Mr. TV (Executive Branch)

Once upon a time, he virtually ruled network programming. He was as famous as some of the stars whose shows he scheduled. The stock market jumped when he moved from CBS to ABC to NBC, where his fortunes fell and he suddenly found himself seeking a new career as one of Hollywood’s countless independent producers.

Now, on this particular day, Fred Silverman, no longer a wunderkind at 58, sits at his desk in his sprawling ninth-floor production offices in West Los Angeles, contemplating the agony and ecstasy of a television career almost unparalleled for its tumultuous ups and downs in a quarter-century of prime-time exposure.

If not for three nightmarish years running NBC, it might all have been ecstasy for the programmer who was known as the man with the golden gut.

For even after he left NBC in 1981 and struggled through some short-lived programs, including a highly publicized late-night series with Alan Thicke, he eventually cut out a new arena for himself as producer of such shows as “Matlock,” “In the Heat of the Night,” “Perry Mason” movies, “Father Dowling Mysteries,” “Jake and the Fatman” and “Diagnosis Murder.”

“I’ve produced, at last count, over 800 hours of prime time,” Silverman says.

He is still churning out shows. “Diagnosis Murder,” a crime drama starring Dick Van Dyke, returns to CBS this fall. “Bone Chillers,” a new children’s series co-produced with Hyperion Studio, is also set for this fall, on ABC. “Bedtime,” a late-night series about six couples around America as they are preparing to go to sleep, premiered on Showtime this month. And he is working on a live, daily, around-the-clock entertainment project for local cable outlets, “The Corner,” which would offer the same format with different personalities in the top 50 markets. The programs would be a mix of community events, lifestyles, interviews, viewer phone calls and other topics of interest to people in each particular city.

If the channels become available, Silverman says, “The Corner”--aimed at the 18-to-34-year-old cable generation that thinks “Channel 2 is no different than Channel 62”--will be “the third act of my life” and perhaps “the last thing I do in the business.”

He knows, of course, that questions about his reign at NBC are coming. But for more than two hours, he matter-of-factly replies on other subjects as well, with none of the volatility he has been known for.

“I think the move here [from New York in the early 1980s] made me less excitable. And having a heart attack six years ago certainly woke me up a little bit,” says Silverman, who now has closely cropped, graying hair. “This is just a job; it’s not a religious calling.”

It wasn’t quite the same when he broke into the network business as head of top-rated CBS’ daytime programming at age 25 in 1963.

“The top management there was never satisfied,” he recalls. “If I went to [CBS Chairman William] Paley and said, ‘We have nine out of the top 10 shows in the daytime,’ he would say, ‘God, that 10th show. Isn’t there anything you can do about that 10th show?’ Good was not good enough. Great was not good enough.”

The drive to win was also unrelenting in the late 1970s, when Silverman was riding high in the ratings at ABC with such shows as “Happy Days” and “Charlie’s Angels.” After years of being ridiculed as a second-class network by competitors at CBS and NBC, ABC walloped the big guys for the first time.

Silverman’s taste in programming was often lampooned, but many rank-and-file workers at ABC were simply pleased that he had gotten the monkey off their backs.

He was, in fact, big enough for Time magazine to give him its Sept. 5, 1977, cover, with the words “TV’s Master Showman.” A trophy-like replica of the cover in Silverman’s office catches a visitor’s eye.

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No other person in modern television history has ever been in the eye of the hurricane at all three leading networks--CBS, ABC and NBC--riding herd on the programming at each of them. (During TV’s infancy in the 1950s, executive Robert Lewine had been appointed to top programming jobs at the three companies.)

At NBC, where Silverman ruled from 1978 to 1981, he was actually president of the entire network. But NBC, desperate to pull out of a lengthy nose dive, clearly hired him for his past programming successes, and there was no doubt of his iron hand.

