The Bionic Programmer

Fred Silverman knew there was something wrong with the whale in his office. "His voice is too high," he finally said to an assistant last week. "Get me a whale with a deeper voice." Then Silverman began auditioning worms.

Not many network programming chiefs pass time listening to tapes of worms and whales to find voices for a Saturday-morning cartoon show. But then, Fred Silverman, 40, is not just any network programming chief. He is, just now, the kingdom and the power, the man who put ABC in Nielsen heaven and gave Charlie's Angels their wings.

In his drive to keep ABC on top, Silverman leaves no worm unturned. He sifts through as many as 1,500 series proposals a season, reads every script and every rewrite of every script, approves every ten-second promotional spot and quarter-page newspaper ad for ABC programs.

What makes Freddie run? For one thing, he seems to have TV tubes implanted in his chest. "He is a child of broadcasting," says former CBS Executive Ethel Winant. Silverman's father was in television (he repaired them), and Fred was reared in Forest Hills, N.Y., on Howdy Doody and Clark Kent. He studied communications at Syracuse University and earned a master's degree at Ohio State. His thesis: a 400-page analysis of ABC programs from 1953 to 1959. After two years of scheduling movies for Chicago's WGN-TV, he showered network executives in New York with unsolicited letters, some of them assessing program lineups. CBS eventually took him on. His first triumph was to make Saturday morning profitable for the network by replacing sitcom reruns with new cartoon series. Later, as programming chief, he gave the network such treasures as Cannon, Maude, Rhoda, Phyllis, Sonny and Cher, Tony Orlando and Dawn.

Quick-tempered and innocent of the finer social graces, Silverman never moved easily among the Ivy Leaguers and suburban types who run CBS. "Fred's idea of small talk is the present schedule, and his idea of important talk is next year's schedule," says one old associate. "You wouldn't want to sit next to him at a dinner party." Silverman was also relatively underpaid at CBS, at about $150,000 a year with no contract. So when ABC offered him $250,000 per annum in a three-year contract to turn it into the hot network, he sprinted across 53rd Street to ABC. The day his defection was announced, ABC's stock rose nearly 2 points.

The bionic programmer now works in a 38th-floor office overlooking the domain of his old CBS colleague Network President Robert Wussler (they occasionally wave to each other from their windows). Silverman arrives at 9:30 each morning and begins rousing his West Coast producers from bed to discuss the overnight ratings. The rest of his day is a marathon of meetings--with soap-opera writers, sitcom producers, cartoon animators, promotion experts, demographics wizards. He returns to his Central Park West apartment for dinner with his wife Cathy and their daughter Melissa, 4, then holes up in his den with a stack of scripts, a rack of video cassettes and two cassette players, which he watches simultaneously.

Silverman is regarded as the only one of the network programmers who makes decisions fast and without a committee. He has a deft eye for spotting a likely spin-off character--like Rhoda or Maude--in a hit show. "Television is a personality medium," he says. "Personality is the key."

Some of Silverman's picks have been wrong. So far this year The Bill Cosby Show and Mr. T. and Tina have folded, Holmes and Yoyo is probably doomed, and Silverman would rather forget about a hairy loser called Me and the Chimp. "I still have nightmares about me and chimps," he says. Moreover, competitors note that he is better at patching up wobbly series than at choosing successful new shows; of his eight new entries this season, only Angels is an unvarnished triumph. And few in the business would credit him with trying to improve viewers' minds. Comments Wussler: "He has style, but he doesn't have a lot of class."

None of his colleagues would fault him for pandering to the masses; they say that he is the masses. "Freddie cares about everything on television," says TV Consultant Michael Dann. "He really believes in what he is doing." Silverman is quick to defend his programming--or any network's--against charges of philistinism. "Consider the number of Broadway plays that flop and the number of motion pictures that get bad reviews," he says. "The quality of television today is surprisingly good. Kojak may not be Shakespeare, but for popular art it's a pretty good show."

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