If you were a typical American adult in 1965, your Sunday evening had a specific shape that almost everyone in the country shared. After dinner, around 8 PM Eastern, the family would gather in the living room in front of the television set. The Ed Sullivan Show would come on. For the next hour, you would watch a strange and wonderful sequence of acts: an opera singer followed by a stand-up comedian followed by a juggler followed by a pop band followed by a Broadway dance number followed by a brief interview with a movie star followed by a trained poodle act. None of it had any obvious internal logic. None of it was related to any of the other parts. And tens of millions of other American families were watching exactly the same thing at exactly the same moment, so that on Monday morning everyone at work, everyone at school, everyone everywhere had a shared experience to talk about.
The variety show was the cultural mass medium that television was originally designed to be. Before the format fragmented into sitcoms, dramas, news, sports, and a thousand other niches, the variety show was a structurally simple and culturally enormous concept: bring different kinds of entertainment under one umbrella, hosted by a friendly personality, broadcast to the entire nation at the same time. The format had inherited from vaudeville, which had been the dominant form of live American entertainment from the 1880s to the 1920s — a sequence of acts, each different, each short, each designed to please as wide an audience as possible. Television in the 1940s and 1950s essentially imported the vaudeville format and broadcast it directly into American living rooms, and the result was one of the most popular kinds of entertainment in the history of the medium.
From roughly 1948 to 1980, the variety show was the dominant prime-time format on American network television. Almost every major broadcasting personality of the era hosted one. The audiences were enormous — single broadcasts regularly drew 30 to 50 million viewers, and the biggest events drew over 60 million. By comparison, the most-watched scripted programs on television today rarely exceed 10 million viewers in their first broadcast. The variety show was watched by an audience that no modern entertainment format can come close to matching.
The dominant figure in the variety show era was Ed Sullivan, a former newspaper columnist with an awkward on-camera presence, a distinctive way of holding his arms across his chest, and a famously stiff manner that should have made him terrible on television but somehow made him perfect. The Ed Sullivan Show ran from 1948 to 1971 — twenty-three years, more than 1,000 episodes, week in and week out, every Sunday night at 8 PM Eastern, on CBS. It was the most influential variety show in television history, and arguably the most influential single television program of any kind during the years it ran.
Sullivan's genius was as a booker rather than as a performer. He had connections everywhere — in opera, on Broadway, in sports, in politics, in classical music, in nightclub comedy, in jazz, in popular music — and he had a remarkable instinct for which acts would matter to a national audience before anyone else realized it. He booked Elvis Presley three times in 1956 and 1957 (the famous broadcast when the cameras filmed Elvis only from the waist up was actually his third appearance, not his first). He booked the Beatles for their first American television appearance on February 9, 1964, drawing 73 million viewers — about 40 percent of the entire U.S. population of the time, and one of the largest single television audiences in American history. He booked the Rolling Stones, the Doors, the Jackson 5, the Supremes, James Brown, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin. He also booked classical pianists, ballet dancers, opera singers, Borscht Belt comedians, novelty acts (the famous plate-spinners, the trained Italian mouse Topo Gigio), Broadway casts performing entire musical numbers, and political figures.
What was extraordinary about the Sullivan show was its mix. On a single Sunday night, you might watch the Beatles play three songs, followed by an Italian opera tenor, followed by a stand-up comedian doing six minutes of material, followed by a Broadway cast performing a number from the new hit show, followed by a circus act. The audience was the entire American family — children, teenagers, parents, grandparents — and Sullivan's job was to find acts that would somehow appeal to everyone in the room. He did this for twenty-three years, and the result was a kind of cultural unity that has not really existed in American mass entertainment since.
If The Ed Sullivan Show was the king of the variety format, The Carol Burnett Show was its queen. Burnett's show ran from 1967 to 1978 on CBS — eleven seasons, 279 episodes — and is widely regarded as one of the best variety shows ever made. Where Sullivan was a presenter and a booker, Burnett was a performer at the center of her own show, surrounded by a brilliant repertory cast that included Harvey Korman, Vicki Lawrence, Tim Conway, and Lyle Waggoner. The cast performed sketches, parodies, and musical numbers together, often with such energy and improvisation that you can see Korman struggling to keep a straight face during many of the most famous bits.
The Carol Burnett Show specialized in long-form sketches that played like miniature movies, including elaborate parodies of Hollywood films and recurring characters that the audience came to love. The most famous parody — 'Went With the Wind!' — was a fifteen-minute spoof of 'Gone With the Wind' in which Burnett wore a dress made out of a curtain (with the curtain rod still attached across her shoulders), and the audience laughter at her entrance went on so long that Burnett had to wait nearly thirty seconds before she could deliver her next line. The episode is one of the most-watched moments in variety show history.
The show's recurring characters became cultural touchstones. The dysfunctional 'Family' sketches with Burnett, Lawrence, and Conway as a group of perpetually battling Southerners. The 'Charwoman' character that Burnett performed at the end of every episode, in costume and makeup, singing 'It's Time to Say So Long' to a sold-out studio audience. The Tim Conway 'Mr. Tudball' sketches with Burnett as his perpetually exasperated secretary 'Mrs. Wiggins.' These were not just comedy bits — they were running stories that the audience came to know and love over years.
Burnett ended the show in 1978, partly because the format was becoming harder to sell to networks and partly because she felt she had said what she had to say with it. The decision marked the symbolic end of the great era of network variety shows, and almost nothing in the format has equaled her show in the decades since.
The Sullivan and Burnett shows were the two giants, but the variety format had dozens of other beloved entries during its golden age, each with its own personality and devoted audience.
The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (1967-1969) was a brilliant, controversial show hosted by folk-singing brothers Tom and Dick Smothers. It mixed musical performances with sharp political comedy that often tangled with CBS censors over its commentary on the Vietnam War, civil rights, and the cultural upheavals of the late 1960s. The show was famously canceled by CBS in 1969 over a content dispute, and it remains one of the most influential cancellations in television history.
The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour (1971-1974) starred the husband-and-wife musical duo, who performed songs together, did sketches with their daughter Chastity making the occasional appearance, and made affectionate jokes at each other's expense in ways that became one of the most popular acts on television. The show survived their actual divorce — for a brief period they continued to host the show together while no longer married, which created a strange and beloved on-screen tension.
The Flip Wilson Show (1970-1974) was the first major variety show hosted by a Black entertainer, and Wilson's brilliant character work — especially his cross-dressing 'Geraldine' character with the catchphrase 'The devil made me do it' — made him one of the biggest stars on television for a few years. The show was massively popular and is now considered a major moment in the integration of American mainstream entertainment.
The Dean Martin Show (1965-1974) was the perpetually relaxed, drink-in-hand singing-and-comedy hour hosted by the Rat Pack member Dean Martin, who broadcast a kind of effortless charm that made the show feel like the world's most enjoyable cocktail party. Martin's apparent improvisation and refusal to take anything seriously — including his own show — became a beloved style.
Other notable shows: The Andy Williams Show, The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour, The Tom Jones Show, The Jackie Gleason Show, Hee Haw (the country-themed variety show that ran from 1969 to 1992 in syndication), The Lawrence Welk Show (1955-1982, the famously gentle 'champagne music' show beloved by older viewers), and The Donny and Marie Show (1976-1979, with the Osmond siblings as hosts).
The decline of the variety show happened relatively quickly, between about 1978 and 1982, and it was driven by several converging forces.
The first was audience fragmentation. As cable television began to spread in the late 1970s and early 1980s, viewers had more channels to choose from. The 30 percent of the audience that had been watching variety shows because they were the only thing on suddenly had alternatives — sports, movies, news, eventually MTV — and they spread out. Without the captive mass audience, the variety show's economics fell apart.
The second was the rise of the half-hour sitcom and the hour-long drama, both of which were more efficient to produce and easier to syndicate than variety shows. A successful sitcom could run for five seasons and then earn money for its producers indefinitely through reruns and syndication. A variety show, with its mix of musical performers and topical comedy, did not syndicate as well — old episodes felt dated quickly, and the music rights were often a nightmare. The economics increasingly favored sitcoms over variety.
The third was changing tastes. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, the format itself was starting to feel old-fashioned. The vaudeville structure of unrelated acts back-to-back had been part of the original appeal, but it began to seem awkward as audiences developed a taste for more cohesive narrative entertainment. The variety show's appeal had partly been its variety, and that variety started to feel like incoherence.
By 1985, almost every major network variety show was off the air. There have been periodic attempts to revive the format since — Saturday Night Live, which premiered in 1975, is technically a variety show and is the closest thing the modern era has to the format. But the prime-time, family-friendly variety show with a singing host and a mix of music, comedy, and novelty acts essentially does not exist in the modern television landscape.
There are good reasons that the variety show died, and modern television in many ways offers more sophisticated, more diverse, more technically polished entertainment than the variety shows of the 1960s and 1970s. The production values were modest. The pacing was sometimes slow. The acts that filled out a typical Ed Sullivan show would seem quaint and strange to modern audiences. None of this is in dispute.
But there is something the variety show offered that nothing in modern entertainment really replaces, and the people who remember it can usually put a finger on what it was. The variety show was the last format that gathered the entire American family in front of a single television set at the same time, watching the same thing, sharing the same experience. The whole audience, from grandparents to small children, sat in the same room and watched the same show. The grandparents enjoyed the opera singer. The teenagers lit up when the Beatles came on. The middle-aged parents appreciated the comedian. The kids were transfixed by the trained dog act. Nobody had a perfect time at every moment, but everybody had a good time at some moment, and the experience of watching together was the point.
Modern entertainment is dramatically more individualized. The grandparents stream a documentary in the bedroom. The parents watch a prestige drama in the living room. The teenagers are on their phones in their own rooms. The children are watching cartoons on a tablet. Nobody is sharing the same moment with anyone else. The home itself is fractured into dozens of small private screens, and the kind of family-wide cultural ritual that the variety show represented is essentially impossible to recreate.
There is nothing wrong with what we have now. The shows are better in many ways. The choices are infinite. But if you remember the experience of sitting on the couch on a Sunday night, with your parents and siblings all in the same room, watching Ed Sullivan introduce the Beatles or Carol Burnett tug her ear at the end of her show or Flip Wilson putting on his Geraldine wig — that memory is not just nostalgia. It is a memory of a kind of shared cultural experience that no longer exists, and that no other format has ever quite replaced. The variety show is gone, and what was lost with it was bigger than the shows themselves. Worth remembering, while there are still people alive who lived through it and can tell the story.
