A Special Comment: Raiders of the Lost Network

A Special Comment: Raiders of the Lost Network

In this age of over 500 channels and nothing to watch, it is fun to look back on the good ol’ days of the 1950s when you could tune into one of the four classic channels and enjoy…

Wait a second… four?

That’s right, folks, before ABC, CBS and NBC even tried to get on television, there was the famous “lost” network, the DuMont Network. DuMont actually was the trendsetter, being the first “official” network on television. So, why have most people never even heard of this? Therein lies the tale of how you could go from a television pioneer to out of business in under ten years.

The story starts in 1938 when DuMont Laboratories got into the television making business. In fact, DuMont actually created the first all-electric televison for the average consumer, a model every television since would follow. From making televisions, it only made sense to actually try and create something to put on television, since you’re creating a whole raison d’être for your product in the first place. Keep in mind this was a period where television was still very experimental, kind of a novelty item while radio was still the entertainment king. Anyway, Paramount Pictures was intrigued by what DuMont was up to and agreed to front DuMont the cash to further their experiments, which in turn lead to the launch of the network, ahead of all others, in 1946.

DuMont ran into problems though right from the start as it had one shortcoming that no other network had – DuMont didn’t have a radio network, base of programming or audience to draw from. Quite literally, they would have to cut their teeth and their path at the same time. On top of that, the bosses at DuMont didn’t like the idea of sponsored programming, a virtual necessity in the early days of television given sponsorship was basically the only lifeline a lot of network shows had, to say nothing of the fact that sponsors already were the main power behind shows on radio, much as they would be for television. So, DuMont basically had to survive on the power of their imagination and not much else. On the plus side of the equation, it lead to original programming, something unique given the other three networks were, as we’ve seen, basically porting all their core show ideas over from radio. This creative sandbox, if you will, would lead to such programming as The Honeymooners, originally a sketch segment on Cavalcade of Stars, and Captain Video, an early sci-fi kiddies show.

The problem DuMont kept facing is what a lot of early pioneers face: money, specifically lack thereof. Add to that a technicality that kept DuMont from growing: the Paramount deal technically made DuMont part of Paramount and therefore under FCC restrictions prohibiting growth beyond a certain size. If DuMont stuck with Paramount, they couldn’t grow and couldn’t have access to more money and markets. If they left, they’d take a huge financial hit since it was, after all, a struggling network with very little support or backing behind it. Indeed, very few stations, even if they carried DuMont programming, carried every single program. This was an era when an affiliate could opt to carry just one or two shows without prescribing to the entire block. Innovative as it was, DuMont just lacked the support needed to survive, especially with powerhouses NBC and CBS in the race and ABC a rising threat.

In the end, time and money ran out on DuMont. Struggling on into the 50s and starving for cash to keep going, DuMont sold one of its flagship stations to Westinghouse for some much needed cash. The tradeoff was with one of its tent pole stations now gone, DuMont was in a weakened negotiating position for getting broadcasts outside of its core base of operations. It struggled on rather bravely into 1955, hemorrhaging money and a shrinking audience share, until Paramount made what was probably at that point a mercy kill, taking control of DuMont Laboratories and shutting down the network.

The ultimate tragedy of the DuMont Network is what happened next: DuMont made kinescopes of most, if not all their shows, primarily so the shows could be seen in other affiliated in other markets. When DuMont went under, that library of tape remained intact until the 1970s when the library was deemed “useless” and, without ceremony or warning, the entire tape archive was dumped in the Upper New York Bay, a loss of roughly 10 years of early television programming. That’s the bad news for classic television fans.

Here’s the good news: at least three large sources of DuMont programming still exist. The first belong to the Jackie Gleason estate, consisting mainly of the early Honeymooners skits. They have been released on DVD by MPI as “Lost” episodes of the Honeymooners, but sales of the DVDs were stopped about four years ago. Currently, the DVDs are out of print and very expensive to track down, but they are out there.

The second library belongs to the Archbishop Fulton Sheen Foundation since his show Life Is Worth Living got its start on DuMont before flipping over to ABC to finish its run. It’s unclear exactly how much is intact since the Sheen Foundation hasn’t released much, to say nothing of the fact that dating what material has been released is, to say the least, challenging. Since it’s impossible for me to date and simply because I would prefer to stay away from religious programming to avoid any potential issues, I’m currently not going to look into Life Is Worth Living, but I am willing to be persuaded if convincing arguments can be made.

The third and final source of DuMont material is the Capitol Wrestling Corporation library. DuMont was the first network to really show professional wrestling on the network, most of it coming from Capitol since it was the local wrestling “territory” near where DuMont was based. The Capitol library the passed into its successor, the World Wide Wrestling Federation which eventually become today’s World Wrestling Entertainment or WWE. That’s the good news – WWE has the tapes. Of course, here’s the bad news – there’s really no market for them, according to the WWE. In the time since DVD has been launched as a standard from the WWE, they’ve released a grand total of two matches from the period and only one came from the Capitol library and it’s not even dated beyond a year.

Other shows, such as Captain Video, do also have a small number of episodes surviving, but those three sources are basically the bulk of all that survives from the DuMont Network. It is, sad to say, not only an inglorious end to a television pioneer, but, as we’ll see, a fate that was all too common for a lot of classic television libraries that were lost simply because they were deemed “useless.” Pardon the bitterness, but it’s hard for a history geek like myself to accept such a sad state of affairs by people who live in the now without remembering the past. Who are we as a people if we forget where we were? Do we not then lose sight of where we have yet to go? Consider that as an epitaph for the DuMont Network and its programming.

Next time, a back track into 1950 and our first syndicated Western.