For most of the history of American television, the country saw its programming through a handful of broadcast networks, delivered free over the air by hundreds of local affiliate stations. Above the rest stood the big four: NBC, CBS, ABC, and Fox. For decades, these networks did more than air shows; they created the television industry itself and shaped the way all traditional media operated. Yet the road to that position of dominance was anything but direct, and the rivalry that defined the medium had its roots in an even older one.
The story begins with radio. NBC made its first broadcast on November 15, 1926, the creation of RCA, then the world’s leading maker of radio receivers. The network was launched in part to give people another reason to buy radios. It became the first and only nationwide radio network in the country.
In 1927, Arthur Judson, who managed both the Philadelphia Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic, approached NBC hoping to broadcast some of their performances. NBC said no. Judson refused to accept the rejection, so he assembled his own small chain of radio stations to air the concerts, calling it United Independent Broadcasters. The name soon changed to the Columbia Broadcasting System after the parent company of Columbia Records briefly invested.
From the very start, then, CBS stood as the underdog rival to a far larger and more established NBC. During the 1930s, the two networks developed different identities. CBS drew listeners by leaning into news coverage, while NBC concentrated on music and comedy. NBC grew so quickly that it acquired multiple affiliates in the same cities, which led to a split of its programming into two networks: the Blue Network and the more profitable Red Network, which carried many of the popular comedy shows.
That success created a serious problem. In 1941, the FCC ruled that no company could own more than one network, and NBC was forced to sell one. The company let go of its less profitable Blue Network, which passed into the hands of Edward Noble, the businessman who decades earlier had bought the Life Savers candy company for a few thousand dollars and turned it into a national brand. Noble renamed the Blue Network ABC, the American Broadcasting Company, and it began its life at a distant third place, far behind NBC and CBS.
By the late 1940s, a new front opened in the battle for dominance: comedy. CBS aggressively recruited NBC’s top comedic talent, using a legal arrangement that involved buying the naming rights to the performers and paying them at a different tax rate. It worked. The contracts CBS offered were far more attractive, and the network succeeded in luring away many of NBC’s biggest stars, most famously Jack Benny, who had been with NBC for 23 years.
By the end of the decade, the two networks were competing nearly neck and neck, while ABC remained stuck in third place, unable to afford programming of the same quality. For ABC, the turning point came not from within television but from Hollywood. In 1948, the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Paramount Pictures that a studio could no longer own both the movies it made and the theaters that exhibited them.
The decision forced Paramount to spin off its chain of more than 700 theaters into an independent company. That new company bought ABC in 1953 for $25 million, giving the network much-needed stability and access to serious capital. The following year, ABC used its new resources to strike a deal with Walt Disney, helping fund the construction of Disneyland in exchange for a 35 percent ownership stake and a commitment from Disney to produce a show for the network. The relationship led to a production deal with Warner Brothers as well.
For the first time, ABC had the funds and the partnerships to compete as an equal. For more than three decades after that, NBC, CBS, and ABC ruled as the big three networks, airing the overwhelming majority of American television programming. That arrangement held until 1985, when Rupert Murdoch, the Australian media magnate who had expanded his father’s newspaper company into a global enterprise, acquired the film studio 20th Century Fox. He then purchased seven television stations in major American markets, including New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Dallas.
Within a year, he used them to launch a new broadcast network, simply called Fox. Few believed Fox had any chance. Viewers had grown up with the same three networks for as long as they had owned televisions, and the notion of a fourth network succeeding struck most as nearly impossible. Fox’s strategy was deliberate: it would air edgier content designed to attract a younger audience.
In its first few years, the network debuted Married with Children, America’s Most Wanted, Beverly Hills 90210, and, most significantly, The Simpsons, which had originated as segments on Fox’s sketch show The Tracey Ullman Show. The lineup gave Fox a distinctly youthful identity compared to leaders like NBC’s Cheers, CBS’s 60 Minutes, and ABC’s Roseanne. Fox further cemented its position in 1996 with a $2. 5 billion deal to acquire New World Communications, making it the country’s largest owner of television stations.
In the following decade, American Idol became the network’s signature hit, securing Fox’s status as a legitimate member of the club. The ownership structures behind these networks shifted repeatedly over the following years. In 1995, Disney acquired ABC in a $19 billion deal, at the time the second-largest corporate takeover in American history. The purchase closed a circle that had begun more than four decades earlier with the Disneyland financing arrangement.
In 2000, CBS was acquired by Viacom for roughly $40 billion, and the two companies have since gone through repeated mergers and separations, though at the time of this account they were again under the same corporate roof. NBC, meanwhile, was brought together with Universal in 2004 through a series of complex deals and became the parent company of the streaming platform Peacock. Hulu was originally launched as a joint venture between NBC and Fox, intended as an online home for their network shows, but Disney and ABC later took full control of it. In a final twist, Disney acquired 20th Century Fox, the film studio, but not the Fox television network.
That meant Fox, the first network ever paired with a major film studio, ended up as the only one of the four that remained independent. Across the categories of programming, NBC proved the most consistent. Meet the Press, which began as an NBC radio show in 1945 and moved to television in 1947, stands as the longest-running show in American television history. NBC launched Today in 1952, and it has aired every morning ever since, while ABC’s Good Morning America began in 1975; CBS and Fox never developed a comparable morning presence.
In late night, NBC started The Tonight Show in 1954, hosted most famously by Johnny Carson for three decades beginning in 1962 and currently by Jimmy Fallon. Fox’s very first broadcast in 1986 was a short-lived late night talk show hosted by Joan Rivers, and the network tried again in 1993 with a brief Chevy Chase vehicle, but it never found lasting success. ABC’s only major late night show has been Jimmy Kimmel Live, which began in 2003. Children’s programming also followed a pattern of early NBC innovation and later responses.
NBC debuted the Howdy Doody Show in 1947, widely recognized as the first major American children’s show. CBS answered in the 1950s with Captain Kangaroo, which ran for nearly three decades. Fox introduced its Fox Kids Saturday morning block in 1990, featuring shows like Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and Bobby’s World, and ABC launched its own Saturday morning lineup to compete. In sketch comedy, NBC again led the way with Saturday Night Live, on the air continuously since 1975 and never truly matched by the others, though Fox made aggressive attempts with In Living Color in 1990 and Mad TV in 1995.
Sports provided another arena of competition. NBC aired the first coast-to-coast radio broadcast in 1927, covering the Rose Bowl. ABC built a reputation for sports broadcasting during the 1960s and acquired ESPN in the 1980s. For Fox, a turning point came with a $1.
5 billion contract to broadcast NFL games, won directly from CBS, which marked the moment many industry observers began treating Fox as a genuine contender. The network followed that up with similar agreements covering the NHL and MLB. The pattern repeated itself three times. NBC built its dominance from the earliest days of radio.
CBS rose from an outsider to a genuine challenger. ABC clawed its way from distant third to full equal. And Fox, against nearly universal expectations, broke into a closed circle that had held steady for decades. In every case, the newcomer was dismissed as unlikely to succeed, and in every case, the new network found a way to distinguish itself, attract an audience, and scale into a national institution.
The era of unchallenged broadcast dominance has since faded under the pressure of streaming, but the networks that fought for supremacy for nearly a century remain the foundation on which American television was built.
