From 1928 (when it originated on radio) until 1974, this network was officially known as the Columbia Broadcasting System. Now called just CBS, it has been owned by Westinghouse and by
Viacom. Its eye logo (known internally as the "Eyemark") is among the most widely recognized corporate logos; based on old Shaker art, the logo premiered on CBS-TV in 1951, and eventually became the symbol for the entire company.
The postwar golden age and the "rural purge" (~1950-1984)
In its heyday, CBS was known as the "Tiffany network." It was the undisputed
ratings champion (a streak that had started with
I Love Lucy in
The Fifties and stretched into
The Sixties), its news operations were among the most respected in the world with great journalists like
Edward R Murrow, and it owned quite a few side businesses unrelated to broadcasting, such as
Columbia/CBS Records, Fender Guitars, Ideal Toys and even the New York Yankees. CBS's dominance was so great that when the fall schedules were announced, ABC and NBC would wait until CBS announced its plans before making their own announcements, effectively making network head James Aubrey programmer for all three networks.
Through the '60s, its primetime programs were mostly rural-themed sitcoms, such as
The Beverly Hillbillies,
The Andy Griffith Show and
Green Acres; fantasies like
My Favorite Martian and
My Living Doll; and domestic comedies like
The Donna Reed Show.
note Aubrey believed the TV audience needed uncomplicated "dumb fun.". The rise of
demographics in the late '60s produced a decision to project a more urbane image and reach for a younger, more urban/suburban, more marketer-friendly demographic. This led CBS to cancel all these shows and more
en masse in 1971, in what came to be known as the "
rural purge
." While this went on at NBC and ABC as well, it was especially pronounced at CBS, the network most associated with such shows. Pat Buttram, who played Mr. Haney on
Green Acres, commented that "it was the year CBS canceled everything with a tree." A number of these shows survived in
syndication, but the landscape of CBS and the networks in general was far more urban than it had been just a year or two prior.
Nevertheless, the rural purge worked. CBS' replacements for its canceled rural-themed shows, such as
The Mary Tyler Moore Show and
All in the Family, got the ratings that they wanted and became classics in their own right. Even as
ABC boomed in the '70s and took the top spot, CBS continued to do well, sitting comfortably in second place right into the early 1980s, with several classic TV shows such as
M*A*S*H and
All in the Family's many
spinoffs (
The Jeffersons,
Maude, and
Good Times) carrying the load handily. They even indulged in genre TV in the late 1970s with shows based on Marvel superheroes
The Amazing Spider-Man and
The Incredible Hulk.
Things changed rapidly as
NBC roared to Number 1 in 1984-1985 with its Thursday night lineup. CBS was heavily invested in dramas such as
Dallas and
Murder, She Wrote, with only a few sitcoms (such as
Newhart) to speak of. Aside from the odd
Peanuts or
Garfield special, pretty much everything CBS ran attracted much older audiences than
NBC or
ABC, leading to many jokes about CBS being "the network for the living dead".
CBS was ripe for a takeover during this time. Ted Turner attempted a hostile takeover of the network, and failed. Loews (the same company that had owned Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer during its heyday) bought a controlling interest in the company in 1985, and installed its co-owner Laurence Tisch as CEO. CBS had debt that resulted from trying to block Turner's takeover, and the cost-cutting and money-raising that followed saw CBS selling many of its side businesses to focus on broadcasting; the biggest one, CBS Records, went to Sony in 1987 (which has caused some confusion due to Sony buying unrelated Columbia Pictures two years later).
In 1993, CBS signed
David Letterman, who had left his show
Late Night (to
Conan O Brien) on
NBC after being shafted out of
The Tonight Show job by his former friend Jay Leno despite Letterman being retiring
Tonight Show host Johnny Carson's preferred choice for his replacement (something Carson never forgave either Leno or NBC for). His
Late Show with David Letterman was an immediate ratings success, destroying Leno in numbers thanks to his younger fan following, but Leno soon began to win the 11:30 slot in 1995 after his interview with Hugh Grant. Despite this Letterman's show was one of CBS' biggest ratings hits, along with the
The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson which aired immediately after.
