Frederick Ziv

Frederick W. Ziv (b. 1905, Cincinnati, Ohio; d. 13 October 2001, Cincinnati) was an American broadcasting producer and syndicator who began in radio, but is considered the father of television syndication and once operated the nation's largest independent television production company.

Earning a law degree at the University of Michigan, Ziv chose to open his own Cincinnati advertising agency rather than practise law. Amidst the bustle of Cincinnati radio in those years (the nation's largest radio sponsor, Procter & Gamble, and one of its most powerfully-signaled radio stations, WLW, were based there), Ziv and writer John L. Sinn (who became Ziv's son-in-law in due course) started the Frederick W. Ziv Company, producing pre-recorded radio shows such as "Boston Blackie" and "The Cisco Kid" and, occasionally, buying old ones for new syndicated rerun broadcast. (The best known of that lot: the serial comedy "Easy Aces" in 1945).

By 1949, the company had opened a television production subsidiary, Ziv Television Productions; it produced some of America's best-remembered shows, inncluding a television versions of "The Cisco Kid" (1949, soon to become the first American television program filmed in colour) and "Mr. District Attorney", and such original creations as "Highway Patrol" (perhaps the best-remembered Ziv production), "I Led Three Lives" (one of the few 1950s television crime dramas that addressed the real or alleged Communist menace as an overt subject), "Bat Masterson" (fictionalising the legendarily dapper marshal, gunfighter, and eventual sportswriter of the same name), and "Sea Hunt".

Ziv Television Productions trademarks included odd (for the times) twists on the genres of his shows, twists like a crime-fighting underwater explorer (Lloyd Bridges as "Sea Hunt" protagonist Mike Nelson) and "Highway Patrol" itself, perhaps the first crime drama to show large urban regions weren't the only places where criminals liked to roam. The company's closing logo---the name Ziv in large, Romanesque lettering, inside the frame of a television screen---was one of the most familiar sign-off logos of its time.

The company's fortunes shifted almost overnight in the mid-1950s. In 1955, they were America's leading and largest independent producer (with a reported two thousand employees at one point), and Ziv was able to buy his own television production studio, after years of leasing from the Hollywood studios; a year later, when the networks hipped up to how successful they could be syndicating reruns of their previous hits, that move cut deeply into the first-run syndication market.

By 1959, the networks began taking control of what went on the air from sponsors (a major result of the quiz show scandals that exploded the same year), and Ziv was miserable about it. "They demanded script approval and cast approval," he was quoted as saying later. "You were just doing whatever the networks asked you to do. And that was not my type of operation. I didn’t care to become an employee of the networks."

Ziv sold 80 percent of his overall company to a group of investors that year and also sold his television production subsidiary to United Artists, leaving the board of directors when United Artists decided to phase Ziv Television Productions out and re-organise as United Artists Television in 1962. He spent the next two decades lecturing on broadcasting and advertising at the University of Cincinnati (who awarded him an honorary doctorate in performing arts in 1985) before settling into full-time retirement.

At his death in 2001, Ziv was survived by a son and a daughter. The University of Cincinnati presents a broadcasting achievement award in his name annually.

References

* William Boddy, "Fifties Television: The Industry and its Critics" (Urbana, Ill.: Illinois University Press, 1980).
* "Aces Up," "Time", 8 September 1947.
* "A Homey Little Thing," "Time", 19 December 1949.
* Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh, "The Complete Directory to Prime Network TV Shows--1946 to Present" (First Edition).