Linda Ellerbee and Lloyd Dobyns

Linda Ellerbee and Bill Schechner

2016 update: Comcast, where my old web site was hosted, shut down its customer web site service a year or two ago, so I’m finally getting around to republishing my years-old essay on NBC News Overnight here. In 1995, this was one of the first articles I published on my site.

I still think Overnight was the best damned news program ever and I still sorely miss it. It was the model of a one-hour news program, and its style and substance contrast achingly with the carny-filled 24-hour news cycle of today.

Some years ago, I digitized the final five broadcasts, 29 November 1983 through 3 December 1983, and I’ve uploaded the final broadcast to include in this post – it’s about a third of the way down this article if you want to see it now and read the essay later.

In the near future, I’ll separately post the Monday-Thursday broadcasts from that week, but before I do those, I’ll upload in another post a 90-minute Overnight highlight reel I got from someone many years ago. It includes a segment from Hodding Carter’s PBS series Inside Story on the passing of Overnight.

Updated 23 October: I’ve uploaded the rest of my Overnight videos as mentioned above. Here’s the playlist.

ovr_logo

NBC News Overnight: An Appreciation

“Don’t worry. It’s a piece of cake. We’ll open with a something and a something, tell some news, a little of this, a little of that, watch a commercial, then a thing and a thing, a reel, some not-ready-for-prime-time stuff, more more news, sportstalk, some sports scores – Reuven said we gotta do scores because of bookies or something – then a roll, a reel a roll and a long five – they talk long at the BBC – a recap, some items, once overnightly, another something and a something, goodbyes – and we’ll be off. A piece of cake.”

– Herb Dudnick, describing Overnight to prospective anchors Linda Ellerbee and Lloyd Dobyns. “Reuven” is Reuven Frank, then president of NBC News.

Linda Ellerbee described the theme music once: “You hear something that may be music or may be the sound Donald Duck would make if you held his head underwater awhile.”

NBC News Overnight, a live one-hour news program, aired for about seventeen months starting on July 5, 1982. Its debut coincided with a lunar eclipse, and despite science reporter Robert Bazell’s disappearance during the live broadcast (he went for some coffee), it was a success from the first night. It was probably the best-written, best-executed news program ever produced. It never talked down to its viewers because, from day one, it never assumed that the lowest common denominator was the way to go. Entirely the opposite, in fact. The writing was crisp, witty, and smart. Overnight closed its doors in the first week of December 1983, after NBC management dropped it because of low ratings.

The first co-anchors, co-writers, and co-editors for Overnight were Linda Ellerbee and Lloyd Dobyns, who had, a few years previously, co-written and co-hosted Weekend, an offbeat weekly magazine for NBC.

This is how the first program opened:

Dobyns: “Tonight, to inaugurate our program, we bring you an eclipse of the moon. And what other program ever did that for you?”

Ellerbee: “And if you want more, there is more: more news, sports, more more news, the Not Ready for Prime Time News, plus dragon boats, crocodiles, spaceships, and one billion Chinese…more or less. Welcome…to Overnight.”

I was hooked immediately. As a matter of fact, I can trace my own interest in journalism directly to Overnight’s first week on the air.

After about six months of helping to shape Overnight, Dobyns left to do other work for NBC. (He developed and anchored Monitor, aka First Camera, during this period.) Bill Schechner ably took his place as co-anchor and co-writer until Overnight went off the air.

Overnight featured literary quotations, subtitled reports from overseas news programs for a new perspective, the best features (or sometimes just the silliest) from local affiliates, and a whole grab bag of things never before seen on national news programs. As Bill Schechner said on the final program, it proved that there is more than one way to deliver and to receive the news. Overnight must have been puzzling to some, though, because it had an unexpected mix of both seriousness about important issues and irreverence for nonsense. For instance, when NBC News released a fairly vapid brochure about Central America, Schechner spent his editorial time wisely. While holding up the brochure, he said this in the voice of a carnival huckster:

“It’s called ‘The NBC News Guide to Central America: Central America in Turmoil’! In these sixteen thrill-packed pages, all somebody thinks you need to know about those pesky southern countries that are making such big news.”

To illustrate Overnight’s content, here’s how a fairly typical program went. This one’s from late November 1983. Paragraphs indicate commercial breaks.