By the mid-1990s, CBS mainly had its weekend sports coverage to fall back on, and when they lost rights to the NFL in 1994, the joke became "
Can't
Broadcast
Sports". Not helping matters was CBS losing a number of key affiliates (Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee, Dallas and others) to
Fox, leaving them to find affiliation elsewhere, many on UHF channels. Still without any solid hits, CBS ended up merging with Westinghouse
note an old-style industrial conglomerate whose main attraction was their broadcasting division, which had been for years hamstrung with two of their stations being affiliated with NBC, which dictated heavily how to present their schedule and news against their wishes in 1995; this was prefaced by a deal that switched three
note NBC affiliates KYW in Philadelphia and WBZ in Boston, and ABC affiliate WJZ in Baltimore of Westinghouse's five stations to CBS.
note The other two, KPIX in San Francisco and KDKA in Pittsburgh, were already CBS affiliates; the only change to them was less pre-emptions. The deal occurred due to WJZ in Baltimore losing its ABC affiliation to NBC affiliate WMAR-TV, something which angered Westinghouse and caused them to fear more defections. CBS picked up Philadelphia's KYW in this deal, which meant they had to sell longtime O&O WCAU. The buyer wound up being NBC, who had wanted to own a station in Philadelphia for decades and traded KCNC in Denver and KUTV in Salt Lake City for WCAU. A further merger occurred, this time with Viacom (CBS's own former distribution arm; now a major media conglomerate) in 2000. This was initially complicated by the fact that Viacom already owned half of
UPN, and both CBS and UPN had owned-and-operated stations in many of the same markets (Philadelphia, Boston, Dallas-Fort Worth, Detroit, Miami, and Pittsburgh). Viacom cleared this hurdle when the FCC legalized duopolies, leading to the two networks becoming corporate siblings. CBS regained the NFL in 1998 when it aggressively outbid NBC for their expiring AFC rights, while NBC attempted (and failed) to get the rights to
Monday Night Football.
Return to success (2000-present)
In the
Turn of the Millennium, CBS started turning itself around, debuting the megahits
Survivor and
CSI in 2000, and following them up over the next few years with a number of hit
police procedurals (including
CSI's
first two spinoffs) and
sitcoms. The network recovered from the abyss, running neck-and-neck with
Fox for the number one spot in the ratings, and started becoming popular with younger audiences again... just as network television viewership overall started to decline with the rise of
New Media. That said, CBS seems to be handling the new media shift far better than the new Viacom has; they've invested heavily in streaming, going as far as putting several classic Paramount/Desilu shows (which were retained by CBS after Paramount's film studio was allocated to the new Viacom in the split) such as
Star Trek: The Original Series and
MacGyver up for viewing, and also bought CNET Networks' family of websites in 2008, rebranding it as CBS Interactive (this subsidiary also includes
GameFAQs, Last.fm, Metacritic and TV.com, in addition to the various CNET websites). Nevertheless, the old joke about being the "network for the living dead" arose again in the early
2010s, as its shows became increasingly
formulaic and became staples for older viewers, causing a shift to older demographics. However, this is now a
winning strategy—after all, who watches network TV nowadays?
At the end of 2005, Viacom renamed itself "CBS Corporation" and split off another company that took the Viacom name (at least in name, as Viacom and CBS Corp. are both publicly-traded subsidiaries of National Amusements, Inc.),
note If you're not clear how that works: National Amusements, CBS, and Viacom are all separate (Delaware) corporations; of these, CBS and Viacom have their shares publicly traded (CBS on the NYSE, Viacom on the NASDAQ). However, a majority of the shares in each of those is held by National Amusements, Inc., which is in turn a privately-held corporation owned 80% by Sumner Redstone and 20% by his daughter Shari. and under this guise, CBS also owns
Showtime and The Smithsonian Channel, along with the CBS Sports Network, which mainly carries college sports. CBS also owns a half interest in
The CW (which stands for "The Columbia-Warner Network") as part of the WB/UPN merger, with Time Warner through its subsidiary
Warner Bros. Entertainment holding the other half, and some CBS-owned stations formerly with UPN carrying that network. As of 2013, CBS also owns 50 percent of the
TVGN network with
Lions Gate. By 2015, CBS launched a diginet across their stations called
Decades; they take a unique approach to the "retro" diginets that have permeated the market, having programming that ties into themes for that day, with
Bill Kurtis (a former anchor at CBS' Chicago station) hosting a historical program called
Through The Decades that completes it; the weekends are reserved for all day marathons of one or two shows for binge viewing.
