Dick Ebersol Reflects on Lessons Learned ‘From Saturday Night to Sunday Night’ in New Autobiography
variety.comJon Burlingame editor Dick Ebersol is one of the seminal figures in the past 50 years of broadcast television. He helped create “Saturday Night Live”; he hired Brandon Tartikoff, genius programmer and innovator, to revive NBC’s primetime fortunes.
As president of NBC Sports, he oversaw the network’s Olympic strategy for many years. “Sunday Night Football” was his idea. Ebersol recounts the high (and sometimes low) points of his career in television in a new autobiography, “From Saturday Night to Sunday Night: My Forty Years of Laughter, Tears and Touchdowns in TV,” published this week by Simon & Schuster.
While all of the great moments in his career were at NBC, Ebersol, now 75, started as a researcher at ABC Sports in 1967. Legendary ABC Sports chief Roone Arledge, Ebersol tells Variety, “was the most important figure in my life,” and the executive who eventually took on Ebersol as a trusted associate.
It was also at ABC that he met sportscaster Jim McKay. “I miss him so much,” Ebersol says of McKay, who died in 2008 at the age of 86. “He really taught me the most important thing about storytelling – how important it is to keep paring it down to just the essence.
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