At a luncheon of the Hollywood Radio and Television Society during that period, NBC programmer Brandon Tartikoff was asked: “Is it true that no one at NBC makes a decision without checking with Silverman?” Quipped Tartikoff: “Could I get back to you on that?”

Neither Silverman nor NBC could foresee the chaos that would unfold in those three years. It involved programming mishaps; personal bitterness, acknowledged by Silverman, that exists to this day from veteran executives of the historic network; and, among other unending crises, the U.S. boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, which compelled NBC to decide not to broadcast the games.

What Silverman had brought to the job was a reputation as an executive who had a remarkable feel for what the public would watch and an intuitive sense of where to place shows on the schedule so they would attract the biggest audiences.

He was 40 years old at the time. He had run prime time for five years at CBS and three at ABC, helping to achieve two of the greatest turnarounds in network history. Program promotion was one of his trademarks and so, in his own words, was a cockiness fed by success.

In the 1991 book “Beating the Odds,” by ABC’s master builder, Leonard Goldenson, Silverman recalls that after the CBS and ABC triumphs, “I had great confidence. I felt I could walk on water. Kind of a Christ complex. That’s one of the reasons I took the NBC job.”

But in the end, this kind of overconfidence turned out, as it usually does, to be wrong. He wound up treading water rather than walking on it at NBC, and the savior turned out to be someone who wasn’t even there at the time--his successor, Grant Tinker.

Silverman’s true ascent to fame began when, after seven years as chief of CBS’ daytime shows, he was named head of the network’s programming in 1970.

“Things had changed dramatically at CBS,” he says. “They were no longer a strong leader in prime time. They had a very old program schedule that was appealing to geriatrics and [rural] counties”--shows like “Hee Haw,” “The Beverly Hillbillies,” “Green Acres” and “Petticoat Junction.”

“I worked for a very courageous man--may he rest in peace--named Bob Wood, who was president of the network,” Silverman says. “He said, ‘We’re really going to have to roll the dice and totally change this network. We just cannot continue the way we are, or we’ll be out of business.’ ”

So out went many of the corn-pone series as CBS set its sights increasingly on the urban audience that was growing as the population kept shifting to bigger cities.

“Most of the shows we replaced these programs with were lackluster,” Silverman says. “But we got lucky with one show which wasn’t even part of our formal development. It was a reject from ABC, a little item that was called ‘Meet the Bunkers.’ It later became ‘All in the Family.’

“ABC had made two pilots of this. But because of an experience they had with a show called ‘Turn-On,’ which was canceled after one show because it was so tasteless, they were just scared to death of ‘All in the Family’ “--with its bigoted central character, Archie Bunker.

“Anyway, Bob had the courage to say, ‘We’re going to put this on the air,’ much to the chagrin of William Paley, who hated the show. It started very slowly. We started it in January [1971]. By May, which is when the Emmy Awards were broadcast then, it won best comedy.

“We had scheduled it Tuesday at 9:30 p.m., between ‘Hee Haw’ and the ‘CBS News Hour.’ That shows you how much faith everybody had in the show. But even in that dog time period, the show was starting to work very well. I went to [Wood] and said, ‘We’re wasting it. Let’s put it on at the beginning of Saturday night. I think we could have a really big hit there.’ And two weeks before the start of the [fall] season, he said, ‘OK, let’s do it.’ ”

When the initial ratings came in for “All in the Family” in its new slot, Silverman says, “I thought our research director was drunk. It was a smash hit. What ‘The Cosby Show’ did for NBC in the ‘80s, that’s what ‘All in the Family’ did for us in the ‘70s. It saved both our jobs.

“Over the next few years, we introduced shows like ‘Bob Newhart,’ ‘MASH,’ ‘Kojak,’ ‘Maude,’ ‘Sonny and Cher,’ ‘Good Times’ and ‘Cannon.’ ” They joined such existing CBS series as “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “The Carol Burnett Show.”

