TV Land - Origins

Origins

Building on the success and popularity of Nick at Nite, TV Land premiered on April 29, 1996, delivering classic situation comedies, dramas, variety shows and memorable TV programming 24 hours a day. The phrase "TV Land" was originally coined by The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show in the 1960s, in which Bullwinkle often introduced his "Bullwinkle's Corner" segments with the greeting, "Hello out there in TV Land!" Occasionally a soundbite of Bullwinkle's phrase is used in TV Land promotions.

Shortly after the cable network's debut, MCA sued Viacom. Because MCA's original agreement with Paramount Pictures on the USA Network prohibited either partner from operating cable networks outside the joint venture, Viacom had been in breach of contract ever since they bought Paramount in 1994, thanks to MTV Networks. MCA claimed that the intention of TV Land was to compete directly with USA (this turned out to be true). Viacom claimed that the matter had already been settled when Sumner Redstone released Frank Biondi from his contract to let him work at MCA. It was eventually settled when Viacom agreed to sell MCA their half of USA.

In 1997, TV Land teamed up with TV Guide to rank the 100 Greatest Episodes of All Time.

The phrase "TV Land" was then used by Nick at Nite in the 1980s as the name of the fictional place whence the channel received its classic programming block, and it appeared in such slogans as "Nick at Nite: Hello Out There From TV Land!" for much of the 1980s. However, once the TV Land network spun-off, Nick at Nite quit using the term in its own slogans in order to prevent viewers from confusing the two separate channels. The new network featured a variety of television programming from the 1950s through the 1990s. Its inaugural season featured the Emmy-Award-winning Hill Street Blues, St. Elsewhere and The Ed Sullivan Show, and series Gunsmoke and The Honeymooners. Great detectives were featured every Saturday, with programs including Honey West, Dog and Cat, Burke's Law, Nero Wolfe (1981) and Ace Crawford, Private Eye. "TV Land Goes West" presented Shane, Barbary Coast, Have Gun, Will Travel and Best of the West. "Hooterville Saturday" featured Petticoat Junction and Green Acres; and "Sunday in the Barracks" laughed with the military in The Phil Silvers Show and Hogan's Heroes.

The network initially was a mix of classic TV and short-lived series, often from the Paramount library. In 1999, a deal with Universal provided the programmers the ability to "cherry-pick" from a variety of series including Emergency!, Kojak and The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries. Although the channel launched during a time when retransmission consent was becoming more common amongst cable networks and broadcast stations nationwide due to a provision in the 1992 Cable Act, MTV Networks chose to offer TV Land to cable system operators free for five years, as long as they added the channel to their expanded basic tiers during 1996.

In February 1999, TV Land's primetime averaged a 1.0 in cable homes, tying ESPN for 10th place among all cable networks. Its siblings, MTV and VH1, tied for 17th and 26th place, respectively. "That February rating put TV Land into the top 10 for the first time since it began operating", John Dempsey reported in Variety, "and opened the eyes of the cable industry to the rich vein of golden-oldie TV shows that distributors are mining for an audience of nostalgia buffs and kids who are stumbling across the series for the first time."

A TV Land channel in Arabia was created in 1996. However, it mostly focused more on sports and action than classic shows. TV Land Arabia shared the 24-hour channel with Paramount Arabia on the Gulf DTH cable service. Both TV Land Arabia and Paramount Arabia closed in 2000.

On January 1, 2001, the network introduced a streamlined logo, which traded the uneven-ness of the original for a more rigid form, and restricted the wedge serif type to "TV" and the sans serif type to "LAND". TV Land celebrated its 10th anniversary on April 29, 2006. Also in 2006, TV Land and Nick at Nite stopped operating jointly together, making TV Land a channel in its own right. TV Land often airs marathon weekends devoted to a single program. In the early 2000s, TV Land aired special programming blocks on New Year's Eve and New Year's Day (beginning on December 31, 2001): the final day of the year revolved around final episodes of classic television series, and the first day of the new year aired exclusively pilot episodes.

Harry Shearer was the regular announcer for the network promos in the 2000s, though as of 2010 no longer does promotions for TV Land. The original announcer was DJ Dan Ingram. On November 23, 2009, the network changed its logo to a more simplified form, keeping the double-trapezoidal outline, but removing the outlines around each letter and simplifying the fonts.

In 2008, TV Land added three hours of infomercials to the morning lineup, airing Monday through Friday from 6–9 a.m. ET. As such, TV Land became only the third cable channel operated by Viacom and its MTV Networks subsidiary to air infomercials (the only others being CMT, Comedy Central, and Spike); in May 2010, TV Land removed one hour of the infomercial block, reducing it to 6-8 a.m. ET, and added reruns to the 8-9 a.m. ET weekday timeslot.