced, “Weaver: Pioneer Dared Us to Think.”

The man who dared, and who has been called television’s “master planner,” was born in Los Angeles on December 21, 1908, to a roofing manufacturer and an artistically inclined housewife who wrote poetry and composed
 operas. Weaver grew into a tall, lanky, self-confident lad who could solve a mathematical equation and conjugate an irregular verb in Latin as easily as he could win trophies tor his interpretations of the Charleston and the fox trot.

At Los Angeles High School, he made the honor society. At Dartmouth College, he made Phi Beta Kappa. In 1930, he graduated magna cum laude in philosophy and returned to Los Angeles to become a comedy writer at radio station KHJ. That job soon led him to take on the program manager duties at San Francisco’s KFRC, where he reversed the trend that was taking talent and advertising dollars south to Los Angeles radio.

In 1935, he moved to New York to become a CBS writer-producer and later, after a stint at Young & Rubicam Advertising, joined American Tobacco as its advertising manager. After World War II, he returned to Young & Rubicam to serve as its vice-president of radio and television. In 1949, when television was still in its infancy, he joined NBC as the network’s vice-president in charge of television.

“It was a business in transition,” Weaver recalls of his first heady years at the network. "[It] had to be completely rebuilt. I couldn’t resist it. I knew what the potential power and importance of television was, and I knew what could be done. It could make the masses into the elite, put the people at the top, with nothing at the bottom except misfits and mental cases."

Almost immediately, he began tinkering with the new medium
 and, in one of his first moves, established the first regularly scheduled late-night TV program. 
 A precursor of the Tonight show, Broadway Open House, telecast from May 1950 to August 1951, was an uncertain mixture of vaudeville, comedy, and song and dance. The experiment collapsed after fifteen months, although it demonstrated that an audience for late-night television did exist.

Another Weaver experiment — this one more successful — was The Saturday Night Revue, a package of two variety shows telecast back-to-back on a single evening, one originating live from Chicago (The Jack Carter Show) and the other from New York (Your Show of Shows, starring Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca). Both segments were popular from the outset, but when Your Show of Shows began to garner higher ratings during the second season, the Carter program was dropped and the Saturday Night Revue concept abandoned. One half of the experiment had succeeded gloriously; Your Show of Shows went on to become a national institution.

In December 1953, after a brief period as vice-chairman of the board (“My Elba period,” he recalls), Weaver was named president of NBC.

“My concept of being president of a network was simple,” Weaver remembers. "It was to program that network. I was president of NBC for only two years, but … I had a very specific plan: to bring into NBC the people from the advertising agencies who had been running radio from the creative end, the programming men." Then, alluding to his maneuver that took the control of programs away from the advertisers, he added: I brought [the programming men] in to replace the time salesmen, who were the dominant force then. I wanted the network to be more than just in 
the business of selling or leasing facilities … to do more than just provide the pipes through which flowed the champagne, occasionally … or the sewage, more often.

Weaver gave the network control over its programs and, at the same time, provided much of its champagne during the first half of the 1950s: Wide Wide World, a program that sought to take full advantage of the technical marvel of live television by presenting entertainment from around the world every Sunday afternoon; Home, a woman’s magazine that, according to the Los Angeles Times, “neither condescended nor insulted women, long before women’s lib”; Matinee Theater, a distinguished showcase for a wide-ranging selection of drama; The Wisdom Series, which offered home viewers the great thinkers of the time, among them, Bertrand Russell, Edith Hamilton, and Sean O’Casey; and Producers’ Showcase (“The best series that’s ever been on television,” Weaver declares), which featured such live, 90-minute productions as Peter Pan, with Mary Martin, and The Petrified Forest, with Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and Henry Fonda.


Besides his invention of television’s special, two other monuments to his imagination are still with us: Today and Tonight, both of which began as relaxed, conversational programs that attempted successfully to capitalize on television’s unique capabilities as a visual medium. The 30-odd years that both shows have remained on the air is testimony to Weaver’s profound understanding of the medium.

Weaver himself said, “Let us dare to think and let us think 
with daring” — words that graced one of the countless memos he turned out at a prolific rate during his tenure at NBC (he has 30 volumes of them stored away today). He described his daring and his visions for television in those legendary memos known as “operation frontal lobes,” which represented, in his estimation, the best that television might offer: “enlightenment through exposure.”

In 1955, Weaver was named chairman of NBC, but he resigned a year later in a dispute with RCA, the network’s parent company. Shortly afterward, he returned to advertising, became an adviser to Governor Nelson Rockefeller, and marketed Mike Todd’s Around the World in 80 Days. For three years in the early 1960s, he headed Subscription Television, Inc., a company that attempted to provide San Francisco and Los Angeles with pay television. The company, however, was severely crippled by a campaign waged against it by movie theater owners and commercial broadcasters. Although the courts eventually ruled that Weaver had the right to promote pay television, his company’s funds were depleted by the time the ruling was handed down.

At the age of 76, Weaver is still an enthusiastic promoter of his subscription television effort. He wants to offer on the same night each week a major show produced live in the theater of its origin — an opera from the Metropolitan, a drama from London or New York, a ballet from San Francisco. His Subscription Television would not telecast any repeats. Instead, it would air new programs every night of the year.

Weaver has other visions and other ideas that might describe the future of television. “Spend an hour with Pat Weaver,” television critic Cecil Smith once observed, “and he’ll spin you a universe of ideas. The last visionary.”

This tribute originally appeared in the Television Academy Hall of Fame program celebrating Sylvester (Pat) Weaver, Jr's induction in 1985.