Broadcasting & Cable magazine named two Fordham alumni to its Hall of Fame during a ceremony at the Ziegfeld Ballroom in New York City on October 29. The television industry trade magazine honored Jean Dietze, TMC ’73, and Armando Nuñez, GABELLI ’82, as part of its 29th Hall of Fame induction class.

Dietze retired this year as president of affiliate relations for NBCUniversal a position she had held since 2015 and in which she served as the network’s chief liaison to its affiliated stations nationwide. Dietze spent her entire career at NBC, starting as a secretary in the sales department in 1973—the same year she graduated from Fordham’s Thomas More College—and working her way up to vice president of TV network services and, eventually, head of affiliate relations.

Nuñez, a trustee fellow at Fordham, is the president and CEO of the CBS Global Distribution Group and chief content licensing officer for CBS. As the company’s top global executive, he oversees all content licensing of CBS-owned programming to domestic and international distribution partners across all cable, broadcast, and streaming services.

Shortly after his induction into the Broadcasting & Cable Hall of Fame, CBS and Viacom, who are expected to close on their merger in early December, announced that Nuñez will serve as chairman for global distribution and chief content licensing officer for ViacomCBS.

Nuñez, who joined CBS in 1999, studied marketing and management at Fordham.

“I’m incredibly proud of my Jesuit education,” he told FORDHAM magazine in 2015. “That inquisitive nature that the Jesuits encourage … is a good skill set to have.”

In 2012, he established the Nuñez Family Scholarship Fund at his alma mater. Each year, the fund supports several full-time students at the Gabelli School of Business, with preference given to Hispanic students. (Nuñez has previously been recognized by The Hollywood Reporter as one of the top 25 Latinos in entertainment.)

The Hall of Fame ceremony was hosted by Inside Edition‘s Deborah Norville, NBC 4 New York’s Chuck Scarborough, and Good Day New York‘s Rosanna Scotto. Dietze and Nuñez‘s fellow Hall of Fame inductees included Byron Allen, Kelly Ripa, and Meredith Vieira.

Eighty years ago today—on September 30, 1939—Fordham competed in the first live televised broadcast of a football game. NBC sent two iconoscope cameras (recently patented by RCA), an announcer, and a crew to Randall’s Island Stadium, where the Rams beat Waynesburg College, 34–7. The game was shown on W2XBS (now WNBC, Channel 4). An estimated 500 people saw the broadcast, possibly including some early television set owners. The majority of TV viewers saw the game at the NBC pavilion at the New York World’s Fair. (Five months after beating Waynesburg, the Rams made history again, playing in the first live TV broadcast of a college basketball game, in which Fordham lost to the University of Pittsburgh at Madison Square Garden.)

Football came to Fordham in fall 1882. Fordham defeated Seton Hall in its first-ever contest and went on to win six of seven games in its first season.

The team’s nickname, the Rams, was born in 1893, during a football game against the United States Military Academy at West Point. Students came up with a cheer: “One dam, two dam, three dam, Fordham!” It was an immediate hit, but Jesuit faculty members frowned on the slightly vulgar chant, saying such behavior was unbecoming of Fordham gentlemen. Students quickly substituted “ram” for the offending word. Suddenly Fordham had its mascot.

In fall 1936, Fordham football’s famed linemen, the Seven Blocks of Granite—John Druze, Al Babartsky, Vincent Lombardi, Alex Wojciechowicz, Nat Pierce, Ed Franco, and Leo Paquin—helped the Rams dominate the sport and capture the attention of the nation.

Lombardi, FCRH ’37, of course, would go on to greater fame as a head coach in the NFL and an icon of American culture. (The Super Bowl trophy is named the Vince Lombardi Trophy.)

On Saturday, September 28, the Rams pleased Family Weekend visitors with a 23-16 win over the Richmond Spiders at Coffey Field.

A documentary—narrated by New York Giants announcer Bob Papa, GABELLI ’86, and featuring rarely seen archival footage—traces the rich history of Fordham football from its roots in the 1880s to its emergence in recent years as one of the nation’s top programs at the Division I FCS level. See the opening of the film, below.

To purchase a DVD of the film, which is available for $50, call the Fordham athletics ticket office at 855-RAM-TIXS.

Jacqueline Reich, Ph.D., professor and chair of Fordham’s department of communication and media studies, is a scholar in the subject of masculinity. In addition to Marcello Mastroianni, Masculinity, and Italian Cinema, (Indiana University Press, 2004), she co-wrote, with Catherine O’Rawe,  Divi. La mascolinità nel cinema italiano (Stars: Masculinity in Italian Cinema), (Donzelli, 2015).

We sat down with her to talk about how shifting attitudes in both the United States and Italy have affected her own work. Spoiler alert: Stear clear if you don’t want to know how the television shows Friday Night Lights and The Sopranos end.

Listen here:

And in a bonus track, Reich talks about her involvement with the Bronx Italian American History Initiative, and how she’s embraced community-based scholarship.

Complete transcription below:

Jacqueline Reich: One of the things that being in a Jesuit university has taught me is that you have to have tough conversations. Because you’re never, ever going to go anywhere if you don’t have them. We’re just going to be caught in a kind of cycle of what you would call, what a lot of people are calling toxic masculinity.