Opening summary
Title shots and theme
Shuttle Columbia launch
German television report on German scientist aboard Columbia (subtitled)
Greyhound strike
CBC report on British newspaper strike
WTCN Minneapolis report on large Midwestern snowstorm
National Weather Service’s long-range winter forecast
From a scientific conference: Carl Sagan’s 5-minute film on the newly-coined “nuclear winter”
Newsreel
Not Ready for Prime Time News: BBC report on a Spanish actor’s 3-day stay in a Barcelona zoo
Sportstalk
Scores on a few slates
Doo-Dah Parade in Pasadena
Report: What ever happened to the Aquino assassination investigation and what kind of investigation was it?
Zeta and Bubba, the Jewish Santa Claus
WEAU Eau Claire report on Capitol lawn Christmas tree and the Civilian Conservation Corps men who cut it down (and originally planted its forest)
Multi-colored money in our future? (Well, no, as it turns out. More likely, Katherine Ortega floating a trial balloon.)
KNBC Los Angeles report: remotely operated toys help photographer with scared kids
Once Overnightly: headline review, several miscellaneous news items, and weather
On Sesame Street’s 15th anniversary, clips from German, Kuwaiti, Latin American, and Israeli versions of the show
Ellerbee’s close:

Sesame Street teaches the beginnings of proper language, no matter what the language, and it uses riddles as one way to teach. Here’s a riddle: Where does the present include the past and future, the singular include the plural, and the masculine include the feminine? Answer: the state of California. For example, what follows are some rules of interpretations found in most of the California codes containing state statutes. These come from sections 11 through 13 of the Health and Safety Code. Quote: “The present tense includes the past and future tense, and the future the present. The masculine gender includes the feminine. The singular number includes the plural. The plural includes the singular.” Close quote. Mind you, this is supposed to make things more simple. For lawyers, one supposes, surely not for normal people. The state of California argues that without a rule on gender, for instance, a woman might insist a law referring to its subject as “he” applied only to men. A few codes do vary the format, at least one of them in a way that lets you know immediately who you are…sort of. Consider the Business and Profession Codes of the state of California, which take care of the tacky pronoun matter with this rule: “Each gender shall include the other two.” [Ellerbee mouths “Two?”] That’s what happens when lawyers get ahold of English…or sex. And so it goes.
Credits

As with any live broadcast, goofs occurred from time to time on the program. However, the anchors always made the best of it. They would chuckle instead of becoming mortified and simply corrected their mistakes, often injecting a bit of humor. Ellerbee once said this on the program after one such mistake:

“Live TV is a great time saver. It allows you to make a fool of yourself in front of large groups of people instead of one at a time.”

Shortly after Dobyns left, an NBC News executive suggested to Ellerbee that she take Dobyns’s seat now that she was the senior anchor. Ellerbee said she felt no need for that, but agreed to give it a try. Some nights later, she returned to her old spot. During that broadcast, she explained, after showing a tape of her position changes:

“Lately, you may have noticed a bit of Musical Chairs being played on this program. But in three nights, I have spilled three cups of coffee because the coffee was where it should be, but I was not. So I have moved back. And if the executives don’t like it, they may jolly well come and do the show and spill their own coffee.”

A year and a half after its birth, NBC decided to cancel Overnight in November 1983, due to low late night ratings — it aired from 1:30 AM to 2:30 AM — and corresponding lack of ad revenue. In the following days and weeks, thousands of viewers (ten thousand, to be exact) called and wrote letters or telegrams of protest to NBC management. Some even sent checks and cash to defray the costs of producing the program (all the money was returned).

NBC’s news release on the program’s cancellation said the program remained “the model of a one-hour news program,” but it was being canceled because “being the best is not enough” (NBC News President Reuven Frank). Today, more than a decade later and, I think, to their shame, no network has attempted to do such a program.

I was in Los Angeles on a business trip when I heard the news of the cancellation. Later that day, I sought out a Western Union office and sent a telegram to Grant Tinker, chairman of NBC. It’s the only time I’ve ever sent someone a telegram. Although I was sorely tempted to write “**** you. Strong letter to follow.” (with the asterisks), I did not. Instead, I believe I wrote something like this: “Strongly urge you reconsider cancellation of Overnight, the best news program ever.”

A small but pretty damned vexing thing came to light when Linda Ellerbee wrote her book, And So It Goes. It led me to believe that factors other than ratings may have contributed to Overnight‘s demise. Her chapter on the show was titled rather strangely. She closed it like this:

“Why did I call this chapter ‘Leave it to Beaver’? Because that’s what some of the men at NBC News called Overnight, the first network news program run by women.”

