What if Disney had bought CBS instead of ABC?

Anonus

This thread had to wait until Centie came back, although she and I and @lee4hmz and @Section42L and maybe @Tre are probably the only interested parties

First things first, this probably would have been the source of a lot of hilarious bullshit between Michael Eisner and Westinghouse

Princess Alice

For a little background: what was the historical relationship between CBS and Westinghouse like?

Anonus

Probably cordial; on the TV side, at least, Westinghouse's KPIX/San Francisco and KDKA/Pittsburgh had been affiliated with the network for decades without any strife.

In 1994, ABC decided to drop its Baltimore affiliate, WJZ-TV, which was owned by Westinghouse, and move to the Scripps-owned WMAR-TV, then an NBC affiliate. Westinghouse was blindsided and decided to search for an affiliation deal for the entire group, in addition to a merger of Westinghouse's radio network with another. In the end, they struck a deal with CBS. This deal included a joint venture in which CBS and Westinghouse would acquire other TV stations across the country, and Westinghouse would take the cap hit. This was a prelude to Westinghouse just buying CBS, which they did the year after this deal was struck.

Anonus

Scripps had more or less blackmailed ABC into a group deal. Though ABC was agreeing to be downgraded to UHF in Tampa-St. Petersburg and Phoenix (dumping a strong affiliate in the latter market) and to less-dominant stations in Baltimore and Cincinnati, it was in the service of making sure that Scripps wouldn't switch their Detroit and Cleveland stations to CBS. (The Detroit station being a station that ABC had owned from the day its license was granted all the way up until the Capital Cities merger!)

Anonus

Bob Iger said that Scripps had a gun to ABC's head.

Sredni Vashtar

Here's a less inside-baseball question: How would this have affected programming?

Anonus

Sredni Vashtar said:

Here's a less inside-baseball question: How would this have affected programming?

That is also inside baseball!

The Crazy Twin Shenanigans episode of Pepper Ann has Professor Hickey explain "What in the name of Sam Donaldson is going on," in a nod to Pepper Ann's network, ABC.

The 101 Dalmatians: The Series episode "The High Price Of Fame" had its plot set in motion by a parody of America's Funniest Home Videos.

And those episodes of Full House and Roseanne where ABC had forced Lorimar and Carsey-Werner to do Disneyland stories would look awfully presumptive.

Also, Michael Eisner's Ego-Fest the 1997 version of The Wonderful World of Disney would be led into by 60 Minutes.

Also, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation was at one point set up at Touchstone Television. Who knows if Disney'd still own it here?

Anonus

Also, the CBS version of One Saturday Morning would be a natural extension of CBS already having a relationship with Disney; CBS had been the home of The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, and The Lion King's Timon & Pumbaa.

Anonus

Also if they saw fit to move Gargoyles to CBS, I'm not sure if it would have been Goliath Chronicles'd. Because CBS would be Disney's toy and they could MAKE CBS DO THEIR BIDDING

Anonus

Of course, Dean Valentine...

Sredni Vashtar

You're assuming that some of these shows would even exist, and furthermore only talking about the effects on Disney. What I would like to know is whether certain shows on CBS would even happen under Disney management, or whether certain CBS shows might have survived longer under such management.

Although I guess you are considering that. I wonder how different CSI would be?

Tre

all this is nice but I think y'all are glossing over the true mystery here:

in this hypothetical universe, assuming Pushing Daisies made it to air (on Disney's CBS or ABC, your choice), would it have gotten more than the two seasons it did in the real world?

Anonus

Sredni Vashtar said:

You're assuming that some of these shows would even exist, and furthermore only talking about the effects on Disney. What I would like to know is whether certain shows on CBS would even happen under Disney management, or whether certain CBS shows might have survived longer under such management.

Although I guess you are considering that. I wonder how different CSI would be?

ngl I'm just assuming that Disney's CBS would be a dumpster fire like their ABC has been intermittently and also people would care more because of CBS's prestige

Also, there would be no ESPN...

though one must wonder if Disney would have plopped Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? onto CBS or gone with Survivor...also all that sentimental Christian stuff CBS ran a lot of in the '90s

and of course, if the Disney-installed leadership at CBS would be good at getting Touchstone Television product on the air and nurturing it

Tre said:

all this is nice but I think y'all are glossing over the true mystery here:

in this hypothetical universe, assuming Pushing Daisies made it to air (on Disney's CBS or ABC, your choice), would it have gotten more than the two seasons it did in the real world?

They could always move it to The WB

Anonus

Oh god

Michael Eisner would DEFINITELY want to milk 60 Minutes like a brand

Remember when he did that with the ABC soaps?

Anonus

Oh, I should also add that the reason I am talking about CBS's effects on Disney and not vice versa is that by the time Larry Tisch finally dumped CBS it had no rudder. Inside baseball it may be, but Fox taking their piece of the NFL rights away, poaching a bunch of longstanding affiliates, AND forcing CBS to resort to UHF stations with weaker signals in markets like Detroit and Atlanta really fucked them up.

Sredni Vashtar

It wouldn't be on the level of what happened to ABC, I don't think, because CBS is such a recognisible name with so much riding on it with programmes like 60 Minutes. Which doesn't mean that the daytime slots wouldn't be a pile of burning garbage, but isn't that true of most daytime TV?

On the topic of Pushing Daisies: The writers' strike killed that show, not the network. It seriously went from great to a complete trainwreck within episodes. But even so, Disney seems to be better with tonally weird material like that than most similarly bloated media enterprises. I mean, they've kept Tim Burton around forever.

Anonus

I wouldn't call Iger's Disney "bloated", not in the sense that Time Warner, Viacom, and pre-Comcast NBC Universal could be called such...

Anonus

I know I've said this a lot, but Disney has really fucked ABC up. Basically all of whatever could be considered ABC traditions were either mangled (e.g. ABC News's product going to shit, the odd attempts to turn General Hospital/One Life to Live/All My Children into franchises) or killed off (e.g. TGIF, the feeding of ABC Sports to ESPN). The network has had more than one period of obvious rudderlessness, never managed to dethrone NBC or CBS from the top spot, and seems to burn out its successful periods quickly. That Eisner canned the person who greenlit Lost and Desperate Housewives doesn't help.

Anonus

There was even a rumor back in 2010 that Disney was close to divesting ABC entirely; a deal to sell it to a partnership of two private equity firms reportedly collapsed amid an FBI investigation.

lee4hmz

I wonder...if that deal had gone through, would it have included ESPN? I kind of doubt it, seeing as ESPN is the only part of ABC Disney was really interested in.

Anonus

ABC being tied at the hip with ESPN is probably much of the reason Disney hasn't just unloaded ABC by now - also, that sale, IIRC, was only going to include ABC and ABC Studios (and, presumably, the network's owned-and-operated stations)

Also, for Disney to sell ESPN would net them a big payday but it would also eliminate their main source of leverage over pay TV providers