I just recently listened to the Planet Money episode on Desi Arnaz titled “How Desi Invented Television”. It was interesting to hear a discussion on Desi Arnaz inventing television at the same time that I was reading When Women Invented Television by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong. Both the book and the podcast talk about inventing television, when they are clearly talking about two very different things that were invented and neither were the actual physical television set. Also, they’re both only talking about television in the US. The development of the television industry in other countries is much, much different.
But first, let’s discuss television. After WWII, the US was shifting quickly into prosperity. Television had been around for a couple decades, but due to the high cost (not to mention the Great Depression and WWII) it had never really developed into a significant business. Now with US consumers earning more money and the quickly dropping costs of television sets, it was time for the television to rise.
The television industry started by basically copying the radio industry. A network would create a show and try to get a brand to sponsor it. If they couldn’t find a sponsor, then the show would quickly go away. Since radio already had a stable of shows which were sponsored, it made sense to take those shows and migrate them to television. These shows included Guiding Light by Irna Phillips, who literally created the daytime soap opera down to the organ cues which even she came to hate, and The Goldbergs by Gertrude Berg. These women were innovators who were able to take a concept from one environment (radio) and successfully transition it to another environment.
Dozens of shows attempted to cross over, but very few made it. Guiding Light outlasted almost every other soap opera around at the time and wasn’t cancelled until 1999. Phillips also created two other long lasting TV soap operas: As the World Turns and Another World. As the World Turns was the first soap opera to expand its time from 15 minutes to 30 minutes. And Another World was the first TV soap opera to broadcast in color. Phillips didn’t just invent the soap opera, she successfully transitioned it to a new format, a new length and a new style.
Geraldine Berg created the first domestic sitcom with The Goldbergs in 1929. If you have watched any sitcom set in a house, it’s been influenced by Geraldine Berg. Not only did Berg create the TV family, she also took the characters to Broadway, a movie, a comic book and a TV series. Berg not only created the show, she wrote every episode and starred as the family matriarch Molly (which won her the very first Best Actress Emmy Award). But Berg didn’t just do family comedy, she also had episodes on social issues, including the Holocaust and Nazis and the assimilating into a new country.
One of the shows, which the CBS network wanted to move to TV was My Favorite Husband, starring Lucille Ball. Ball was a B list Hollywood actress who starred in a string of movies, but never really made it big. But her radio show My Favorite Husband was extremely popular, but Ball refused to do it unless her real-life husband, Desi Arnaz was her co-star. It was 1950 in America and CBS was not too excited about a show starring a white woman married to a Cuban man, so they deferred saying that they didn’t believe that audiences would support them. So Arnaz did what he always did, he went on tour. Only this time Ball came with him and after the music was done, Arnaz and Ball would do a vaudeville act for the audience. The tour was such a huge hit that the CBS couldn’t say no. However the tour had taught Arnaz and Ball some lessons, that they wanted to bring with them.
First they wanted to film in California, so Ball could continue making movies. Second, they wanted the show to look better than most shows, which meant shooting it on film. Third, they wanted multiple cameras. On the vaudeville portion of the tour, Ball and Arnaz had realized that the reaction to the joke was often more important than the joke itself. To get the reaction shots, they wanted three cameras. And finally, they wanted a live audience since Ball wanted the same energy she got from the radio show and the tour.
CBS balked at the high cost, so Arnaz negotiated a compromise. Ball and Arnaz would pay for the costs out of their pocket and they would own the finished product. Arnaz had created what was the first television production company with Desilu and he wasn’t done with his innovations. To get the show to look good in front of a live audience, Arnaz adapted the multi-camera setup which Jerry Fairbanks had invented a couple years earlier and worked with famed cinematographer Karl Freund to get the lighting perfect for all the sets. None of this would have mattered if the chemistry between Ball and Arnaz hadn’t translated so well to the screen. In their first season, they had over 70% of the televisions turned to I Love Lucy. This level of popularity let the show not only make money from their sponsor, but also from merchandise.
In 1951, Ball gave birth to the couple’s second child at the same time that she had a baby on the show. Ball needed to take time off from the show to recover and spend time with their new child. Since she was the star of the show, it couldn’t just continue without her. So Arnaz came up with his next innovation, reruns.
He took the older episodes, which had just been sitting in a Desilu warehouse, and re-ran them for awhile instead producing of new shows. The ratings for the reruns were just as strong as original shows, which gave Desilu a way to make money for a second time on the same show. But Arnaz wasn’t done. He realized that if he could rerun the shows in place of new episodes, he could rerun the shows to syndicated networks and effectively make money a third time for each episode. There were shows made specifically for syndication prior to I Love Lucy. But this was the first time that previous seasons of network shows were shown in syndication.
Berg and Phillips were innovators in the content of television, while Desi Arnaz was an innovator in the business of television. He created production companies, reruns, syndicating network shows, all these innovations set the business of television which is still used today.
When thinking about innovation in your work, look at what these innovators did to find places for you to innovate as well. Are there places where you can take a product from one area and use it somewhere else? Are there ways to make money multiple times on the same product?