the beginning and end of cable, part 2

In part 1 I wrote about early cable systems and some of the history of locally originated content. While cable TV was originally a way to bring broadcast TV signals to people who couldn’t receive them clearly, its rapid growth in the US in the 1980s and ‘90s was more because people wanted extra channels besides the three networks and the odd PBS or independent (or starting in 1986, Fox) station here or there. As all of those extra channels turn into streaming brands, or disappear entirely, here’s a look back at where they began. Here’s what you might’ve seen if you got cable in the ‘70s or ‘80s, in roughly chronological order, with a little discussion of what became of these channels.

HBO

Northeast US via microwave: November 1972. National feed via satellite: September 1975. The first and biggest of the premium cable networks. At the beginning it was only operational nights and weekends, presenting movies and sports without commercial interruption to those cable subscribers who paid an additional fee for it.

The ‘70s were the first time that movies being unedited could be as much of an attraction as them being commercial-free. It was only a few years after the end of the Hays Code, the film industry’s heavy-handed self-censorship “guidelines”, but broadcast television remained under the watchful eye of the FCC. Cable and satellite TV, meanwhile, could be licensed for its use of the radio spectrum but the FCC had no power to regulate its content, so HBO could show movies with all the dirty words and nudity intact.

Sports were a big part of HBO in the early years - the first broadcast over the national satellite feed began with the “Thrilla in Manila” between Ali and Foreman, one of the greatest boxing matches of all time. Other sports would soon make their way to basic cable for a wider audience, but boxing remained an HBO staple for some time, though the biggest matches eventually went to the even more exclusive realm of pay-per-view. Concerts and stand-up comedy were occasional features. It stood for “Home Box Office,” after all.

Original series weren’t much of a draw at first. Glancing over a list of shows that debuted on HBO in its first 20 years, the only one that’s particularly fondly remembered today is Fraggle Rock.¹ Most of their shows for grown-ups were just mediocre network TV, only with tits and cussing. Other than movies and miniseries, their first production to get critical acclaim and Emmy nods was The Larry Sanders Show (1992-1998). Then came Oz and The Sopranos and Sex and the City and all the rest… soon that was what people got HBO for and the movies were just a bonus.

TBS

Local channel in Atlanta: September 1967. National feed: December 1976.

Ted Turner had a lot of strange ideas, and some of them made him a very rich man. When he took over Atlanta’s Channel 17 in 1970, it was in a tight race for last place with another UHF independent and the city’s only channel still broadcasting in black-and-white. Upgrading the transmitter to color nearly bankrupted the station, and in the end Ted would hold a telethon to pay off the debt. Like most independent stations, its schedule was largely movies and reruns; 17 would only pick up content that other Atlanta channels had rejected, to get lower prices from the syndicators. Original content consisted mainly of Braves and Hawks games (Turner would end up buying both teams) and comedic newscasts that doubled as fulfilling a “public service” obligation. In those days, this was enough to gain an audience and make a profit.

Up until the mid-‘90s, out-of-town independent stations were often added to cable system lineups to supplement the local channels. Sure, every independent was mostly movies and reruns, but you could get different movies and different reruns by pulling in stations from far away. When the Westar and Satcom satellites took to the skies, Turner realized he could uplink Channel 17 and get it on cable systems across the whole country. Thus the first “superstation” was born, and national audiences started taking to this quirky local station. And with national audiences came national ad sales, and Turner’s cable empire started to grow.

During the ‘80s and ‘90s, TBS would typically start shows at :05 and :35 minutes past the hour, while every other channel would start its shows at :00 and :30. The reasoning was that if you watched a show to the end on TBS, you’d already have missed the first few minutes of whatever other channel you were going to flip to, so why not stay on TBS? It also made the channel stand out in the listing format used by TV Guide and most newspapers at the time.

In those days TBS never had much in the way of original content, other than sports. It was a movie-and-rerun channel run on the cheap, and proud of it.

Officially Channel 17 was WJRJ under its first owner; it became WTCG after Turner took over in 1970 and WTBS for “Turner Broadcasting System” in 1979. Branding went through a number of variations of “SuperStation WTBS”, “TBS Superstation”, etc., over the years. Since 2004 it’s just been “TBS.” In 2007 the local Atlanta station was split from the national feed, becoming WPCH “Peachtree TV”; it’s now a CW Network affiliate.

CBN

April 1977. Looking at a list of the most widely available cable channels in the 1980s, this is the biggest one that doesn’t ring a bell to me. Turns out it’s still around under a different name, though probably not for much longer.