The end of 2009 saw the CBS brand enter the United Kingdom, in an agreement with the broadcaster Chello Zone, launching four channels.
CBS News
During the 1950s and 1960s, CBS had, arguably, the greatest television news department in the world. With anchors like Edward R. Murrow (the man who fought
Joe McCarthy and won) and Walter Cronkite ("The Most Trusted Man in America"), and shows like
60 Minutes, CBS News ruled the roost. Their
CBS Reports specials became famous. In 1960, Murrow's
CBS Reports documentary
Harvest of Shame showed the plight of American migrant agricultural workers, and is acknowledged as one of the greatest news stories ever.
Harvest of Shame forever changed the nature of TV news and set the tone for a generation of investigative journalists.
Unfortunately, not only was there was little money in such programs, but they usually managed to upset corporate sponsors. Coca-Cola, for example, refused to purchase advertising on CBS for years after
Harvest of Shame. Fearing that other sponsors would follow suit, CBS allowed their news division to wither into irrelevance over the following decades, causing
PBS (which didn't have corporate sponsors to answer to) to take up the mantle of investigative TV journalism in the United States.
However, there has been a bigger emphasis on their news department going towards hard news after the end of the
Dan Rather/Katie Couric era, with
60 Minutes anchor Scott Pelley moving to the
Evening News, and the fact that CBS News dominates on Sundays but withers the rest of the week. This can be seen in their newscasts not going after the newest sordid scandal in the way ABC and NBC do, but focusing more on international news, and
CBS This Morning, which seems more comfortable with its lower audience with a news-bent program meant to compete more with
Morning Joe and
Fox & Friends than just playing
Follow the Leader with the others (
PBS' Charlie Rose is one of the anchors for starters; he previously anchored their overnight
Nightwatch' newscast back in the 80s, bringing it full circle). They also recently launched their own 24-hour news network, CBSN; uniquely, it streams live on their website, mobile apps, and devices like the Roku instead of traditional TV providers; it draws upon the resources of CBS News, their affiliates and CBS-owned properties (like
The NFL Today from Showtime and CNET's websites).
Sports
CBS has had the exclusive broadcast rights to the NCAA Men's Basketball Championship since 1991, and the song
"One Shining Moment", which they play at the closing of every tournament, has become synonymous with the Dance. In 2011 they split the tourney with Turner channels
TBS, TNT and truTV (also owned by Time Warner) to allow viewers to watch every game without interruptions, forcing fans to subscribe to
DirecTV's pay-per-view "Mega March Madness" package, or saddling their affiliates with arranging a second channel to air spillover games. Emphasis on affiliates here; the network's owned-and-operated stations (which there are 14 of, almost all located in major markets) are crippled by the fact that they are not allowed to have digital subchannels (so as not to negatively impact the picture quality), further necessitating the Turner deal.
However, this is a big advantage for CBS' other programming, as their high quality HD signal isn't impeded by decades-old reruns or automated weather or live cross country skiing from Lithuania on subchannels like it is on NBC and ABC-owned stations. This means that you, the viewer, have the luxury of seeing every single wrinkle in
Horatio Caine's face.
note or, at least, you did, until CBS sent Horatio into retirement in spring 2012. Now you'll have to settle for Frank Reagan's moustache hairs.
The network also carries the AFC side of the Sunday afternoon
National Football League schedule
note including NFC home games against AFC away teams; conversely, AFC home games with NFC away teams belong to Fox on Sundays, along with The Masters golf tournament, tennis's U.S. Open, and sports from the Southeastern Conference, whose highly competitive football schedule has given it an audience just as large as for NFL events.
Shows on CBS:
