How the First Nite of Nick-at-Nite Came to Be

Before Nick-at-Nite

Geraldine Laybourne, former President of Nickelodeon: In 1984, I’d just taken over Nickelodeon, and we had a lot of improvements to do. For one thing, we knew that, in June 1985, Arts & Entertainment, which had been running overnight at Nickelodeon from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m., was going away and becoming its own network.

My bosses felt like I was doing a great job with Nickelodeon — we had doubled the ratings in six months, we were getting the right voice and everything was going well. Still, they kept telling me they were going to hire somebody else to run the overnight. But I basically said, “Let us run it. Don’t hire somebody from the outside. We’ve done heroic work.”

They ultimately agreed, but we only had two months to figure out what we were going to do. We couldn’t have anything ready for June 1st. So we ran “Camp Nickelodeon” for a month — which was just 24 hours of Nickelodeon’s children’s programming — then Nick-at-Nite would launch on July 1st.

Scott Webb, Producer in Nickelodeon On-Air Promotion Department: To buy us time, the decision was made to just let Nickelodeon go 24 hours a day. That didn’t exactly make sense to people as a long-term solution, so, the question was: “What could we put on that would be appropriate on the back end of Nickelodeon?”

The acquisitions department had recently added Lassie to the Nickelodeon schedule and that did well. So for the overnight, the acquisitions department said they could acquire more black-and-white programming like Dennis the Menace, The Donna Reed Show and Route 66. This was the bottom of the barrel, so the assignment was given to the on-air promotions department to create an identity that would make sense as a complement to Nickelodeon.

Alan Goodman, co-founder of Fred/Alan Inc., consultants hired by Nickelodeon: Truth is, Nick-at-Nite was always going to be reruns because they didn’t have any kind of a production budget. They couldn’t do anything else, and reruns were very affordable. When my partner Fred Seibert and I were brought on to help develop the identity for Nick-at-Nite, Debby Beece from programming said to us, “I don’t know what to do. All I can afford are these lousy black-and-white reruns.” I looked at the shows that were available to her, and I thought, “I don’t think these are lousy shows.” I loved Dennis the Menace when I was a kid. I loved The Donna Reed Show when I was a kid. Those were primetime staples in my family that I had very fond memories of watching.

Debby Beece, former Senior Vice President of Programming for Nickelodeon: My recollection is that we were given those shows by Viacom and didn’t have much choice about it. We had a lot of concerns about how they would do. These were shows that were on television on other networks, notably broadcast as reruns, and we wondered if anyone would bother to watch them on Nickelodeon.

Laybourne: I have to give a lot of credit to Debby Beece, who came back early from maternity leave to help launch Nick-at-Nite. She was a very high level thinker, and we didn’t want to turn our backs on kids. For Nick-at-Nite, we had just $1 million to launch it, which is basically nothing. 

We were buying episodes of Mr. Ed for $500 an episode. There are a lot of funny stories from that time, like one distributor from Kansas City came with a suitcase full of shows to sell to us — which was suspect in the biggest way. He went to the Port Authority and wanted to get a cup of coffee, so he left his suitcases in the middle of the Port Authority and they were stolen. He was so shocked. He said, “Why would anybody take these suitcases?” We were like, “This is New York City, buddy.”

Fred Seibert, co-founder of Fred/Alan Inc.: You could buy these shows for a dime on the dollar compared to contemporary color shows. In fact, if you know My Three Sons, the first set of seasons was in black-and-white, then the show went to color. Well, we could only afford the black-and-white ones. Still, we said, “Look, you can’t just pick any old show and put it on. You have to screen these shows and understand that they can stand the test of time.” It couldn’t be pure nostalgia because there’s a lot of nostalgia for a lot of old things that are crappy or that just don’t play in the modern world.

Beece: The shows were good TV. That was an important part of our brand promise.

How Nickelodeon at Night Became “Nick-at-Nite”

Laybourne: There was a big debate about calling the overnight “Nickelodeon” or not. I was fighting for a new name because we needed a different designation for advertisers. We did make a vow that Nickelodeon’s loyal audience wouldn’t feel like the programming wasn’t for them — that, whatever was on, wouldn’t be inappropriate for them — but it would have a different packaging. That was the main thing for me. Plus, I wanted a name and an attitude that would attract advertising.

Seibert: Debby Beece came up with the name “Nick-at-Nite.”

Laybourne: There was a bit of a debate of whether or not we should spell “night” wrong, as N-I-T-E instead of N-I-G-H-T. Ultimately, we decided that we should spell it wrong. Even though I had been a school teacher, we thought Nick-at-Nite looked better on a logo.

Scott Nash, co-founder of Corey McPherson Nash, the design firm that created the Nick-at-Nite logo: With Nickelodeon, we had done a flexible, ever-changing logo. We claimed a color (orange) and a typeface, but the shape of the logo always changed. When we got to Nick-at-Nite, we again wanted to do a flexi-logo, and we had this idea based around nostalgia. Since they were going to show things like The Donna Reed Show, our idea was to take vernacular design signage as our model — or, the sort of things you might see on a diner or something in the 1950s. We proposed various, flexible, geometric shapes — a moon, an oval, a diamond, etc. — under a consistent logo configuration on top. I always think of the Nick-at-Nite logo as a sign that would appear on some building, like some mid-century modern diner or something.

How Nick-at-Nite Found Its Identity

Laybourne: For the packaging of Nick-at-Nite, we turned to the same people who did the packaging for Nickelodeon: Fred Seibert and Alan Goodman.

Seibert: Alan Goodman and I started working with Nickelodeon in June of 1984, when they were the lowest-rated cable network in America. Bob Pittman, who ran the company, and Gerry Laybourne thought that Alan and I could help. We had worked at MTV and built the brand there. So, we went in with Nickelodeon and worked with them very hard to reorganize how they thought about telling their audience about Nickelodeon. And by January of 1985, they were the number one cable network, where they stayed for 25 years.

When it came to the overnight, they had tried out some ideas on their own, but once they figured out they weren’t going to work, they came to Fred and me. They explained what they needed: to have something that fills the time between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. Then they said, “There’s only one problem, the company has licensed 250 episodes of the old Donna Reed Show — that terrible sitcom where Donna Reed wears pearls all the time and is perfectly dressed while she’s making dinner for the family.”

Alan and I were thrilled because we had previously been at ABC, pitching them an idea for what we were calling “Oldies Television,” where they would run old black-and-white episodes of Father Knows Best and other shows like that. ABC had said to us, “We can’t do that! We’re a network. We can’t run black-and-white shows. People will laugh at us. That’ll do terribly.”

Alan and I were very frustrated because we were huge fans of oldies radio. We thought, “Radio has an oldies channel, why can’t television?” So when Gerry told us they had all these Donna Reed episodes, our antennae went up. We said, “That’s great. Let’s build a whole channel around this idea!”

Goodman: We liked these shows, but we still had to wrap our heads around how we were going to make this all work. Here were shows that were easily 20 to 25 years out of anybody’s consciousness, and because of that, they were perceived as having no value. We thought, “We need to put some sort of spin on it in terms of what context to enjoy them in.” So, we made a comparison to David Letterman. In the same way that Late Night with David Letterman was a show about a show, this was a network about a network. He and his head writer Merrill Markoe took all of the tropes of late-night television and stood them on their head. That’s what we wanted to do with Nick-at-Nite.

I was also inspired by these little bits they would do on Rocky and Bullwinkle where, before the commercial, Bullwinkle would say, “Hey, Rocky, watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat!” and he sticks his hand in the hat and Rocky goes, “This never works.” Then it would go to commercials, and when the show came back, it would be a lion, a bear or a rhinoceros. As a kid, you’d wait around to see which one it was. I always loved the idea of those, so I wanted to do that for Nick-at-Nite. We did a ton of spots where this set gets built in stop-motion, complete with the Nick-at-Nite moon in the window, then the guy turns on the TV and the TV turns into something, like a gorilla — it changed every time. We did dozens of them, and they ran at the top of every hour. It was all tying into this point-of-view of not taking this too seriously.

Seibert: Overall, we said, “Here’s what’s going to make us different. Everyone else looks at all this stuff and goes, ‘Ugh, reruns,’ but we're going to go, ‘Oh boy! Reruns!’” We had built MTV as the real first media brand in television. We told a story to the audience about MTV and what it was. It wasn’t merely “Watch A Flock of Seagulls” and “Watch Duran Duran.” MTV was a special place. It was a club that we could all join.

When we got to Nickelodeon, we said, “All you’re doing is promoting individual shows like everybody else does on television. It will be much smarter to position Nickelodeon as the greatest kids club that ever existed.” So, we suggested doing the same thing with this 10-hour block that would end up becoming Nick-at-Nite. These shows may not be the greatest things ever made, but they’re really good. Let’s only pick really good shows that people will enjoy, and then we can proudly promote ourselves as the place where it’s “TV for the TV Generation” — it’s TV Land. We actually started using the TV Land moniker before they had a channel called TV Land.

Beece: We decided it was important to create a unique environment for the shows to be presented in. We put a lot of effort into creating promotions that were campy and funny, and had an ironic sense that we were presenting reruns as though they were hip. 

Nick-at-Nite Launch: July 1, 1985

Seibert: To my memory, it did very well from the get-go. Within months, it was the number one cable network in prime time.

Laybourne: We got so much viewer mail so quickly. We made old TV look good.

Goodman: I loved working on Nick-at-Nite, and it really made me feel proud when people would say they watched Nick-at-Nite — not the specific shows on Nick-at-Nite — but just Nick-at-Nite. That told us that we had created this network with a point-of-view that made people feel like it spoke to them.