There were other hits--”The Waltons” and “Rhoda” among them--and the usual quota of lemons, from “Bearcats” to “The Chicago Teddy Bears.” In a 1971 Life magazine article about Silverman, he also made a classic misjudgment in mentioning movie stars he thought would strike out on TV, saying that “Candice Bergen [now on “Murphy Brown”] would be zilch.”

“That’s what I said,” he says with a nod. “Right again. This is from the guy who turned down ‘Sanford and Son.’ ”

Next stop, ABC. And ABC and Silverman seemed made for each other.

“It was like a mom-and-pop store,” Silverman recalls. “ABC was still the young upstart. They were basically what Fox is now--very scrappy. I felt very comfortable.”

He was there from 1975 to 1978 and was blessed with brilliant young executives. Among them: Michael Eisner, now Disney chairman; Tartikoff; Brandon Stoddard, a future head of ABC programming; and Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner, who later, with their own company, produced “The Cosby Show” and “Roseanne.”

“I came in there at a really good time,” Silverman says. “They had started the rebuilding process. Some shows were starting to take root, like ‘Happy Days.’ And ‘Barney Miller’ was in the schedule, and ‘Starsky and Hutch’ and ‘Welcome Back, Kotter.’

“There was a show called ‘Harry’s Angels.’ It was just a script. I read it and said, ‘We really should do something with this. This is a very commercial idea.’ Everybody looked at me like I was crazy. We did the pilot. The research department said, ‘This is the biggest failure we’ve ever tested.’ But it went on the air [in 1976]”--and, of course, was a big hit under its new title of “Charlie’s Angels.”

ABC’s ratings turnaround was socked home in the 1976-77 season, when it had 10 of the top 14 shows, including “Happy Days,” “Laverne & Shirley,” “Charlie’s Angels,” “The Six Million Dollar Man,” “Baretta,” “Three’s Company,” “Welcome Back, Kotter” and “The Bionic Woman.”

That was also the season of “Roots,” the 12-hour ABC saga that made television history, mesmerizing the nation on eight consecutive nights in January 1977.

Silverman left ABC the following year. But program development was already helping to raise the network’s profile further with such other popular series as “Taxi,” “Soap,” “Mork & Mindy,” “The Love Boat,” “Fantasy Island” and “Eight Is Enough” premiering in 1977 and 1978.

“Everybody has a time, and that moment in time was perfect for me,” Silverman says, “because of the people that were [at ABC] and because of the schedule that was in place when I got there.”

Despite some critical hits, however, ABC was often targeted--in shows like “Three’s Company” and “Charlie’s Angels”--for being raunchier, more suggestive and less sophisticated than its competition.

“The ground rules were different [from CBS],” Silverman says. “We were trying to appeal to a younger audience. The CBS audience had more affluence. I believe they were better-educated.” At ABC, he adds, “It [was] ‘Welcome Back, Kotter,’ ‘Happy Days.’ It was just a different audience, more of a blue-collar audience.”

ABC had struck pay dirt. And it was now a three-network race.

Next stop, NBC. And if ABC and Silverman were made for each other, NBC and Silverman were not.

A 1979 book, “Inside ABC,” by former ABC executive Sterling “Red” Quinlan, seemed on target. The question with Silverman at NBC, Quinlan wrote, was whether he would “suddenly ask himself the question: ‘What the hell am I doing here? This really isn’t my bag.’ ”

It certainly wasn’t. Many NBC executives agreed. And soon, so did the industry. It was not a happy time.

“I don’t know how you could say that,” Silverman says sardonically. “If you like pain, it was great.”

Series like “Supertrain,” “Hello, Larry” and “Pink Lady” brought ridicule. Each day seemed to bring a crisis. Some believed that Silverman should not have been given the whole network to run, just programming.

“It was not a particularly good period in my life,” he says.