Originally the CBN Satellite Service, this began as an extension of Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network. “The 700 Club” had been running for 10 years by then and Robertson wanted to expand his reach. It quickly became apparent that even devoted evangelicals would only watch so much Jesus talk in one day, so CBN started adding “family-friendly” secular programming. In 1988, it rebranded as the CBN Family Channel, which would become just the Family Channel a couple of years later when it spun off as its own for-profit company.

I’m not totally sure whether CBN got onto so many cable systems because of demand for the religious content or the secular content - or just because it was free and made for decent counterprogramming for the other cable channels. The ‘80s might have been the peak of televangelism, with Robertson launching his presidential bid and the likes of Tammy Faye Bakker becoming national celebrities. Since then the religious world has fallen out of touch with the secular world, and you only hear about televangelists when they say something shockingly offensive to our modern progressive mores.

Anyway, after it split off from CBN, I did watch a good bit of the Family Channel as a kid. It had cartoons and game shows - of course they were all reruns but I was too young to know that. Through the ‘90s it bumbled along as one of those channels that everyone got on cable but nobody really asked for. It was briefly bought by News Corp, becoming Fox Family and trying to compete with the other kids’ networks. This didn’t work out and Disney snapped it up from Fox, tweaking the name again to ABC Family.

In 2016 the network adopted its current name, Freeform. By then its original programming was mainly targeted at teen and twentysomething women, it had progressive and somewhat edgy fare like “Pretty Little Liars”, and the ABC Family name was both a misnomer and a turn-off. There were longstanding rumors that Robertson had required the network to keep “Family” in its name in perpetuity, but if any such obligation ever existed, it had expired long ago. But there was still an obligation to show “The 700 Club” three times a day, a strange remnant of the channel’s religious origins that lasted through three owners and four names.

As of a few months ago, one of the major cable companies (Spectrum) has dropped Freeform and some of Disney’s other lesser-watched channels from its lineup, in exchange for adding a Disney+ subscription as a benefit to the same subscription tier. All of Freeform’s original shows have ended or migrated to Disney’s streaming services. It seems likely to be one of the first “legacy” cable networks to shut down entirely - just to get out of the 700 Club contract if nothing else.

There were a few other religious channels on early cable, but most of them didn’t show secular programming and had little impact on the rest of the media world, so I won’t be going into them.

USA Network

September 1977. In the early days there were only a handful of communications satellites, each of which could carry a relatively small number of feeds. Oftentimes if a new service didn’t have enough content for 168 hours a week or enough money to afford a full-time feed, it would lease space from another. This channel started out as an unnamed shared feed managed by UA-Columbia Cablevision, with five independent services - two sports channels (Madison Square Garden Sports² and UACC’s Thursday Night Baseball), a children’s program called Calliope (also owned by UACC), C-SPAN, and BET - each with its own blocks of time, when the first three merged operations in 1980 and became the USA Network. (C-SPAN and BET would soon get their own feeds, freeing USA to become a 24-hour channel.)

From this disjointed beginning I get a sense of why USA has changed its focus so much over the years. In the early ‘80s it was mainly a sports channel, competing with ESPN, but also ran kids’ shows and a block of British imports called “The English Channel.” After it lost its sports contracts, USA tried to be a cable version of broadcast networks, with a variety of original shows in prime time. For a while they had a reputation for more risque shows than the broadcast channels would touch (like “Silk Stalkings” and “La Femme Nikita”), but only a little more risque - there’s no FCC censorship of cable but there are still advertisers you don’t want to piss off.

From the ‘90s I remember the game show block (eliminated after GSN filled that niche) and the Cartoon Express (cancelled instead of trying to compete with the full-time kids networks). USA changed owners a few times, ending up under NBC-Universal. The only recent USA original I watched was “Mr. Robot” which had a few scenes skewering the cheesy garbage USA used to show.

The last phase of USA before linear TV goes away for good may be a return to its roots. With the shutdown of the NBC Sports Network, most of its Premier League games and Olympic qualifiers and such are now getting shown on USA, making it a sports channel once again.

Showtime

West Coast: July 1976. National feed: March 1978. The Pepsi to HBO’s Coke. Followed pretty much the same arc from movie channel to critical darling to streaming adjunct as HBO, down to its first notable original series being a metafictional Garry Shandling sitcom - although interestingly, Shandling was on Showtime first.

