The Ed Sullivan Show: Encyclopedia II - The Ed Sullivan Show - Background

The Ed Sullivan Show - Background

Along with the talent he booked each week, he also had recurring characters appear many times a season, such as his puppet sidekick Topo Gigio, and ventriloquist Señor Wences.

While most of the episodes aired live from New York City, the show also aired live on occasion from other nations, such as the United Kingdom, Australia, and Japan. For many years, Ed Sullivan was a national event each Sunday evening, and was the first exposure for foreign performers to the American public.

On the occasion of the show's ten-year anniversary telecast, Sullivan commented on how the show had changed during a June 1958 interview syndicated by the Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA):

The program did not shy away from airing performances from black entertainers. Sullivan also commented on this during during his NEA interview:

The show included performances from black entertainers such as Diahann Carroll, Nat King Cole, Bo Diddley, The Fifth Dimension, Aretha Franklin, Mahalia Jackson, The Supremes, and The Temptations.

In that same 1958 NEA interview, Sullivan noted his pride about the role that the show had had in improving the public's understanding of mental illness. Sullivan consider his May 17, 1953 telecast to be the single most important episode in the show's first decade. During that show, a salute to the popular Broadway director Joshua Logan, the two men were watching in the wings and Sullivan asked Logan how he thought the show was doing. According to Sullivan, Logan told him that the show was dreadfully becoming "another one of those and-then-I-wrote shows"; Sullivan asked him what he should do about it, and Logan volunteered to talk about his experiences in a mental institution. Sullivan took him up on the offer, and in retrospect believed that several advances in the treatment of mental illness could be attributed to the resulting publicity, including the repeal of a Pennsylvania law about the treatment of the mentally ill and the granting of funds for the construction of new psychiatric hospitals.

The show enjoyed phenomenal popularity in the 1950s and early 1960s. As had occurred with Amos 'n Andy on the radio a decade earlier, the family ritual of gathering around the television set to watch Ed Sullivan became almost a U.S. cultural universal. Ed Sullivan was regarded as a kingmaker, and performers considered an appearance on his program as a guarantee of stardom. The show's iconic status is illustrated by a song from 1963 musical, Bye Bye Birdie. In the song, "Hymn for a Sunday Evening," a family of viewers expresses their regard for the program in worshipful tones.

In the late 1960s, Sullivan remarked that his program was waning as the decade went on. He realized that to keep viewers, the best and brightest in entertainment had to be seen, or else the viewers were going to keep on changing the channel. Along with declining viewership, Ed Sullivan attracted a higher median age for the average viewer as the seasons went on. These two reasons were evidence for its cancellation in 1971. Sullivan would produce one-off specials for CBS until his death in 1974.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Background", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki