Mary Hart accepts her Tartikoff Legacy Award. Other honorees: Regis Philbin, Dick Ebersol and Gerhard Zeiler
The legendary Brandon Tartikoff would’ve been thrilled at this year’s 8th Annual Legacy Awards presented in his name at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami during NATPE.
Three of the four recipients had ties to the late Tartikoff. One, Dick Ebersol, was his one-time boss and best friend. Another, Gerhard Zeiler, was the first non-American given the honor–and as the head of European entertainment network RTL Group, someone that the former NBC programming executive would have greatly admired.
The other recipients are legends as well. For Mary Hart and Regis Philbin, who both happen to be leaving their long-time chairs later this year, this event was the first of what will be many tributes to their illustrious careers, which are by no means over.
The Legacy Award is given to those in the television business who show leadership, vision and passion, and in the case of this year’s honorees, there was a hefty dose of humor involved as well.
Philbin took the industry audience on a tour of his career, reflecting on various general managers who stood in his way as if it were yesterday. Finding his niche early on as a talk show host, Philbin tried to talk the station manager at WABC-TV into syndicating his show, saying it would bring in more money in it. He didn’t get his way at the time.
On the way up the ladder in local television, he was recruited by Grant Tinker to come to NBC. And that’s where his connection to both Tartikoff and Hart came to light. Philbin told of running into Hart in Beverly Hills one day in the early 1980s—she had been working on “PM Magazine” at a local station– and recruiting her to come to the network with him to do an hour-long show. But just before it hit air, the show was cut to half an hour—and Reege was used to doing an opening segment that could last up to 20 minutes. He knew the show wouldn’t make it, and sure enough, six months later it was canned. Tinker delivered that bad news, saying it came from New York, and it wasn’t until several decades later that Philbin learned Tartikoff was actually the guy behind the firing.
Reege gloated about the fact that his syndicated show with Kelly Ripa has, as he put it, killed NBC in the ratings just about ever since.
Mary Hart is never one to gloat, but as the longtime anchor of “Entertainment Tonight” she looked back on how at the beginning, 30 years ago, there were many naysayers who thought there was not enough entertainment news for a five-day-a-week show. They were obviously proved wrong in fairly short order with the spate of imitators that cropped up and still prosper.
“We created a genre that’s flooded TV,” said Hart. Not to mention the Internet.
Zeiler was introduced with a comedic clip that showed him everywhere from with the pope to on a soccer field. He talked about how he admired Brandon Tartikoff from the early 1980s, and how European television executives tried to emulate him—and that meant putting on good shows that connect with people and are original.
Lilly Tartikoff Karatz, who congratulated every honoree in her late husband’s name, gave a special presentation to Dick Ebersol, the widely respected chairman of NBC Universal Sports, responsible for the network’s huge successes in its Olympics coverage over the past several decades.
She called him “the ultimate TV entrepreneur,” responsible for eight of the ten most watched events on television ever.
Ebersol’s resume includes stints running “Saturday Night Live” and also being fired from the peacock network by Fred Silverman. He reflected on the time that Tartikoff, whom he had hired and was under his wing, was promoted over him and the two left the office for hours to figure out if they would stay and how they would cope with it.
History shows that it worked out very well on that front. For Tartikoff’s health, unfortunately it was a very difficult road that cut his life short at a young age. As his best friend, Ebersol reflected on the many lives touched by his grace, and his courage in fighting the odds, with a smile.
It was an inspirational and appropriate way to end the evening.