During the final few weeks of Overnight‘s tenure at NBC, some of the newswriters were invited to be the newsreaders for the stories they wrote, instead of being the usual “hazy background figures” often referred to on the program.

Just a week or so before the last story was filed on Overnight, editor Patrick Trese, who wrote the sports copy for the program, read one of his own stories. This one was about the coordinator of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. His closing comments follow. “Linda and Bill and Deborah” refers to Linda Ellerbee and Bill Schechner, co-anchors and principal writers, and Deborah Johnson, executive producer.

Patrick Trese:

So, from time to time, hazy figures do emerge from the background. This month, thanks to Linda and Bill and Deborah, it was my turn. And, tonight, I suspect that it’s the last time any of us hazy figures gets to say anything in our own voices.

With Overnight about to close down and our futures uncertain, you might think that we had nothing to celebrate this Thanksgiving, but we did.

Around 6 PM, we shared a turkey dinner with all the fixings in our little office down the hall. Correspondent John Hart burnt a cork and gave everybody a moustache, and we laughed, and Linda read some of your letters out loud. We had a group picture taken on the set and then we all went to work on what we know and the critics tell us is just about the best news program ever.

Sad? Of course. Thankful? You bet. Because we have each other. The best in the business. And we got that way because the people who, now, must take us off the air gave us the chance to show what we hazy figures could do for you, and for ourselves. Most people never get that much, but we did, and we’re grateful tonight. And so it goes.

Linda Ellerbee:

Good night from the mushiest newscast in the business. And there are six more.

Here is the final broadcast of Overnight. It aired the early morning of Saturday, 3 December 1983. Most of this is the digital copy I made from the videotape I recorded that night. The quality improves greatly after the first five minutes, which I got from another source – I missed the opening on the night. Hey, it’s even got commercials, including a seemingly 12-year-old Kevin Costner pretending to know how to use a shockingly clunky looking Apple computer.

A playlist of the entire last week plus extras is here.

On the final program, in the midst of the usual news stories, sports on a roll, one final pig feature (“on the theory that your body never outgrows its need for animal stories”), a very funny “best of” segment, and senior producer Cheryl Gould’s great set of footage with “Beyond the Blue Horizon” sung by Lou Christie underneath*, a few principals gave their commentaries.

*I had this listed as Mike Nesmith’s version for a number of years because Bill Schechner assured me that my original article’s reference to Lou Christie was incorrect, but even YouTube’s automated listing of copyrighted works contained in my Overnight uploads says it’s Lou Christie, so I’ve changed it back.

About halfway through the final program, Schechner introduced editor Pat Trese:

One of the job titles here is editor. It means writing and cutting pieces. Pat Trese’s got that job, or, that’s what they pay him for. And for the past seventeen months, part of the job has been writing and editing sports. We call it “sportstalk.” They are the only words that Linda and I speak that we don’t write ourselves. But Pat’s real job here is to be wise. Every newsroom needs such a person, but few are so lucky as we. Pat’s got some things to say about sports, so tonight, instead of a sports feature, we feature Pat.

Trese:

It all began, as Ted Baxter once said, in a little 50,000 watt NBC radio station in Cleveland, Ohio. I turned twenty-one and got a job writing for the late Tom Manning, the dean of the nation’s sportscasters. Tom had started out announcing the starting lineups for the Indians at League Park with a megaphone. Later, he was second man to Graham McNamee for the first coast-to-coast radio broadcasts of the World Series and the Rose Bowl. That’s the man who taught me to write sportstalk, one of the very first in the business.

He taught me some other things about sports, too. That, despite what the modern sportstalkers tell you, winning isn’t everything. If Billy Martin’s job is up for grabs tonight, it’s because the Yankees finished third, not first, this year. And if amateur athletes are in trouble for using steroids, it’s because they’ve been told that there’s no other place but first place, and if you don’t win the gold medal, you’re nothing at all.

That was not the sportstalk message of the man who trained me, or of his contemporary and friend, Grantland Rice. And if their message seems corny in this age of superdomes and interminable playing seasons and million dollar deals and cocaine busts and labor-management disputes, it does not seem corny here, not tonight and not on this team. For when the one great scorer comes to write against your name, he marks not that you won or lost, but how you played the game. That was the message of Grantland Rice. And there is this to say about Overnight: It’s the only place I can recite those lines with a straight face.

