The Ed Sullivan Show - Background

Background

Along with the new talent Sullivan booked each week, he also had recurring characters appear many times a season, such as his "Little Italian Mouse" puppet sidekick Topo Gigio, who debuted April 14, 1963, and ventriloquist Señor Wences. While most of the episodes aired live from New York City, the show also aired live on occasion from other nations, such as the United Kingdom, Australia, and Japan. For many years, Ed Sullivan was a national event each Sunday evening, and was the first exposure for foreign performers to the American public. On the occasion of the show's tenth anniversary telecast, Sullivan commented on how the show had changed during a June 1958 interview syndicated by the Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA):

The chief difference is mostly one of pace. In those days, we had maybe six acts. Now we have 11 or 12. Then, each of our acts would do a leisurely ten minutes or so. Now they do two or three minutes. And in those early days I talked too much. Watching these kines I cringe. I look up at me talking away and I say "You fool! Keep quiet!" But I just keep on talking. I've learned how to keep my mouth shut.

The show enjoyed phenomenal popularity in the 1950s and early 1960s. As had occurred with Amos 'n Andy on the radio in the early 1930s, and would happen with the annual telecasts of The Wizard of Oz in the 1960s and '70s, the family ritual of gathering around the television set to watch Ed Sullivan became almost a U.S. cultural universal. He was regarded as a kingmaker, and performers considered an appearance on his program as a guarantee of stardom, although this sometimes did not turn out to be the case. The show's iconic status is illustrated by a song from the 1960 musical Bye Bye Birdie. In the song "Hymn for a Sunday Evening", a family of viewers expresses their regard for the program in worshipful tones.

In September 1965, CBS started televising the program in compatible color, as all three major networks began to switch to 100 percent color prime time schedules. CBS had once backed its own color system, developed by Peter Goldmark, and resisted using RCA's compatible process until 1954. At that time, it built its first New York City color TV studio, Studio 72, at 2248 Broadway (81st Street). One "Ed Sullivan Show" was broadcast on August 22, 1954 from the new studio, but it was mostly used for one-time-only specials such as Rodgers and Hammerstein's March 31, 1957 "Cinderella." CBS Studio 72 was demolished in 1986 and replaced by an apartment house. CBS Studio 50 was finally "colorized" in 1965.

In the late 1960s, Sullivan remarked that his program was waning as the decade went on. He realized that to keep viewers, the best and brightest in entertainment had to be seen, or else the viewers were going to keep on changing the channel. Along with declining viewership, Ed Sullivan attracted a higher median age for the average viewer (which most sponsors found undesirable) as the seasons went on. These two factors were the reason the show was canceled by CBS after the end of the 1970–1971 season. Because there was no notice of cancelation, Sullivan's landmark program ended without a series finale. Sullivan would produce one-off specials for CBS until his death in 1974.

Many kinescopes and tapes still exist, including a comprehensive collection of 1030 hours that is accessible to the public at the Library of Congress; the earliest "kinnie" in the Sullivan archive is the November 28, 1948 telecast. In the 1990s, performances were repackaged as The Best of the Ed Sullivan Show and Ed Sullivan—Rock & Roll Classics in syndication and on the VH1 and TV Land cable channels. From 2001 through 2004, PBS stations across the U.S. aired edited versions of The Ed Sullivan Show (usually airing two 30-minute programs back-to-back). These were produced by WQED Multimedia in Pittsburgh. Since then, CBS has reacquired the rights to the show and makes clips from episodes available on the CBS Innertube website.