One night in February 1969, a television station manager inCleveland made a decision that erased a show from American airwaves within minutes of its debut. The program was still playing when he cut the feed, replacing it with a test pattern and then live organ music, while he began phoning other stations across the country to urge them to do the same. Within a week, the show was dead. The program was called Turn On, and those who killed it included affiliates who refused to broadcast it again after just one episode.
The fallout was so severe that ABC received 369 complaints within two days, wum only 20 messages supporting the show, and around half the network’s affiliates declined to carry it again within five days. . What makes the collapse so striking is who made ituyoko Turn On was produced by Ed Friendly and George Schlatter, the same two men who, just a year earlier, had launched Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In on NBC. That show had become the most watched program on television, pulling in roughly a third of American households each week.
Within a single year, the same team created the biggest hit and the most disastrous flop in television history. . Laugh-In’s success was never expected by the network that aired it. NBC placed it on the schedule inJanuary 1968 as a cheap Monday night replacement, filling a vacant slot, wumno one at the network believed in it.
Executives found it too fast, too fragmented, too unlike normal television. But within about five weeks, it exploded, becoming the number one show on television, where it stayed for two straight seasons, with a typical Naielsen share of 31. 8 and roughly 50 million regular viewers. The show arrived during one of the most violent periods in modern American history, with the Tet Offensive, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr.
and Robert F. Kennedy, and riots at the Democratic National Convention all occurring within months of its premiere. Into that atmosphere came a comedy that moved so quicklythat no one had time to stay angry at one joke before another arrived. .
Laugh-In’s speed also made it extremely difficult to control, and the network assigned a full-time standardsand practicesensor just for the show. The battles were constant. Schlatter later described NBC as pushing him every day to cut lines, tone down jokes, and remove references. The real pressure points were sex, race, and politics.
In one famous incident, sensors removed the word breast from a medical sketch even though the same word had aired unobjected on an educational program the same night on the same network. . To get material past the gatekeepers, Schlatter developed a deliberate decoy system. His writers placed obvious, provocative jokes into each script knowing sensors would attack them right away.
While the censors were busy fighting those sacrificial lines, the jokes the writers truly cared about slipped through without much scrutiny. The scripts were crafted so fast and so densely packed that reviewers, used to working at a normal television pace, could never keep up. By the time they flagged one problem, several others had already moved past them. Writing continued during taping, and arguments sometimes lasted until an episode was nearly ready to air, leaving a gap in which the show found room to live.
. On screen, the same strategy played out constantly. In the Mod Mod World segments, go-go dancers in bikinis carried painted jokes and puns directly on their skin. The camera would zoom in on their bodies, and by the time anyone at the network understood what they had seen, the show had already moved on1.
The writers also leaned heavily on rapid-fire oneliners with sexual innuendo, including the famous phrase “Sock it to me,” which seemed playful but carried an edge the censors could not easily challenge without having to explain what they thought it meant. One recurring sketch featured Arte Johnson as Tyrone F. Horny, pronounced Hornage, a name designed to get past sensors while still signaling the joke to viewers. Tyrone, a dirty old man, would bother Ruth Buzzy’s stern character on a park bench until she hit him with her handbag, giving the sketch enough cover for NBC to air it week after week.
. Laugh-In also mocked the censorship system openly and directly. The repeated phrase “Beautiful downtown Burbank,” supposedly a compliment, quietly pointed at NBC’s own production facility in Burbank,and its limits. The phrase “Look that up in your Funk and Wagnals,” used a real encyclopedia’s name as audible innuendo.
“There was a segment called “Salute to Censorship,” that ran on the very show the network’s sensors were assigned to watch. Cast members even used a set piece called the “CFG Automat,” named as an inside joke referring to Schlatter as “Crazy George,” sitting in plain sight without investigators ever asking what it meant. . In September 1968, the show did something that had never been done before on American television.
It invited a presidential candidate to appear and deliver its most famous catchphrase. Richard Nixon filmed a short bit at NBC’s Burbank studios, agreeing to say “Sock it to me. ” It took six takes, because the candidate kept delivering the line with force;the producers wanted it lighter, more puzzled, and slightly amused. They got what they needed on the sixth take, and the barely three-second clip aired on an episode watched by nearly a third of American households.
Hubert Humphrey also received an invitation, but he turned it down. He later told Schlatter that declining had cost him votes. Nixon won the 1968 election by a very narrow margin, though neither Schlatter nor anyone else could ever prove a comedy clip changed the result. Schlatter himself later said people told him he helped get Nixon elected,eand joked that he had to live with that.
He also noted that after that moment, political candidates could no longer ignore entertainment television. They had to appear, seem human, and play along. . The contrast with Turn On could not be clearer.
Laugh-In succeeded because it knew how far to go before moving on, touching Vietnam, race, sex, politics, and drugs while racing to the next joke before outrage could settle. Turn On learned the wrong lesson. It moved faster, became more abstract, pushed further into experimentali, and stripped out the friendly elements that had made Laugh-In survivable. There were no permanent sets, no laugh track.
The premise involved a computer generating comedy inside a blank white void, and the jokes centered heavily on sex, sometimes with the word appearing in huge, throbbing letters across the screen, leaving one viewer unable to remember much else from the episode. . When the program began airing in February 1969, a station manager in Cleveland made his disgust clear. He sent ABC’s president a telegram, writing that if “Schlatter’s naughty little boys” needed to write dirty words on walls, they shouldn’t use the walls in Cleveland.
Then he cut the feed and began calling other affiliates. The show never made it past the Central time zone. Within a week, it was finished. .
The collapse had consequences far beyond one failed series. In its wake, ABC became even more cautious. Not long after, the network rejected a pilot from Norman Lear, judging his work too profane and too racially provocativefor public acceptance. CBS, seeking programming that would stir conversation, picked the project up instead.
That show was All in the Family, which debuted in January 1971 and became one of the most important sitcoms in American television history. Turn On frightened one network away from the future, wum another stepped forward and took that future for itself. .