Later, Schechner gave his final words:

Time for last words, for the last time. My turn first.

Two important things happened here. One, it seems clear that you there and we here broke the barrier of the medium that connects us. We involved each other in the ideas that were this program. We showed there is more than one way to send and receive the news. The experiment succeeded. Will the technique spread? Let us all hope.

Well, that’s business. Let’s talk about life. We were not afraid of each other’s successes in here. When one of us grew, it did not mean that another had to shrink. There was plenty of room. The producers, editors, researchers, technicians behind me and in a bunch of rooms on other floors and in other cities were the sinew of what went on here. It is on their wings that this show flew, and together we went higher than any one of us could have reached alone. And our work was multiplied by a lot of things: love, respect, wisecracks, irreverence, bad and good taste, and a fair share of wisdom.

It was a news show. It was a high time. It was one hell of a ride.

Ellerbee brought down the curtain this way:

Before we leave, thank you. Thank you for the more than ten thousand letters, telegrams, and calls. And for the toys, flowers, books, records, songs about Overnight, and the money, which we sent back. What you said we take with us.

I think that it is not as important that NBC took this program off the air as it is that NBC put this program on the air. That was something. We go smiling.

The final quote is from Mark Twain, discussing the young missionary who went out among the cannibals. Said Twain: “They listened with the greatest of interest to everything he had to say. And then they ate him.” This is the three hundred sixty-seventh edition of Overnight. There are no more.

And so it goes.

During the final credits, after “It Was Just One of Those Things” finished, the final verse of “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” was heard, sung by the cast of the Mary Tyler Moore Show. MTM‘s last episode featured the cancellation of the news program. Grant Tinker, at one time Moore’s husband, was the chairman of NBC when Overnight was cancelled.

Just before fade to black, they showed a close-up of several of the toys viewers had sent in during the final days. (Linda Ellerbee always had a small duck on her desk, hence the deluge of animals and wind-up robots and such, and hence her present company’s name: Lucky Duck Productions.) Smack dab in the middle, to my surprise, was a walking 6″ tall wind-up signboard man quite familiar to me:

overnight-signboard

It wasn’t a huge surprise, though. Earlier in the last week, on the night they received my package, they put the signboard man at the front of the anchor desk, next to Ellerbee’s lucky duck, and it changed positions a few times during commercial breaks:

I don’t think I could have asked for a nicer “thank you.” Thanks to the wonders of modern technology and also to the fact that I’m a lazy bum and never purge old word processing documents, I can now reveal to you what the signs on the front and back of the little guy said:

                        WITH SPECIAL THANKS TO
   BRAVO,
                    Linda Ellerbee    Bill Schechner
 OVERNIGHT,                 Lloyd Dobyns

   BRAVO!           Deborah Johnson   Cheryl Gould
                    Gerald Polikoff   Marvin Einhorn
                    Peter Basil       Russ Ross
                    David Levens      Truus Bos
                    Cathy Porter      Darrell Strong
  ENCORE,           Philip Wasserman  Daniel Webster
                    Patrick Trese     Dave Berg
  ENCORE!           Katherine Field   Cynthia Brush
                    Kimberly McCarthy Debra Pettit
                    Roberto Soto      Avrom Zaritsky
                    Neal Baker        Ellen Harris
                    Hope Chodosh      Patricia Lewis
                    Piera DiMichelle  Jered Dawaliby
                    Joyce Hurley      David Herz
                    Frank O'Shea      Vance Babb

                               - et al -

Overnight‘s final broadcast was in the early morning hours of Saturday, December 3, 1983. Thus, for this constant viewer, began a very long winter of broadcast news discontent.

In 1984, Overnight was posthumously honored with an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University award for excellence in journalism. The jury said it was “conceivably the best-written and most intelligent television news anywhere.” This is the clip that was shown during the award ceremony:

“We tried to do the news without frills, without fluffy hairdos, without graphics. It does say something about our business that is not very pretty. It didn’t matter how good the show was. What counted was money.”

– Linda Ellerbee

Here’s the entire crew of Overnight, in the order they were presented in the final show’s closing credits (left to right, top to bottom of each set).

