Fred Silverman, the high-profile television executive who put “All in the Family,” “MASH” and “The Love Boat” on the air during the 1970s heyday of broadcasting, has died at 82.
He died Thursday at his home in California’s Pacific Palisades, a publicist’s statement said.
In his remarkable TV reign, Silverman was the first and only exec to run the creative sides of all three key networks of the day: CBS, ABC and NBC. For his skill in spotting potential hit shows, Time magazine called him “the man with the golden gut.”
The New York native got his start as a program executive at Chicago’s WGN-Channel 9 in the early 1960s, where one of his achievements was packaging old movies into a popular weekly showcase called “Family Classics.”
After a stint at WPIX in New York City, he was charged at age 25 with overseeing CBS’ daytime programming.
As he ascended at the network, his projects included such prime-time phenomena as “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “MASH,” “The Waltons,” “Good Times,” “The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour” and “Kojak.” He then jumped ship to ABC, where as entertainment president he rebuilt the third-place network into a top-rated powerhouse, relying on such escapist fare as “The Love Boat,” “Laverne & Shirley,” “Three’s Company” and “The Bionic Woman.” The landmark miniseries “Roots” also aired there under his watch.
NBC lured him to defect in 1978, but his high volume of cancellations and premieres there was only spottily successful. For all the prestige dramas (“Hill Street Blues”) or crowd-pleasing comedies (“Diff’rent Strokes,” “The Facts of Life”) Silverman green-lit, he also programmed several disasters, including the poorly received sitcom “Hello Larry” and the pricey rail drama “Supertrain.”
He left NBC in 1981 and became a producer, reviving “Perry Mason” as a series of TV movies and launching such hits as “Matlock,” “Diagnosis: Murder” and “In the Heat of the Night.”
