Whipped Cream Difficulties

Fred Silverman, famous TV executive at CBS, ABC, and NBC.

At 25, Mr. Silverman was made head of daytime programming for CBS, and in 1970, in his early 30s, he landed the network’s top programming job, putting him in charge of the prime-time schedule.

He was responsible for the success of “All in the Family”:

“I couldn’t believe I was seeing what I was seeing,” Mr. Silverman recalled in an oral history recorded in 2001 for the Television Academy Foundation. “Compared to the crap that we were canceling, this was really setting new boundaries.”
He credited Robert Wood, president of CBS at the time, with putting the show on the air in January 1971. But it was Mr. Silverman who rescued it from its original, deadly Tuesday night time slot, stacking it on Saturday nights with another savvy series, “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”
“These were the first building blocks,” Mr. Silverman said, leading to other successes like the spinoffs “Maude,” from “All in the Family,” and “Rhoda,” from “Mary Tyler Moore.”

He went on to ABC:

By the time he left in 1978 to become NBC’s president and chief executive, ABC was No. 1 in the Nielsen rankings, on the strength of shows like “Laverne & Shirley” (a spinoff of “Happy Days”), not to mention the landmark mini-series “Roots” (1977).

At NBC. he was responsible for airing hits such as “Supertrain”, “Hello, Larry”, and “Pink Lady”. He also gave us the Jean Doumanian era of SNL.

Okay, that wasn’t 100% fair. He was also responsible for David Letterman’s daytime show, “Hill Street Blues”, and “Shōgun”.

After NBC, he went on to become an independent producer, whose credits included “Matlock”, “Jake and the Fatman”, “In the Heat of the Night”, and “Diagnosis: Murder”.

I actually managed to find a video of the legendary “A Limo for a Lame-O” sketch. I can’t embed it, but you can find it here. I can embed this:

Remember when Al Franken was funny?

John Andretti, member of the Andretti racing family. (Hattip: Lawrence.)

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