Patrick Verel: In the last year, the phrase Me Too has become shorthand for survivors of sexual assault and harassment speaking out against their assailants. At the same time, the term toxic masculinity has also entered the public conversation as a potential culprit for unrestrained, unresolved hostility towards women. Jacqueline Reich, a professor and Chair of Fordham’s Department of Communications and Media Studies was one of the first scholars to explore the subject of masculinity, most recently through a 2015 book, Stars, Masculinity in Italian Cinema. We sat down with her to talk about how shifting attitudes in both the United States and Italy have affected her work.

I’m Patrick Verel. And this is Fordham News.

What is masculinity studies and how does studying masculinity differ from the ways in which one studies feminism?

Jacqueline Reich: Well, masculinity studies grew out of feminist criticism. At least the way I practice it. I’ll tell you sort of how I got involved in it. I was a graduate student and I was working on my dissertation, which was on the representation of women in films during the fascist period. I started thinking to myself, well, I’m looking at female representations. Shouldn’t I be looking at the representation of men? So, at the same time that I’m starting to think about this, Marcello Mastroianni passes away, in 1996. And all of the obituaries in the United States started talking about him as this Latin lover and this great icon of style on the Italian screen. Italian ones focused on his overall star persona, his contributions, his work with actresses, his works with Federico Fellini. Not that the American ones didn’t mention that as well. But still, it was a different sort of paradigm.

So, the kind of way that I look at masculinity studies, in particular reference to cinema, is obviously about representation. We know that what we see on the screen is not real. We know we believe it is a representation of something. But when we interrogate this notion of masculinity, what we need to think about is that all gender is constructed. It’s also changeable. It’s negotiable. And it fluctuates from culture to culture. So we’re talking about a cultural construction here.

And this particular cultural construction of the Latin lover, I discovered, emerged more from American constructs of what Italian-ness meant in a masculine perspective, rather than what actually appears on screen. But if we’re going back to masculinity studies and its reference to and how it grew out of feminist criticism, we have to think about the ideas of the feminist critic and philosopher, Judith Butler, who talks about the whole performative of nature, of gender. It’s so much of our own identities are performative anyway, right? So if you are a daughter, you are expected to behave in a certain way. If you are a wife, you are expected to behave in a certain way.

In many ways, what you see in the films of Mastroianni is him performing certain types of masculine roles. And at the same time, undermining them. And if you look deeper, you see there’s just a lot of conflict going on there. There’s someone, as opposed to being this very cool, suave, debonair, ideal, is stylish as well, is really kind of a schlemiel, a guy who can’t get anything right.

Patrick Verel: Now, your area of research touches on depictions of masculinity on the screen. Has it changed in appreciable ways since you first started studying it?

Jacqueline Reich: I would say in Hollywood cinema, not so much. Hollywood films are written, the standard is this kind of three-act structure. The three-act structure has a status quo ethos built into it. Because it’s about conflict and resolution. Not that you necessarily have to have a happy ending of a film. But you can have a satisfactory ending of a film. When you see it changing, what we might call quality TV, which started the Sopranos, you see men who are imperfect, who are conflicted. Even so, another spoiler alert, you get to the end of the Sopranos, and the screen goes black. There is no resolution.

I just finished binge-watching Friday Night Lights, for instance. Now there’s an interesting representation. Football aside, I think what’s really brilliant about the series is the way in which the wife and the husband interact. She has a career and again, you’ve got … your listeners are going to hate me because I’m giving them all these spoiler alerts. I’m going to spoil everything for them. And mostly she has supported his career. At the end, in the last episode, she gets a really great job as dean of admissions at a college. And, it would require him leaving Texas and leaving his job. And he does. And that’s something, probably, we would have never seen.

Patrick Verel: Now a key aspect of your book about Italian actors, such as Marcello Mastroianni is this masculine anxiety, which is when masculinity manifests itself as an anger that is reactionary and defensive and destructive rather than productive. Tell me a little bit more about this anxiety.

Jacqueline Reich: I think everyone is resistant to change. In Italy, the post-war, and post-fascist, we have to remember, period was a time of reconstruction and rebuilding. But it was also a profound time of change. After the Marshall Plan, after the end of World War II, Italy’s economy started booming. What’s fueling this? New industry. You can’t just have men doing it all. Women go into the workforce. Also Italy, like the United States in the mid to late ’60s, it was a period of radical social and political change and political and social activism. That produces a lot of anxiety.

So naturally, some of this anxiety comes out in the roles that are represented on screen.

Patrick Verel: Where do you see it manifest itself today? And what do you think we should do to stop it?

Jacqueline Reich: I don’t know that we necessarily have to do anything to stop different kinds of representations of anxiety. But, I do see a real shift. And I think that this anxiety that we saw onscreen and a kind of general cultural anxiety is now shifting into anger. And so here I’m kind of referencing the work of Susan Faludi in her book Stiffed, and Michael Kimmel in Angry White Men. And their main thesis is that white men are angry. And what Kimmel has called this kind of anger, and he did a very interesting sociological study of it. He’s called it aggrieved entitlement. And he defines aggrieved entitlement as the sense that those benefits to which you believe yourself entitled have been snatched away from you by unforeseen forces larger and more powerful. He concludes that the social cure for angry white men involves challenging the ideology of masculinity that’s passed on from father to son.

