R.I.P.: Fred Silverman, TV Programming Exec

Fred Silverman September 13, 1937 – January 30, 2020

Fred Silverman, who as a top executive at CBS, ABC and finally NBC was one of the most powerful people in the three-network era — a force behind the success of beloved series like “All in the Family,” “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “M*A*S*H,” “Laverne & Shirley” and “Hill Street Blues” — died on Thursday at his home in the Pacific Palisades section of Los Angeles.

He was 82, reports the NY Times. The cause was cancer.

At 25, Mr. Silverman was made head of daytime programming for CBS, and in 1970, in his early 30s, he landed the network’s top programming job, putting him in charge of the prime-time schedule.

CBS, known in the 1960s for relatively conventional comedies like “The Andy Griffith Show” and “The Beverly Hillbillies,” was looking to freshen its image, and Norman Lear and Bud Yorkin’s groundbreaking “All in the Family,” which tackled contemporary issues like bigotry with scalding humor, became a key component of that strategy.

The show was originally made for ABC, but when that network rejected it, Lear took it to CBS, where Mr. Silverman and other executives watched a pilot.


“I couldn’t believe I was seeing what I was seeing,” Silverman recalled in an oral history recorded in 2001 for the Television Academy Foundation. “Compared to the crap that we were canceling, this was really setting new boundaries.”

He credited Robert Wood, president of CBS at the time, with putting the show on the air in January 1971. But it was Mr. Silverman who rescued it from its original, deadly Tuesday night time slot, stacking it on Saturday nights with another savvy series, “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”

“These were the first building blocks,” Mr. Silverman said, leading to other successes like the spinoffs “Maude,” from “All in the Family,” and “Rhoda,” from “Mary Tyler Moore.”