How Fox Outran the Hounds

By Greg Braxton

March 30, 1997 12 AM PT

Greg Braxton is a Times staff writer

To the harmonious melody of Frank Sinatra’s “Love & Marriage” and the disharmonious rantings of the blue-collar “anti-Cosbys,” the Fox network proclaimed its arrival in America’s prime-time consciousness 10 years ago this week, poised to challenge ABC, CBS and NBC and become the fourth commercial broadcasting network.

But despite the brashness of the April 5, 1987, premiere of “Married . . . With Children,” which was a parody of the cuddly, lovable Huxtables of “The Cosby Show” on NBC, the network was still in the hunt for the Fox persona.

The irreverent attitude associated with the network today was not yet in bloom. To sound like its rivals, Fox was using the moniker FBC, for the Fox Broadcasting Co. And some of its first series were every bit as conventional as “Married . . . With Children” was unconventional.

“We were just trying to make programs that would have a broad-based appeal,” recalled Garth Ancier, Fox’s first programming chief. “We felt if we just did original programming that was well done, that would be enough. But when you’re building a network, that’s not enough.”

Ancier, who is currently programming head of the fledgling WB Network, paused, then laughed before adding, “We had to fumble around a bit before we found out who we were.”

The search for identity is over.

As it celebrates its 10th anniversary in prime time, Fox is now a powerful and influential force on the television landscape. Its strategy of targeting the 18-to-34 and 18-to-49 age groups, for whom advertisers are willing to pay a premium, has won over viewers and critics alike with a succession of sexy, edgy, sometimes crude, sometimes stylish “alternative” shows such as “21 Jump Street,” “The Simpsons,” “Cops,” “In Living Color, “Melrose Place,” “The X-Files,” “Martin,” “Party of Five,” “Living Single,” “Beverly Hills, 90210,” “New York Undercover” and the new “King of the Hill.”

The key to Fox’s success, former and current executives of the network agree, was the development of a “brand” name that characterized all of its programming. A Fox show came to be easily identifiable by its fresh, youthful look and approach to its characters and stories. That philosophy, they said, forever altered the nature of prime-time television.

“One of the most important things is that Fox changed the face of television marketing,” said Peter Chernin, who succeeded Ancier as programming chief (1989-92) and is currently president of Fox’s parent News Corp. “They did an amazing job of creating a brand image. It’s one of the major brands of the last 10 years, and it forced the other networks to do the same. ‘Must-See TV’ on NBC came out of Fox.”

Fox’s early going, however, was characterized by a lack of focus.

Fox Broadcasting Co., a vision of media mogul and Fox owner Rupert Murdoch, and Barry Diller, chief executive officer of Fox Inc., was established as a satellite-delivered, national programming service for independent TV stations. Murdoch predicted that Fox one day would be the fourth network to stand alongside ABC, CBS and NBC, but the growth was slow. For three months there was only one night a week of programming, and only two until the fall of 1989. The network did not reach seven nights of programming until January 1993.

The move to build Fox marked only the second time in 50 years that an attempt at putting together a fourth network had been made. The Allen B. DuMont Laboratories launched one in 1946 but it collapsed in 1955.

“There was no certain path to follow, no model we could use,” Ancier said.

Ancier and his boss, Jamie Kellner, Fox’s first president, approached noted producers such as James L. Brooks, Ed. Weinberger, Stephen J. Cannell, Gary David Goldberg, Michael Moye and Ron Leavitt about developing shows for Fox. “We told them, ‘We’ll let you do the show you want to do that the other networks won’t let you do,’ ” Kellner recalled.

Current Fox Entertainment President Peter Roth, who was then president of Stephen J. Cannell Productions, said, “I remember when we were first approached by Fox and they said, ‘We are not governed by the same rules. We want a strong, young male action series.’ We just loved the notion of Fox. There was a rebellious spirit that they were taking on the other three networks.”

Still, the direction of that rebel philosophy had not been fully determined, and the first year of Fox was marked by a wide variety of programming.