What I think history has shown us, unfortunately, is that dialogue and understanding aren’t enough. That we kind of have to question the structures, the institutions, and the economic powers that not just perpetuate aggrieved entitlement, but entitlement itself. So you’ve got to ask yourself why is one person entitled to something anything other than another? I think in this case, I’ve been affected by my time at Fordham and thinking … and some of my experiences with Ignatian pedagogy. Ignatius would say that we are all human beings who deserve God’s love. Why did they feel entitled to begin with?

Patrick Verel: I mean, to me, that’s easy. As a white man, you say, well, white men have always had control of everything here.

Jacqueline Reich: Why? Right? And that’s the question. One of the things that being in a Jesuit university has taught me is that you have to have tough conversations. Because you’re never, ever going to go anywhere if you don’t have them. We’re just going to be caught in a kind of cycle of what you would call … what a lot of people are calling toxic masculinity. So you have to have these tough conversations that not only address why people are angry and why people are anxious but why people are entitled.

Bonus Track

Patrick Verel: In 2016, you joined the Bronx Italian American History Initiative, which traces the history of Italians and Italian Americans in the Bronx in the 20th century. Can you tell me a little bit more about, how does this work?

Jacqueline Reich: On the one hand, it’s an example of what we would call community-engaged research, which is something the university is really prioritizing right now. And basically, what that means is that you go outside the university walls, and you engage with the local community. What we aim to do is collect stories from Italians and Italian Americans who grew up in the Bronx. But eventually, we’re going to involve them in the design of the project. It used to be, you would talk to them, and that would be it. But this whole idea of participatory design, and reaching out to the community, and engaging with the community, brings them back into the project.

So, we’re going to reach out to them as we figure out the larger architecture of how we’re going to design this archive. But we do want to think about their experiences and their memories and contextualize them in the racial and the big fabric of the Bronx and look at how their experiences compare with African Americans, with Latinas, and with other white ethnic populations. We’re also thinking about different experiences of men and women, of northern and southern Italians, of different generations.

Patrick Verel: So, how did you make the leap from being a film historian to community-engaged research?

Jacqueline Reich: I saw that my colleague, Kathleen LaPenta, in Modern Languages, was beginning this Italian American History Initiative. I teach a class on Italian Americans on American Screens, so I’ve done a lot of work in this area. I also wrote an article on Charles Atlas, who was originally named Angelo Siciliano, and how he, kind of, used bodybuilding to achieve not only success but whiteness, at a time when Italians were discriminated against.

But I really think I was profoundly influenced by two things. One, are my colleagues at Fordham, particularly, in the Communication and Media Studies department, who are all, in some ways, involved in civic engagement. So, I taught this class on Italian Americans on American Screens, taught it so many times at multiple institutions, but this is my third time teaching it here. So, we read an article about Little Italys, from a kind of anthropological and sociological point of view, and then we went to Ferragosto, which is the big festival here the weekend after Labor Day. But, we all went out, and we looked at how the neighborhood, through the festival, inscribes Italianness, and a kind of tension that exists between the sort of image, that it wishes to present, and the actual residential population of the area, which is much more ethnically diverse than Italians.

The other aspect is that I’ve recently been involved in a leadership program sponsored by The Association Of Jesuit Colleges and Universities. It’s called the Ignatian Colleagues Program. You attend different seminars and workshops, but you also do a service immersion trip, and I went down to the border. I worked with the Kino Border Initiative for a week, as a kind of witness, right? We worked five mornings a week in the comedor, the cafeteria, where they serve meals to recently deported migrants, people about to try to get through, people seeking asylum, and it was a profoundly moving experience, and I came back from that trip saying, “Okay. You know, am I just going to go back into the archive, and deal with my papers? Or am I going to try to somehow shift my work, so that it engages with contemporary issues, but also gets me and students and scholars, thinking about how we can do scholarship that’s needed.”

So, for instance, right? A lot of NGOs … I was just at a conference recently about refugee and migrant education and the relationship to universities, and how you can establish partnerships. What we’re doing with the Bronx project, is much more historical, but so many parallels exist between the way immigrants and migrants were treated during the major wave of immigration in the United States between 1880 and 1924, to what’s going on now. And so, can we learn from our mistakes? Right? I can bring, I hope, a historical perspective, and then with that historical knowledge, help to empower students and scholars, as well, to think about what it means to be an academic in the 21st century.

I think that it’s about choosing an issue that matters to you and trying to effect change with that issue. So, I’m dealing with a historical project on immigration. Shouldn’t I be working on immigration issues right now? Shouldn’t I be out there in the field? Shouldn’t I be working with migrant communities? Shouldn’t I be working to bring attention to these issues, so that we don’t make the same mistakes again? So that we don’t block a ship of immigrants like we did during World War II, right, a ship of Jewish immigrants, who had no place to go. Because again, right? It goes back to this issue of entitlement. What makes these people less entitled to safety, to human dignity? And I think that’s really the core issue for me, is preserving human dignity, and that’s both a human issue, but it’s also a Jesuit and Catholic issue.

“It was terrifying,” Seidell says. “Not because of anything Lorne did, but just because he’s Lorne Michaels.”

That summer, Seidell had been going to a lot of Mets games, and though he says Michaels asked a couple of comedy questions, they also talked a lot about baseball.

“He talked about how the Mets weren’t great, because there was no expectation of excellence on the Mets, whereas on the Yankees there is,” Seidell says. “I think he was probably using this to talk about SNL, because I remember him saying, ‘If you’re not excellent on the Yankees, then you’re not a Yankee for very long.’”

Looking back, Seidell realizes that meeting with Michaels is the last step of a thorough hiring process—a step that exists so Michaels can be sure “that you can conduct yourself around people with some level of chill.” But at the time, he says, “I left there being like, ‘I don’t know. We just talked about baseball. I think I blew it.’”

It turns out he didn’t blow it. He got the job, and like a ballplayer who’s proven his worth, he’s stuck around: In May, he finished his fourth season as a writer for the show.

‘The Last Place on TV You Can Bomb’

Seidell began performing stand-up in Manhattan during his sophomore year at Fordham. He started writing for the website College Humor in 2004, and eventually worked his way up to become the site’s editor in chief. That job became a springboard to other opportunities, including working on shows for MTV and writing on a sitcom in Los Angeles.

But his dream job was always to write for SNL. He grew up watching the likes of Will Ferrell, Molly Shannon, and Cheri Oteri on the show—part of a childhood comedy diet that also included Adam Sandler records and John Candy movies. Some of the first laughs he got as a kid were the result of simply repeating lines from his favorite SNL sketches. (“I live in a VAN, down by the RIVER.”) And so after Sarah Schneider, a friend from College Humor, was hired to write at SNL in 2011, Seidell began applying as well, sending in packets of sample sketches whenever the show put out a call for submissions. He applied four times before finally getting the job.

And though Schneider had given Seidell a heads-up about what he was in for once his first season began, he says nothing can truly prepare you for it. “It’s like someone telling you what skydiving is like,” he says.

Indeed, he quickly learned how grueling the schedule would be: pitches on Monday, a marathon writing session on Tuesday into Wednesday, a table read of potential sketches later that day, rewrites on Thursday, and rehearsals on Friday. All of that builds to a long day on Saturday—an occasion Seidell marks each week by forgoing his usual casual wear in favor of a suit and tie.

Seidell is the first to admit that writing a great sketch that kills on air is hard. Some sketches he works on in a given week won’t even make it to dress rehearsal, and sometimes a sketch just doesn’t work even if it does make it to the live broadcast. But that’s part of the job’s appeal. “This is the last place on TV you can bomb, which adds to the pressure, which I find motivating,” Seidell says from the office he shares with writing partner Mikey Day on the 17th floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, nine floors above the fabled studio 8H. Tacked to a bulletin board above his desk are cue cards from sketches Seidell co-wrote that most definitely did not bomb, including “FBI Simulator,” which features Larry David as a lifelike weirdo target-practice dummy in an FBI training exercise.

Satire vs. Silliness for Silliness’ Sake

The entire office is decorated with props and mementos from memorable sketches Seidell co-wrote. A cue card from “Close Encounter,” in which Kate McKinnon explains that she was not “dealing with the top brass” during her abduction by aliens, hangs in a frame in the office’s corner. There’s a pizza-guitar prop from a sketch featuring Aziz Ansari in a Chuck E. Cheese’s-like restaurant, an illustration of Chance the Rapper from a sketch in which he plays an out-of-his-element hockey announcer, and, near the door, a fan-made poster depicting perhaps Seidell’s most famous sketch: “Haunted Elevator,” written with Day and Bobby Moynihan and starring Tom Hanks as David S. Pumpkins, a confusing character who repeatedly appears in a Tower of Terror-type ride wearing a jack-o’-lantern-print suit. The 2016 sketch blew up after the show aired. Not only did it lead to some media appearances by Seidell, it served as the inspiration for a kids’ Halloween special that aired last fall.

Seidell suggests the timing of the episode helped it go viral. “My personal theory is that it was right before the election, and the rhetoric was really harsh on both sides. I think it was the last safe thing to talk about with your friends and family who disagree with you politically.” (It also didn’t hurt that Hanks, in Seidell’s words, “just went for it,” fully committing to the goofy character.)

It’s fitting that “Haunted Elevator” became Seidell’s most buzzed-about sketch, as it’s representative of the type of sketch he most prefers to write. It’s impossible for an SNL writer in 2018 to ignore politics, as the current administration has provided fodder for many sketches over the past two years. Seidell, for instance, pitches in by co-writing appearances by cast members portraying President Trump’s sons Donald Jr. and Eric. But he is most interested in writing sketches that aren’t tied to the news cycle at all, particularly when they’re a little on the weirder side.

“There are a lot of [comedy shows] that just sort of say something everyone agrees with, and they’re aiming for applause and not laughs,” Seidell says. “But as a writer, I just find that boring. This show’s always been a balance of political stuff versus just baldly funny stuff. I’ve just always favored silliness. I’ve always just gone for a laugh over some stinging political critique.”

That’s not to say that topical sketches can’t be silly—or that they can’t appeal across the political spectrum. With Day, for instance, he co-wrote a commercial parody for “Levi’s Wokes,” comically ugly, ill-fitting jeans described as “size-less, style-neutral, gender nonconforming denim for a generation that defies labels.”

“I feel like I found a creative soulmate in Streeter, so I’m very lucky that he got put in my office that first season,” says Day, who joined the show a year before Seidell. “We share an odd sense of humor, and there’s few people there who are as crazy as I am to start writing something new at like 4 or 5 a.m. out of nowhere.”

A Seat at the SNL Kids’ Table

SNL‘s schedule of intense show weeks combined with downtime in the summer has allowed Seidell to work on other projects, including the David S. Pumpkins special last year. And he says he’d be interested in working on a bigger project like a film at some point, in addition to continuing with some stand-up dates, though his time away from the show also lets him spend more time with his wife and 2-year-old son.

In the meantime, he’s laser-focused on SNL. Since being hired, he’s added the title of writing supervisor, which means he not only writes sketches but also helps decide which ones make the show. “You have a seat, maybe not at the big-boy table, but at the kids’ table,” he jokes. It also means more opportunities to learn from Lorne Michaels. “It’s like if you were a baseball player and you get to talk with Babe Ruth,” Seidell says. “He’s maybe the most important person in American comedy, maybe ever.” Seidell pauses, then laughs. “And he wasn’t even born in America.”

Michaels, after all, has been producing groundbreaking sketch comedy for generations. “My parents told me growing up, ‘This is the funniest show,’” says Seidell, who made it his professional goal to be a writer there, preferring it over other beloved programs like The Late Show. “If you want to write comedy, this is the place to be.”

—Joe DeLessio, FCLC ’06, a social media editor at New York magazine, is a frequent contributor to this magazine.

Related Story: Streeter Seidell’s Top 5 SNL Sketches

“My mom said, you know, ‘Sheri, it would be cool if you could get an internship at a place like The Daily Show and really take advantage of the opportunity,” said DeNucci, a double major in psychology and communication and media studies.

When DeNucci applied and was accepted as an intern with The Daily Show with Trevor Noah last fall, she was elated—but there was another surprise. She wasn’t the only Fordham student there. FCRH junior Reed Horner and Fordham College at Lincoln Center junior Reese Ravner were also selected, though none of them had known one another prior to the internship.

“I was super happy because hundreds of people apply for an internship with the show,” said Horner, a journalism major. “It’s a small world.”

As interns at the award-winning news satire program, which airs weeknights on Comedy Central, DeNucci, Ravner, and Horner learned the ins and outs of television production.

Lessons and Opportunities 

From the Equifax data breach to Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election, they said The Daily Show delivered the world’s biggest news stories with unmatched humor.

“Millennials and people my age want to know what’s going on in the news, but they don’t want the news to be presented in a dry way,” said DeNucci, who was drawn to the show’s writing process. “There’s definitely this kind of sharp, witty, New York energy that goes into the show, and I think that’s important.”

Along with more than a dozen other interns, the Fordham students helped with daily tapings. Two to three days a week, they also supported different departments of the show, including the control room, talent, audience, studio production, and field production.

“When you watch the show on TV, you don’t really think about the fact that there are so many people involved,” said Ravner, a double major in communication and media studies and Spanish language and literature. “Everyone from the security guard to the people in the post-production office work together to put the show on every night.”

Horner, a beat reporter at WFUV whose dream is to be a late-night show host, said watching host and comedian Trevor Noah work collaboratively with his team was a source of inspiration.

“I learned that just because you’re on camera or have your name on something, it doesn’t necessarily make you better than the people around you,” said Horner, who believed the internship underscored the power of teamwork. “You can’t let your belief in yourself turn into arrogance because you could miss out on a lot of lessons and opportunities.”

Ravner is taking many of those lessons with her at her new internship at NBC News this spring.

“You have to always ask what’s the next thing you can do to help [after you’ve completed a task],” she said. “To see this in practice in a work environment like The Daily Show was really cool. That’s something I’ll take with me moving forward.”

For Meenasarani Linde Murugan, Ph.D., the period is a gold mine for her primary research interest: representations of performances of race and gender on television.

Murugan, an assistant professor in communication and media studies, is working on a book that looks at the interactions between performers of color and the white program hosts on variety shows during that period. She’s interested in the ways racial issues were discussed, both explicitly and in more subtle ways.

Although much research has been done on the transition from radio to early television and how that affected representations of ethnicity and masculinity, Murugan maintains there’s more to be learned. Her research casts a critical eye at shows such as the Tonight Show, and program hosts such as Dinah Shore, Flip Wilson, and Carol Burnett.

“Variety shows articulated a kind of cosmopolitanism that served to expand existing constructions of gender and race in the postwar period,” she said.

In addition to viewing old TV clips, Murugan examines archived memos to learn how television producers, hosts, and executives were talking at the time about different guests. While hosts were overwhelmingly white, persons of color were often featured as guests especially for musical performances.

For a brief period, she said, there was a rivalry between Steve Allen, one of the first hosts of the Tonight Show, and television variety show legend Ed Sullivan. Allen considered himself to be more hip than Sullivan; he played jazz piano on the show and he invited many African Americans as guests.

“[It was] one of the ways in which Allen thought he was more sophisticated,” she said. “It was a very interesting use of those performers’ names to give himself credibility.”

“I think that [posture]is a tension we all still see today, when people say things like ‘but some of my best friends are black.’ On the one hand, he is giving these performers a platform in a very segregated entertainment sphere. But at the same time, it lends credibility to his show.”

Murugan’s research also explores tensions inherent in the fact that variety shows were filmed in New York or Los Angeles, where white audience members and performers of color often mixed, but were broadcast nationally. Regions such as the South were less accepting of such fraternization.

“The variety shows had the opportunity to break down those walls, and at the same time, a lot of times when they did that, hosts got hate mail,” she said.

It wasn’t just about the viewers, however. “It was really about advertisers,” she said. “If they were going to sponsor the show, then they didn’t want to lose a possible customer market.”

Murugan said she found revealing instances of solidarity, beyond hosts simply hosting performers of color. Allen, for instance, once devoted an entire show to a conversation with African-American comedian Dick Gregory about what it means to be a black man in the United States.

“Most of the time it’s just the two smoking cigarettes and having a very candid conversation,” she said. “And then they come back from a commercial break, and Steve Allen addresses the studio audience and the camera. He basically says ‘You know, some of you might be upset by what we’re talking about, but I don’t care.’

“There’s something about the candidness of that interview that I appreciated; Allen knowing that people might feel uncomfortable with what they’re talking about but realizing it’s still important to have the conversation.”

Ultimately Murugan said she hopes to better understand the terrain in which such instances of solidarity took place. While it requires one person to sacrifice a certain amount of privilege, does that have to happen in every episode aired on television?

She said that there are a lot of questions about how today’s political changes will affect popular culture. But when she began working on the book in August 2015, the rhetoric of inclusion was strong.

This embrace is sometimes seen as a recent development, but as examples from variety shows illustrate, the truth is more complicated. Television has been diverse, Murugan said, it just hasn’t been equal.

“It’s not just about having people of all colors on a show. We still want more diversity and want it on a very surface level.”

“But then we’re not really interrogating what’s the nature of that interaction. I think we also need to talk about issues of power,” she said.   

In 1972, four years after their success on the show, FORDHAM magazine caught up with them. McMahon, FCRH ’69, who had married his classmate Jeanine Durbin, TMC ’69, was in his third year at Harvard Law School. Ellard, FCRH ’69, was a graduate student in philosophy at Yale, where he was writing a thesis on “ideology in political philosophy.” Leahey, FCRH ’69, was a fourth-year student at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. And Ouzounian, FCRH ’70, had earned a master’s degree in drama at the University of British Columbia.

The magazine also noted that two other Fordham students—“supernumeraries” Judith Aissen and Mary Daly, both members of the Thomas More College Class of 1969—didn’t appear on the TV show but contributed to the team’s success by providing considerable “bench strength.”

All six College Bowl teammates went on to remarkable careers:

Judith Aissen, Ph.D., earned her doctorate in linguistics at Harvard and is currently professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an expert in Mayan languages.

Mary Daly graduated from Fordham Law School cum laude in 1972. She served on the school’s faculty from 1983 to 2004, when she was named dean of St. John’s University’s School of Law, a position she held until her death in 2008 at the age of 61. The Rev. Donald J. Harrington, then president of St. John’s, remembered her as “an energetic, effective, and scholarly leader.”

Arthur McMahon is a partner at Nixon Peabody, where for many years he led the law firm’s public finance group.

George Ellard, who captained the 1968 College Bowl team, went on to serve as inspector general of the National Security Agency, a position he held from 2007 to 2016. He’s currently an assistant professor at the National War College.

Edward Leahey earned his medical degree at Columbia and was directing the Cardiovascular Clinical Pharmacology Laboratory at Columbia-Presbyterian in 1981, when he died of a rare heart ailment. He was only 33 years old, but as director of the lab, he’d already discovered an interaction between two commonly used drugs, quinidine and digoxin, a discovery that “permitted physicians to avoid the potentially fatal toxicity produced by the interaction,” The New York Times reported.

Richard Ouzounian went on to a long and distinguished career in the performing arts and as a journalist. He has written, directed, or acted in more 250 productions, and in December 2015, he retired as chief theater critic for the Toronto Star, a position he’d held since 2000.

Florio, a 2015 grad who majored in business administration with a dual concentration in entrepreneurship and marketing, was among handful of college seniors and recent grads from across the country to appear on a special episode of ABC program, which aired on Oct. 2.

The episode featured hit show, Shark Tank’s, “Mr. Wonderful,” Kevin O’Leary, putting college seniors through a sales boot camp on the art of the sell, prepping them for the show’s second annual sales challenge. After the field was narrowed down to three, the newly minted sales force headed to New York City’s Union Square Park to see which of the final contestants learned the most, in a competitive sales experiment captured on hidden camera.

The contestants had to sell cupcakes out of a truck from a company in which O’Leary had invested on Shark Tank, Wicked Good Cupcakes. O’Leary and ABC/ESPN anchor Hannah Storm provided live direction and commentary, and, in the end, Florio was the victor.

Christine Janssen-Selvadurai, the director of the entrepreneurship program at the Gabelli School, said she was “so proud of Tommy Florio’s representation of Fordham.” Watch the segment of 20/20 here.

The luxury of sinking into a sofa on a rainy Sunday and tearing through hours of TV is not an option for the busy actress, star of the hit Netflix series Orange Is the New Black. For the rest of us, however, TV is more of a habit now than it’s ever been: The average American spends nearly one-fifth of his or her waking hours in front of the screen—and that’s before you take Netflix and other streaming services into account. The sheer volume of excellent television out there, ready for the watching at our slightest whim, is keeping us more gripped than at any time since the invention of the vacuum tube.

“I had a relatively simple syllogism: If you offer more choice, people will find something they like,” he said in a 2011 interview. “The monopoly of three networks will change, and the audience will be eroded. Revenues will be eroded. If you are part of the ‘erodees,’ you should also be part of the ‘eroders.’” Granath’s plea led directly to ABC’s investment in the ARTS network (which became A&E) and its later purchase of ESPN.

Since the 1980s, cable has reinvented itself, becoming more than 24-hour news, weather, sports, and documentaries. It’s now the home of some of the most acclaimed scripted series in TV history—Mad Men, The Sopranos, and Breaking Bad, to name a few.

But while studios and networks are innovating at breakneck pace, history is repeating itself. This time around, there are new eroders: video-on-demand services like Netflix and Amazon. And they’re cutting into cable’s viewership as much as the networks’ audience.

All this competition means shows are taking risks more readily than they ever have before, telling stories often tucked into the shadows and keeping viewers gripped to the point where whole weekends are lost to mega marathons.

The Cream Rises

There’s so much TV out there now, it’s nearly impossible to keep up. According to Variety, 145 original scripted series and miniseries were on the air in the fall of 2014, a 14 percent increase over the previous year. That trajectory continues: Not including streaming outlets like Netflix and Amazon, networks have ordered some 350 scripted series for the current TV season. Yet actors and producers are still choosing among this landslide of material the same way they always have: based on merit.

Thomas Kelly, FCRH ’87, a writer and producer whose credits include Blue Bloods (CBS) and Copper (BBC America), was attracted to his current project, The Get Down (Netflix), based primarily on story and talent. The 13-episode season, scheduled to begin shooting in New York City this summer, focuses on the struggles of a group of teenagers in the South Bronx in the late 1970s.

“It’s in essence an American dream story, which is what I’ve always written about,” says Kelly, who grew up partly in the Bronx. “I’m fascinated by the American dream—by the reality of it, by the duality of it, by the myth of it. It’s always that journey starting from a place or a class, lower-middle class or poor. How do you transition out of that into the greater American mainstream?”

Filmmaker Baz Luhrmann, of Moulin Rouge! and The Great Gatsby fame, will direct the first three episodes and the season finale. “He’s a true artist—I don’t use that term lightly,” Kelly says. “He’s really got this amazing vision, and it’s up to me to translate that vision and make it a TV show, which is awesome.”

A more extreme example: Schilling signed on to play Piper Chapman on Orange Is the New Black before Netflix premiered its smash-hit political drama House of Cards, the show most often credited with proving that streaming content is a viable model for original series. “There was no precedent,” she says. “We just knew Kevin [Spacey] was going to be on a Netflix TV show.”

When she decided to take the role, for which she’s received Golden Globe and Emmy nominations, she simply went on instinct. “If you make choices based on the people that you’re working with and based on the story, you really can’t go wrong,” she says. “I went in just curious—just really interested in Piper and her journey. … I trusted that in my guts. I had no idea [the show]would be received the way that it was.”

Kevin Spacey and Baz Luhrmann, of course, aren’t the only A-listers who have been moving from film to TV. David Fincher directed the House of Cards pilot, 12 Years a Slave scribe John Ridley is producing the ABC drama American Crime, and Scarlett Johansson will star in a limited-run series called The Custom of the Country, based on an Edith Wharton novel. The list goes on.

But why? The seeming mass migration of talent from film to TV began several years before House of Cards hit, so giving all the credit to new distribution methods and viewing habits such as binge-watching is undue. According to The Get Down’s Kelly, there are more factors at play.

“Features are a mess right now,” he says. “[You’re either] making Mission Impossible 27 or you’re making an independent film. There’s no middle ground anymore for serious filmmakers and features. People from the feature world are interested in television because of all the great material that’s being done.”

Securing the Bottom Line

For viewers, this embarrassment of TV riches is good news. But for network executives, it’s more complicated. The current boom is exciting, but it can be harrowing for anyone who needs to make money by making TV. Producing more high-quality shows and distributing them across multiple outlets makes turning a profit a tricky proposition.

From a content standpoint, the primary issue is one of simple supply and demand. Not only are studios competing for a limited amount of top-tier talent, but they also have to jockey for crews, equipment, and locations, among other production needs. Case in point: A showrunner can now demand double the wage he or she could in 2009, according to estimates in Variety.

“I think the talent level’s getting watered down a bit in everything from writers to creators to cast and crew,” says Kelly, who has worked on series for broadcast, cable, and now streaming networks. “There’s just so much [content]out there, it’s getting spread thin.”

But for broadcast and cable networks, the problems don’t end once a show is scripted, shot, and in the can. They still have to find ways to get ads in front of viewers, who are increasingly not watching live TV. They’re using DVRs, which allow them to skip commercials, and streaming shows online or through devices like Roku and Apple TV.