Older cable systems, with only 20-30 channels, would typically carry only HBO or Showtime but not both, to avoid duplication. At the time neither was affiliated with a major studio yet, and the studios would only offer them a paltry selection of films, meaning that oftentimes HBO and Showtime would have the same movies on within a few days of each other. So there was little reason to want to subscribe to both - and given the prevalence of B-movies and flops in the early days, there was a lot of subscription churn. By the ‘90s the Time-Warner and Viacom-Paramount mergers would give each movie channel its own extensive catalog, and most cable systems had 70-100 channels of capacity so there was room for both.

As of a couple of months ago, the linear Showtime channel has been rebranded as “Paramount+ with Showtime” to emphasize that the network really sees itself as part of the streaming service now. I think this is a bit confusing and they’ll walk it back if they decide to keep the linear feed around.

WGN

Local channel in Chicago: April 1948. National feed: November 1978. The second-biggest “superstation” had a very different feel from TBS. WGN was no plucky upstart run by a quirky impresario, but a big professional VHF station owned by the Chicago Tribune. (The call letters, used by the Tribune’s radio station since 1924, stand for “World’s Greatest Newspaper.”) Like TBS there was the usual indie station fodder of movies and reruns and sports, but also local news (by actual newscasters, not comedians) and the country’s last local kids show, Bozo the Clown.

In short: TBS was a national channel that happened to be based in Atlanta. WGN was a Chicago channel that happened to be available nationwide.

There were several smaller “superstations” with satellite or microwave distribution in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, the most widespread being New York’s WOR and WPIX. As a kid in suburban New York those were my local channels and we didn’t have WGN but we got Boston’s TV-38 (WSBK) on cable for a while… it meant I got to see the same cartoons on at different times. And they had “Punky Brewster” which other channels didn’t. I guess Yankee fans liked the sports coverage so they could root against the Sawx.

In the ‘90s an FCC regulation called “syndex”³ made it less attractive to carry out-of-town channels on cable, and besides there were enough national cable channels by then that out-of-town TV wasn’t necessary to fill the lineup. Most of the “superstation” feeds shut down, but WGN was popular enough to keep going. Outside Chicago, its main selling point in the later years was that it carried the WB network (later the CW) for smaller cities that didn’t have an affiliate of their own.

Finally in 2014 the national channel split from the Chicago CW affiliate, becoming the little-watched “WGN America” for a few years before it was converted into “NewsNation” in an effort to compete with CNN.

The Movie Channel

Locally programmed: April 1973. National feed: January 1979. Yes, it’s a channel that shows movies. That’s about it.

It originated as Warner Cable’s “Star Channel” which was, strictly speaking, many local premium channels. Warner would license movies to local cable systems and mail them videotapes, and each cable company would schedule its own “Star Channel” with common branding. This is actually something pretty similar to something I did in college, programming our campus cable station with movies and manually changing the tapes when we didn’t have a live show in the studio (the ostensible reason why we had a campus cable station, though during my time the studio was usually empty).

This rather cumbersome system was replaced by a more efficient national satellite feed of Star Channel at the beginning of 1979, then renamed The Movie Channel a few months later. For a few years TMC took on HBO and Showtime as a third national premium channel. Then a convoluted series of transactions led to TMC merging into Showtime, becoming its secondary channel and positioned as a competitor with Cinemax.

There’s never been any originally produced content on TMC, other than promos and interstitials. It’s a channel that shows movies. That’s about it.

Satellite Program Network

January 1979. Apparently this was one of the more widely available cable networks in the 1980s, though it was completely forgotten about five minutes after it went off the air. SPN showed a hodgepodge of unrelated genres in the hope that some of them would find an audience. None ever did. The name was changed to “Tempo Television” sometime around 1986. In 1989 NBC brought the channel for its slot on satellites and cable systems, ended all its existing programming and relaunched it as CNBC - regarding which see FNN in Part 3.

Modern Satellite Network

January 1979. Run by Modern Education, a producer of industrial/educational films. As far as I can tell, the main purpose of this channel was to sublet time blocks to other channels, and Modern would run their own content on slots they couldn’t lease out, basically as a time-filler. The channel was fully leased out in 1986, with Modern’s final slot going to the Home Shopping Network, and ceased to exist.

MSN shows up in the lists of most widespread cable channels because, I guess, the lists were sloppily made. I can’t imagine any cable service wanting to pick MSN itself up unless they were truly desparate, but there was demand for some of its guest channels, which I understand included the predecessors to Lifetime. Of course different cable systems might report their channel lists differently, one might say “Modern” and one might say “Daytime” for carrying Daytime when it was running on Modern’s channel… bad data is an eternal problem. Some other “channels” that made the lists but only existed as guests of MSN or USA or another shared channel include “TeleFrance USA” and “The Silent Network” - the latter being a programming block in American Sign Language.

