Tedium - Fourth Failures 📺🇺🇸

A 1966 Cincinnati Enquirer article about Daniel H. Overmyer, the warehouse entrepreneur who tried to build a TV network.

The warehouse king that built a network that lasted a month

If you were “the king of warehousing,” what would you do with your money in the hunt of your next business endeavor?

Well, in the case of Daniel H. Overmyer, he took the steps to launch his own TV network—and a very ambitious one at that.

Based in Toledo, Ohio, Overmyer was an early investor in UHF-based technology, having received a permit for WDHO-TV (now known as WNWO-TV), which launched in May of 1966, and was one of a network of stations that he brought online.

As writer K.M. Richards writes on there site about the history of UHF television, Overmyer was initially seen as something of a savior for UHF:

At first glance, Overmyer seemed to be exactly what the growing UHF industry needed: He was a self-made Toledo businessman whose extensive interests included trucking and warehouse holdings, and the weekly Toledo Monitor newspaper. His financial statement at the time showed ownership of 200 warehouses in 56 cities worth $35 million dollars, plus a leasing company and 80% ownership of Progress National Bank for a total somewhere in the neighborhood of $50 to $60 million. Overmyer also apparently had the drive to make a successful run at broadcasting; shortly after the FCC filing for Toledo, his executive vice president and managing director Robert F. Adams (formerly general sales manager of WBKB-TV under ABC in Chicago) said they “hoped to acquire the full complement of AM, FM and TV properties allowed under the FCC’s rules as soon as feasible.”

The network, first publicly announced in 1966, aimed to have a mixture of cultural, sports, and religious programming, and had nearly three dozen affiliates signed up by the middle of that year. Oliver Treyz, an early ABC television president, was brought on board to run the network.

An ad for The Las Vegas Show, the only output that Overmyer’s network ever aired.

But in the end, the network, built around a Las Vegas-themed variety show hosted by a frequent Ed Sullivan Show guest, was too big for the king of warehousing’s britches. In late 1966, something appeared to spook Overmyer about the idea of the network, which he had been promoting for many months in the press, and he tried to disband the network, only for Treyz to keep it alive, leading to its sale to a group of businessmen under the name the United Network.

The network first went on air on the first day of May, 1967 … and went off the air on the first day of June, 1967. It was a bit of a mess, with money bleeding left and right, and despite the relatively high viewership of The Las Vegas Show, the variety showcase hosted by Bill Dana, the network did not survive.

Part of the problem was timing: May is usually when a TV season ends, rather than begins. The effort was bold nonetheless, with around 125 affiliates airing the two-hour show, but it was not something that could be salvaged.

Charles W. Shoop, an early employee of the Overmyer network, made it clear that the work was a labor of love in a statement to the House of Representatives Special Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce.

“I could fill a book describing the hard work; heartaches; disappointments; and also some of the rare good accomplishments that came forth from the ‘rise and fall of the Fourth Network,’” he wrote in his letter to the subcommittee.

Overmyer is one of the “pals” in this 1978 New York Daily News headline.

The king of warehousing did not survive the situation unscathed—and by 1973, his warehousing company had filed for bankruptcy, with his group of local TV stations following a few years later. I’ll spare you the details, because there are a lot of them, enough to fill a whole issue of Tedium, but let’s just say that Overmyer’s business problems caught up with him in a big way. he was eventually charged with bankruptcy fraud in the mid-1980s as his business empire spiraled out of control, and later spent six months in prison.

It lasted a month, but left a pretty wild story in its wake.

Star Trek: Phase II was intended to be the centerpiece of Paramount’s late-1970s network. It was never made.

How an all-star team of major executives nearly launched a major network as a vehicle for a Star Trek reboot … and how that network eventually inspired every successful “fourth network”

Doesn’t it seem like Barry Diller has been around basically forever?

