Sylvester "Pat" Weaver (December 21, 1908 – March 17, 2002) was a former radio advertising executive who was president of NBC between 1953 and 1955. He has been credited with reshaping broadcasting's format and philosophy as radio gave way to television as America's dominant home entertainment.
Sylvester Laflin Weaver, Jr. was the son of Sylvester Laflin Weaver, Sr. (1876-1956) and Miranda Dean Weaver (February, 1877-March 21, 1961). He was the brother of comedian Doodles Weaver. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1930, where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Phi Kappa Psi Fraternity.
He married Elizabeth Inglis, and the couple had two children: actress Sigourney Weaver (born Susan Alexander Weaver) and Trajan Weaver.
Weaver worked for the Young & Rubicam advertising agency during the golden age of radio. In the mid-1930s he produced Fred Allen's Town Hall Tonight radio show, and he then supervised all the agency's radio programming. NBC hired him in 1947 to challenge the CBS network's programming lead.
At NBC, Weaver established many operating practices that became standard for network television. He introduced the practice of networks producing their own television programming, then selling advertising time during the broadcasts. Prior to that, ad agencies usually created each show for a particular client. Because commercial announcements could now more easily be sold to more than one company sponsor for each program, a single advertiser pulling out would not necessarily threaten a program.
Weaver created The Today Show in 1952, followed by The Tonight Show (1954) with Steve Allen, Home (1954) with Arlene Francis and Wide Wide World (1955), hosted by Dave Garroway.
He believed so deeply that broadcasting should educate as well as entertain that he typically required NBC shows to include at least one sophisticated cultural reference or performance per installment—including a segment of a Verdi opera adapted to the comic style of Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca's groundbreaking Your Show of Shows.
Weaver didn't ignore NBC Radio, either. In 1955, as network radio was dying, Weaver gave it one of the greatest adrenaline kicks in its history with NBC Monitor, a weekend-long magazine-style programming block that featured an array of news, music, comedy, drama, sports, and anything that could be broadcast within magazine style, with rotating advertisers and some of the most memorable names in broadcast journalism, entertainment, and sports.
NBC Monitor long outlived Weaver's tenure running the network. Following disputes with chieftain David Sarnoff, Weaver departed. His ideas were either too expensive or too highbrow for company tastes. His successors (first, Sarnoff's son, Robert; then, Robert Kintner) standardized the network's programming practices with far less of the ambitiousness that characterized the Weaver years.
He died in 2002. [1]
Sylvester L. Weaver Jr., a pioneering television executive who created the NBC programs Today and Tonight and did much to shape the medium's pervasive influence, died Friday at his home in Santa Barbara, Calif. He was 93. Mr. Weaver, who worked at NBC from 1949 until 1956, when he resigned as chairman, went into television with a background in radio and advertising. He melded acute marketing skills with a creative, sometimes philosophical approach to television as it became a staple of American life. In just seven years, Mr. Weaver, known as Pat, left an imprint as the most important innovator in television programming, championing such influential programs as Meet the Press and Your Show of Shows.
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