I don’t have much to say about HSN and its fellow shopping channels - they and the religious channels are the cockroaches of TV, they’ll be around after everything else dies off.

C-SPAN

March 1979. Maybe this channel has stayed truer to its original vision than any other. Congress has changed, but sticking a camera in front of Congress and airing their proceedings unedited hasn’t.

Unlike its equivalents in foreign countries, C-SPAN is not government-owned, government-funded, or part of any national public broadcaster like PBS. Its owner is the National Cable Satellite Corporation, a nonprofit funded primarily by carriage fees from cable systems. Its costs are low enough that it should be able to stay around until traditional cable goes extinct for good. And you’d think they’d see that coming and pivot to a longer-term funding source by then.

I applaud C-SPAN’s commitment to neutrality - they’ll air unedited rants from any lunatic who phones in while their on-screen announcers just politely listen. They have to - if they’re going to work with Congress they can’t be biased, even against lunatics, because who knows whether someone in Congress will agree with those lunatics?

Nickelodeon

April 1979. There’s already enough Nick retrospectives and “only ‘90s kids will remember this” nostalgia to go around so I’ll refrain. It is interesting to learn that Nickelodeon started out as a commercial-free educational channel and was marketed more to parents than to kids. Early promos featured corny mime performances and bragged about an endorsement from the teachers’ union. The “orange splat” rebranding in 1985 marked a shift towards trying to appeal to kids themselves, and was so phenomenally successful that it lasted through several generations of kids, seeming fresh to all of them.

Unlike a lot of other cable channels, Nick had original content from day one - actually, before day one. The first Nick original, “Pinwheel”, began on a local cable channel in Ohio and its success there inspired the concept of an all-day children’s channel. I have no recollection of Pinwheel, but looking up clips, it appears to be a mediocre Sesame Street knockoff. Somehow it ran several seasons and continued in reruns on Nick’s midday preschool block (somewhere along the way they started calling it “Nick Jr.”) until it was replaced by Eureeka’s Castle, a pretty good Sesame Street knockoff.

Nick relied on foreign imports to fill its schedule in the early years. “You Can’t Do That On Television”, the network’s first big hit and the origin of Nick’s trademark green slime, was a Canadian import, though it became less overtly Canadian as it got more of an audience in the States. I also remember Nick showing “Today’s Special” and “Fred Penner’s Place” which nowadays you see on “only Canadian kids will remember this” lists… did Canada annex New York while I wasn’t looking? And I had no idea that “Maya the Bee” and “Grimm’s Fairy Tale Classics” were Japanese. Somebody should’ve warned my preschool self, early exposure to anime might’ve been what made me a weeb for life.

The other notable thing about early Nick was it was a daytime-only channel that shared its satellite slot with a nighttime-only channel for adults. This was Star Channel/The Movie Channel at the very beginning, then ARTS/A&E for several years. After those channels went 24 hours Nick had dead air after 8 PM for a few months, until someone had the bright idea of making “Nick at Nite” - the TV equivalent of an oldies station on radio. And today it’s just as disorienting to flip past Nick at Nite and see shows I remember from their first runs as it is to hear bands I like called “classic rock.”

ESPN

September 1979. Not quite the first all-sports channel⁴ but the first distributed nationwide. The full name “Entertainment and Sports Programming Network” gave them room to add non-sports programming later on, like USA, but it never happened, and they never said what “ESPN” stood for on air. Instead of trying to find different kinds of shows for the daytime hours when there wasn’t any live sports to cover, they just put last night’s SportsCenter on repeat all day.

SportsCenter, by the way, was the first show on ESPN its first day on the air. I think it’s the only thing from ‘70s cable still running. ESPN doesn’t identify individual episodes on its program listings so every episode used to show up on my cable guide with an air date of September 7, 1979… I guess that’s their equivalent of December 31, 1969.

The first sporting event on ESPN was a game in the World Series… of men’s slow-pitch softball. College sports and lesser-known pro sports predominated in the early ‘80s as ESPN struggled to acquire rights to show the big four leagues. After 1984, when ABC took a controlling stake in ESPN, they started booking major sports more consistently. Since then the production values have improved but, well, sports are sports, and ESPN is still recognizably a sports channel.

That brings us to 1980 which is a nice arbitrary place to stop. I’ll discuss cable channels that debuted in the 1980s in part 3.