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Television Variety Shows

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Author: Jude

"The Ed Sullivan Show" dominated Sunday night television. The television variety show aired first on June 20, 1948, and last aired on June 6, 1971. Each and every Sunday night, friends and families gathered around the television set to watch the show that always started with the stiff and formal Ed Sullivan announcing that there would be a "really big shew." (That's not a typo.

That's the way Sullivan pronounced the word "show.") All kinds of acts were featured on the Ed Sullivan Show: musical performers, circus acts, comedy acts, etc. Ed Sullivan was responsible for bringing Elvis Presley and the Beatles to television.

The variety show as it first appeared on television was almost exactly the way that audiences had viewed stage variety shows since the Victorian era. But times were changing. "The Ed Sullivan Show" actually is said to have launched the "golden age of television." Variety became big business — very big business.

Actors and actresses who had made it big in vaudeville came to television variety shows — the Marx Brothers, George Burns and Gracie Allen, W. C. Fields, and Jack Benny. They were followed closely by such greats as Milton Berle, Jackie Gleason, Bob Hope, Dean Martin, and Jerry Lewis.

Variety shows on television were very popular, and they got good ratings up until about the 1970s. Variety shows were no longer regularly scheduled. "Specials" were occasionally aired that features variety acts. That practice continues.

Variety shows are making a comeback today, but they bear little resemblance to the early television variety shows. About the only real and regularly scheduled variety show on television today is "America's Got Talent." The show can only be described as the marriage of the variety show to reality television. There are also what I call "specialized" variety shows like "American Idol" and "So You Think You Can Dance."









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