Shows ranged from the crass “Married . . . With Children” to the classy “The Tracey Ullman Show,” a sketch comedy series showcasing the then-unheralded British entertainer, and included “Duet,” a comedy about the budding relationship of a young couple, the White House comedy “Mr. President” starring George C. Scott, a horror show called “Werewolf,” an adaptation of the movie “Down and Out in Beverly Hills” and, from Cannell’s company, “21 Jump Street,” a teen-oriented drama about young cops starring the then-largely unknown Johnny Depp.

But a pattern soon revealed itself. The series that didn’t look like traditional network shows, such as “Married” and “21 Jump Street,” performed better than the more traditional fare.

“For the first six months to a year, we tried to be like the other networks in programming,” Ancier said. “Frankly, what we learned is if you try to be like the other networks, then there is no reason for viewers to try you.”

He added, “ ‘Married . . . With Children’ was unlike anything you could get on a traditional network. So was ’21 Jump Street.’ That was young and that broke out early, while the pieces that were more traditional, like ‘Duet,’ never broke out at all.”

By the time the Fox executives had a handle on what to do, however, they already had another batch of series in the pipeline. “That kind of refocusing and development to be different takes time,” Ancier said. “It took a lot of time, and a couple of painful years.” The network limped along, offering short-lived flops like “The Dirty Dozen,” “Family Double-Dare” and “Boys Will Be Boys.”

While Fox executives began to look for programming that would be more irreverent and would woo younger audiences, the industry kept sounding death knells. “The press was not kind,” Kellner said. “There was initial enthusiasm, like Columbus sailing around the world. But once we got out of port, then it became a joke.”

It didn’t help that Fox’s first series, “The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers,” which had debuted in late night the previous October, had been yanked in May because of declining audiences and internal discord.

Fox got one of its biggest and most important boosts early in 1989 from an unexpected source: a Detroit housewife named Terry Rakolta.

Rakolta sparked a huge controversy when she undertook a one-woman crusade against “Married . . . With Children” after having been horrified by an episode she watched. “I find it very offensive--it exploits women, it stereotypes poor people, it has gratuitous sex in it and very anti-family attitudes,” she said.

Rakolta complained to Fox, and Kellner called her, assuring her that he was concerned and would look into her grievance. But Rakolta did not inform Kellner that she also had written to 45 advertisers about the show, prompting one company to pull its ads and several others to reconsider their support.

Within days, Rakolta was on “Nightline,” “Good Morning America,” the front page of the New York Times and “Entertainment Tonight.”

Brad Turell, head of publicity for the WB, who held a similar post at Fox when Rakolta’s assault erupted, said, “That became the mushrooming story of the moment, and it wouldn’t die. ‘Nightline’ and all these network newscasts would do a piece, and then they would show clips of ‘Married.’ They would talk about the Fox network and then give a history of the network. We were trying to do damage control, trying to save ourselves, but at the same time, they were giving us $100 million worth of promotion.

“By the time the furor died down, the [public’s] consciousness of the Fox network had been raised tremendously,” Turell said.

Quipped Kellner: “Terry Rakolta has no idea how important she was in helping to build the Fox network.”

Another milestone for the network occurred at the end of the year, with the premiere of “The Simpsons.” The animated series, based on short segments that had been featured on Ullman’s show, was an instant hit with viewers. The debut was followed by a one-hour “Married . . . With Children” that guest-starred comedian Sam Kinison. The two shows scored Fox’s then-highest ratings ever for a Sunday night, and the executives felt they were finally on a roll.

“It was like lightning in a bottle, just explosive,” said Sandy Grushow, who was a Fox marketing executive at the time and was programming chief from 1992 to 1994. He is now president of 20th Century Fox Television.

And when “In Living Color,” designed as a black “Laugh-In,” hit the Fox airwaves in April 1990 and joined the Sunday lineup of “Married” and “The Simpsons,” the network hit its stride.

“We became the funny guys of television,” Kellner said. “There was no other network that had more high-powered comedy than Fox.”

He added, “What was kind of amazing is that there were so many young people running the network who didn’t have much experience in network television. There was a team of 20 to 25 people who really made it work, an anti-network crowd who were able in a relatively short period of time to do work that, in some ways, was better than what the networks were doing in terms of originality, and at an execution level that was high enough to be accepted by the audience.”

While Fox trained its development on attracting younger viewers, an intense marketing plan was aimed at sharpening Fox’s identity. The network’s marketing whizzes, Bob Bibb and Lew Goldstein, designed a 30-foot-tall Fox logo on a sound stage, and stars of the series would do promos around the structure. In commercials, an orchestra would blare out the familiar 20th Century Fox theme.

Fox stars began hosting “theme” nights of programming. Kellner told his executives to focus on demographics, not on household ratings. And the Fox Broadcasting Co. name was dropped in promotion efforts and replaced in favor of the simpler, catchier Fox.

“That was us trying to sound like a big network,” Kellner said of the FBC moniker. “It was stupid.”

With the newfound success--which was bolstered by the 1989 arrival of “Cops,” a documentary-style reality show, and the 1990 debut of a youth-oriented serial, “Beverly Hills, 90210”--the Fox executive team gained new determination.

Said Grushow: “The fact that this might not work was never something that entered into our psyche. It was simply not an alternative. We were going to succeed. We were fighting for a cause. We had a very clear sense of who we were and who we needed to be. We were the epitome of edgy and irreverent among the networks.”

Fox occasionally has lost its grip on that identity, however, in trying to satisfy Murdoch’s mandate to capitalize on the network’s billion-dollar investment in NFL football and broaden the appeal of Fox from a network for “Clearasil kids” to an entertainment giant that would overtake his three more prominent rivals.

That was particularly true during the run of John Matoian as programming chief. Replacing Grushow in 1994, the former CBS executive and head of the family film division at Fox’s film studio admitted that Fox was not a network that he had ever watched, “possibly because I was out of the demographic.” His strategy of trying to copy NBC’s formula of yuppie-themed comedies failed to catch fire, and he resigned last August. (He is now president of HBO Pictures and HBO NYC Productions.)

Roth, named to take over the entertainment division, saw the prime-time ratings plunge by almost 10% last fall, but he quickly got the network back on track by abruptly canceling all but one of Fox’s struggling new series, reviving “America’s Most Wanted” and putting on the offbeat cartoon “King of the Hill” from “Beavis and Butt-head” creator Mike Judge.

“We had to re-identify the brand that is Fox,” Roth explained. “We’re not going backward, we’re crystallizing that philosophy and carrying it forward into the future.”

Meanwhile, some of the Fox executives who helped launch Fox have moved on to the two fledgling networks--WB and UPN--hoping that magic can strike again. Ancier and Kellner are at the helm of WB, while Lucie Salhany, who succeeded Kellner at Fox, is heading up UPN.

Kellner has brought several members of his Fox team with him to the WB, including Ancier, publicity head Turell and marketing executives Bibb and Goldstein.

“I would not have started this if I didn’t have these people to do it again, because the odds of competing in this TV business are slim today,” Kellner said. He added that he believes WB, with the animated Michigan J. Frog as a mascot and its emphasis on family shows, will soon have an identity as distinctive as Fox’s.

In retrospect, Ancier said he sees the mistakes that were made at Fox: “We launched too many shows too fast. It was extremely ambitious to put two nights on the air within a few months of each other. It gave us no time to refocus. It was too much.”

Still, in overcoming the obstacles, Fox accomplished more than just creating a viable business. Said News Corp. President Chernin: “The dominant story in television over the last 10 years is the death of the monopoly by the three networks. Fox was a key player in that. Fox also forced the other networks to do a better job, or die. You see the other networks becoming more focused.”

And former Fox executives continue to look back on their legacy with fondness.

Said Grushow: “It was a roller-coaster ride. It had its ups and downs. But it was always exhilarating. I’d do it again in a minute.”