TOP Security: Reginald Lewis, Stan Kagmarski, Jr.; Makeup: Candy Carell, Deborah Harrin; Stage Hands: John Harty, John Trautwein, Jack Wilner
MIDDLE Broadcast Operations: Tony Ramos; Teleprompter: Dave Auerbach; Electronic Maintenance: Mike Girardo
BOTTOM Audio Assistant: Lynne Hendel; Transmission: Leroy Brown; Studio Supervisor: George Mendez

TOP Camera: Bob Zweck, Nestor Torres; Lighting: Rick McGuinness; Library Researcher: Robert Meyer
MIDDLE Electronic Graphics: Susan Connal; Videotape Operators: Ivan Kleiman, Steven Johnson; Graphics: Burtis Scott, Kathryn Miles
BOTTOM EJ Maintenance: Sal Grasso; Tape Librarians: Ralph Rangel, Tony Gugino; Burbank Control: Jay Roper, Director

TOP Washington Control: Bill Kreps, Director; Tape Editors – Washington: Connie Gochis, Rich Clark; Tape Editors: Vince Sarubbi, Lonnie Tabman
MIDDLE Tape Editors: Sonny Hansen, Phyllis Famiglietti, George White, Vinnie Novak, Mike Kaas, Ilene Schneider
BOTTOM Tape Editors: Cara DeVito, Jim Byrne; Tape Supervisors: Lou Giachetto, George Bushell; Video: Carl M. Henry III

TOP Stage Manager: David Herz; Audio: David J. Levens; Associate Director: Bern Meyer
MIDDLE Directors: Marvin Einhorn, Gerald Polikoff; Researcher: Patricia Lewis; Technical Director: Peter Basil
BOTTOM Desk Assistant: Hope L. Chodosh; Production Associate: Ellen Harris; Production Staff: Jered Dawaliby

TOP Production Staff: Claudia Pascarelli, Peira DeMichele; Newsreel: Robert Soto (Newswriter), Ralph Martucci (Editor); The Week in Review: Bruce Burger (Editor), Kim McCarthy (Newswriter)
MIDDLE Unit Manager: Vance Babb; News & Feature Assistant: Neal Baker; Production Manager: Frank O’Shea
BOTTOM Technical Manager: Frank Garofalo; Newswriter – Burbank: Dave Berg; Newswriter – Washington: Debra Pettit
NOT PICTURED Production Secretary: Cheryl Funaro

TOP Newswriters: Cynthia Brush, Avrom Zaritsky, Katharine Field
MIDDLE Editor: Patrick Trese; Producer – Burbank: Daniel Webster; Producer – London: Truus Bos
BOTTOM Producer – Chicago: Darrel Strong; Producer: Philip Wasserman; Producer – Washington: Cathy Porter

TOP Principal Writers: Linda Ellerbee, Bill Schechner; With Special Thanks To: Herb Dudnick; General Editor: Linda Ellerbee
MIDDLE Senior Producer: Cheryl Gould; Executive Producer: Deborah B. Johnson
BOTTOM Locations: Archie P. Lago (with viewer toys); anchor desk; Ellerbee’s lucky duck

(It occurs to me that “Locations: Archie P. Lago” has got to be last pun perpetrated by the writers.)

Postscript:

As I review this appreciation while updating it in early 1997, some months after the rescue of Mystery Science Theater 3000 – due in no small part to a very organized effort by thousands of people who liked the show – I have to wonder if Overnight might have survived if the Internet were as ubiquitous in 1983 as it is now. Just think of the increase in support and press the show could have and almost certainly would have received. Ah, well…c’est la mort.

Once every year or two, I review my tapes of the final week of Overnight, marvel at its style and substance once again, and am not surprised in the slightest that I miss it just as much as the first week it was off the air. The news, of course, is old, but the energy and intelligence that was Overnight shines through brightly.

Second postscript, April 1998:

Good golly. Something I never expected has happened: All of the principals of Overnight have now seen this appreciation. In the space of about ten days, I’ve heard from anchors Linda Ellerbee, Lloyd Dobyns, and Bill Schechner, as well as Herb Dudnick, inventor of the insides of Overnight. Linda visited this page first and advised the rest of the folks by e-mail. They all wrote to me and had the most magnanimous comments. They all made me feel rather proud of my small effort. I’m quite glad that the inventors of Overnight now know that their efforts of fifteen years ago [thirty-three years ago as of this 2016 update] are remembered and appreciated, and, what’s more, they’re still having a positive effect out here.