Responsible for pioneering the movie-of-the-week concept while at ABC in the late 1960s, Diller became an iconic media mogul in the 1980s and 1990s before finishing out his long career with the internet giant IAC. (Which, fun fact, was initially built as a vehicle for increasing the reach of the Home Shopping Network.) But in the late 1970s, as head of Paramount Pictures, he took his first stab at becoming the founder of a fourth network. And he had many of the elements to pull it off at the time—only for it to get pulled down by internal politics.

The key factor for Paramount? Star Trek, which the company owned, was an absolutely massive hit in syndication, with 137 stations airing the show in the mid-1970s. There was clear interest in a new show, and Paramount leaned into that in an effort to build a new network.

The story of the Paramount Television Service, as it would have been called, feels comparable to the basketball “Dream Team” at the 1992 Summer Olympics, with soon-to-be major executives such as Diller, Michael Eisner, and Jeffrey Katzenberg all associated with the effort.

Paramount only planned a single night of programming, but the marquee show would have offered a great launching point for a fourth network: Star Trek: Phase II, a revival of the original series with Gene Roddenberry back as creator and most of the original cast back on board. With Star Trek already a phenomenon, the network would have essentially launched with a guaranteed hit on its hands.

But the effort failed to pick up steam internally, according to the Los Angeles Times, out of concern that the studio would lose tens of millions of dollars in trying to build a new network. Despite the strong interest in new Star Trek series, the channel was not to be, though the work on the unfinished Star Trek revival played directly into the film that appeared in 1979. (The film also had one thing that the series might not have had: Leonard Nimoy, who was in a battle with the studio over royalties at the time the revival series was being considered.)

Barry Diller. (Wikimedia Commons)

The effort was the just the first time Paramount tried to launch a fourth network. Diller—who carried a reputation in Hollywood so strong that The New York Times wrote he had “built what is widely regarded as perhaps the best-run, most stable and most consistently successful movie company in Hollywood”—also tried to create a Paramount network around 1984, running into issues with leadership at Paramount’s parent company, Gulf+Western, for a second time. That’s when he left and became the Chairman CEO of 20th Century Fox, where he found someone who was willing to pony up the cash to buy a group of stations—Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp. acquired Fox in 1985.

“Mr. Diller—who became chairman of Paramount Pictures at the age of 31, ran the studio for a decade and built it into Hollywood’s most consistently successful movie studio before he lost a power struggle and moved across town to Fox in 1984, has the hubris to think he can create the first television network since Leonard Goldenson launched ABC in 1951,” a 1986 New York Times article on the launch of Fox, and Diller’s role in it, stated. (He had the hubris, alright—and it worked after a few tries.)

But the idea for a Paramount network didn’t die with Diller, just as the idea of a Star Trek TV revival never went away with the demise of the Paramount Television Service. In fact, the syndication success of Star Trek: The Next Generation revived interest in the idea—now technically a fifth network, thanks to Fox—around 1989, per the Times, though the feet-dragging at Gulf+Western prevented it once again.

Eventually, it came back with a vengeance in 1993, thanks to a collaboration between Paramount and Chris-Craft Industries’ United Television, which came to be known as the United Paramount Network, or UPN. Problem was, by that time, a fellow major studio, Warner Brothers, had basically the same idea. Both new channels were driven by changes in federal regulations that allowed TV networks to syndicate their own shows—something troubling to both Paramount and Warner Bros., as they each distributed many successful shows in syndication. The net effect was that UPN and The WB went on air at almost exactly the same time.

UPN was not exactly a major success—while it had the successful Star Trek: Voyager and WWE Smackdown was a longtime anchor, many of its other shows (for example, the one based on the work of annoying bad Twitter man) failed to make an impact, and the network merged with The WB in 2006 after eventual Paramount owner Viacom spun off UPN as a portion of the CBS corporation. That lives on today as the long-running “fifth network,” The CW.

In many ways, we eventually got a fourth network because of Barry Diller, who was willing to see this idea through, to bank his reputation on getting it right. Given his key role in this story, we’ll do him a solid and not dwell on the time he tried to turn the USA cable network into a “fourth network” by acquiring a group of Home Shopping Network affiliates.

Even our business heroes sometimes get it wrong.