He did come up with a hit, “Real People,” although it ultimately encouraged the infotainment trend. “Hill Street Blues,” the classic television drama, also premiered during his watch. And David Letterman started to emerge on the network--although his 1980 daytime series flopped and it was 1982 before his groundbreaking late-night NBC show arrived. Silverman also points to the long-running “The Facts of Life” and “Diff’rent Strokes” as “building blocks” for the network, which had few other comedies at the time.

Still, the cacophony of frenzy dominated. Veteran executives departed, among them NBC’s respected chief spokesman, Bud Rukeyser, who later returned under Tinker. Except for the late-night stability of Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show,” NBC seemed to be reeling.

Asked about the constant gossip that he was drinking and smoking heavily, was difficult to get along with and was calling late at night, ordering rewrites on scripts for the next morning’s shooting, Silverman says:

“I’d say some of that is true. I drank more than I should, but I certainly was not an alcoholic. I smoked more than I should, but I always smoked up until six years ago. I called people occasionally in the evening, but I think that’s greatly exaggerated.”

At the time, however, people who received the calls felt besieged.

In the news area, meanwhile, David Brinkley, unhappy with the new management of his division, also eventually left NBC in 1981 and joined ABC.

As for “Real People,” although it did well in the ratings as the virtual godfather of infotainment, Silverman says he didn’t foresee its influence in opening the door to seedier reality shows:

“ ‘Real People’ celebrated the average person who’s trying to get by. Look what it’s led to. You see ‘Hard Copy,’ ‘Inside Edition.’ So I would say it did kind of lead there. But we didn’t start off by saying we’re going to create a terrible new genre of programming. That’s what happened.”

In the end, Silverman was ousted from NBC. There were, he acknowledges, “very hard feelings from people,” but he maintains that he was saddled by tens of millions of dollars in commitments to studios for long-form programming that he should have written off.

These days, Silverman’s life is less hurly-burly than in his periods of professional turmoil. He and his wife, Cathy, who is involved in charity work, live in a house in Mandeville Canyon. His son Bill, 19, is a student at Vassar. His daughter Melissa, 24, attended Northwestern, now lives in New York and is an assistant in motion picture production design.

“She created an idea for an animated show called ‘Pigout,’ and I sold it to Fox,” the Bronx-born Silverman says. “It went on the air [in 1990], called ‘Piggsburg Pigs!’ She got a credit. She also touted me onto the Smurfs. I didn’t know what they were, and a day later I made a commitment to put on the show”--in 1981 on NBC, where it was a hit in the years after he left.

As it turns out, in his more recent years as a producer, some of his biggest hits--”Perry Mason,” “In the Heat of the Night” and “Matlock”--also appeared on NBC.

That, as they say, is show biz.

Next stop, Act 3. And probably boom or bust.

“The first act was working at the networks. The second act was producing. But I’m not out to do five more ‘Matlocks’ now,” he says.

He is betting on cable and his project, “The Corner,” as a new kind of 24-hour program service, with its identical format originating in each local market and tailored to that market. He has a big, fat loose-leaf notebook outlining it all in detail, right down to work shifts and salaries. If it materializes, it won’t be for several years. But he’s pitching it around.

Noting the increasing growth of cable and the shrinkage of network audiences, he says in his written outline:

“Now that cable penetration is over 80% in many cities, it is time to review the potential of cable channels as a local programming outlet. As cable penetration continues to grow, there will . . . be virtually no discrepancy in the intrinsic value of any channel except for its program offerings.

“Local television is going to be the television of the future,” he predicts, citing such signs as the growth of local cable sports channels and the success of “The KTLA Morning News” against network competitors “Good Morning America” and “Today.”

Moving into the growth area of local cable entertainment, he says, “The Corner” would combine “elements of local radio, leisure magazines and personality television--a lot of feature and service material for viewers.”

The idea “is going to get done--somebody is going to do it,” he says.

He, of course, wants to be that somebody.

Funny thing. Sounds like running a network again.