Watching a recorded show on a DVR (i.e., time-shifted viewing), often spells salvation for people who can’t or who no longer want to make “appointment TV.” Networks and advertisers have adapted their business models accordingly. Time-shifting is already built into network audience tracking models, says Dominick Nuzzi, FCRH ’76, the senior vice president of production and administration at ABC Media Group.

“I’ll give you an example,” he says. “One of the shows on ABC, How to Get Away with Murder: On the first day of viewing, it [had]10.1 million viewers. Three days later, there were another 4.5 million viewers.” That combined audience, live-plus-three-day ratings, or C3, is what advertisers are paying to reach.

There’s also revenue to be tapped in other delayed-viewing avenues, namely streaming content, which can take the form of an app or a website, according to Nuzzi.

“The nice thing about streaming things is that [they’re] DVR-proof,” he says. “There may not be as many commercials as there were in the network or broadcast, but you’re not able to zip through them.”

Streaming content also helps networks diversify their media offerings. Advertisers who buy an ad that plays before a show viewed on ABC’s website, for instance, are also buying a different type of audience engagement, in which viewers can go directly to a sponsor’s website. Still, despite all this repositioning, ad revenues are thinning.

The Ripple Effect

All this doesn’t mean that networks are careening toward failure—far from it. It just means that TV executives have to develop more revenue from non-advertising sources. For Armando Nuñez, GABELLI ’82, president and CEO of CBS Global Distribution Group, that entails using old and new programming alike to strike deals internationally and with streaming services, like Amazon and Netflix, as well as local on-demand players.

“All this great technology,” he says, “creates new pipes for us to place both all [our]great legacy content and all [the]great new content we are creating.”

The abundance of content coupled with the rise of streaming services and decline in traditional ad revenue also means that the TV audience is a moving target in a way it hasn’t been since the cable boom of the 1970s and 1980s. The changes, some say, will be sweeping. If original cable series like Oz and Mad Men moved the goalpost for networks in terms of production quality and subject matter, video-on-demand offerings are pushing it even further.

“[Network] shows have to compete—to have the story, the star power, and the complexity,” says Kelly.

Jennifer Clark, a TV scholar and an associate professor of communication and media studies at Fordham, says the networks are looking to cable and video-on-demand series for guidance on how to get viewers back.

“Some, like Fox or NBC, are starting to pick that up,” she says, “because they’re compelled by capturing those audiences that are now getting away from them.”

Tracking Netflix is a good bet. According to Kelly, the company’s deep technological roots have helped it take a lot of the guesswork out of finding audiences for its series. Netflix uses its own proprietary algorithms to analyze viewer data and identify an audience before it starts producing a series. The success of those series is not only a feather in Netflix’s cap, but also an additional proof point they can use to explore political or social issues others might avoid putting in front of a mass audience. Orange Is the New Black, for example, is a trendsetter in how frankly it deals with issues of race, gender, and sexuality—topics often seen as too taboo for mass consumption.

“Netflix-produced series are probably some of the most culturally interesting, innovative types of television that we’re seeing,” Clark says. “People are really responding to that. I think that is going to begin to come back to more conventional television.”

In some small ways, its effects are already on the air. “There seems to be more of a push towards inserting issues of ethnicity—questions of identity that we typically haven’t seen on network television—and trying to deal with that within the mass-appeal dynamic,” says Clark, who points to the new ABC comedy Fresh off the Boat, which features a Taiwanese-American family, as an example. “I think that is one small movement toward something that replicates what Orange Is the New Black seems to be accomplishing.”

Keep on Innovating

Still, the trendsetters in this new golden age of TV are not content to rest on their laurels. As Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and even Yahoo roll out full seasons of original series, they’re considering what this new type of television consumption means for how they tell stories and keep audiences satisfied. In the long run, binge-watching might actually be what spurs studios to continue to improve.

“You’re watching a season of television over, say, two days,” says Kelly. “You’re essentially watching a 13-hour movie as opposed to watching a television show.”

For directors and actors, this means a shift in their creative process. Schilling of Orange Is the New Black says that shooting a full season at once feels more complete creatively, allowing actors to follow their characters even more closely than was possible before. “It’s a little bit more cinematic,” she says. “You’re able to play the full arc. It’s not the same as the experience of doing it when it’s broken up—it’s very helpful.”

For a showrunner like Kelly, it means that viewers are watching even more closely, raising the bar for everything from story to production value. “The little details, things that you wouldn’t really pay attention to, maybe you shouldn’t pay much attention to, become glaring,” he says.

A fall 2014 Variety cover story warned that this new golden age of television is a bubble and, like all bubbles, will inevitably burst. As networks, cable channels, and video-on-demand services rush to capture (or recapture) their share of the audience, they may be dangerously overextending themselves.

After all, the shine will inevitably wear off flashy new delivery methods and services, and content will remain the great equalizer.

“Technology is fantastic, but people don’t watch technology—they watch content,” says Nuñez, the head of CBS Global Distribution Group. “When you have great content, then the great business follows.”

—Corinne Iozzio, FCLC ’05, is a contributing editor at Popular Science and a New York City-based freelance writer focused on technology and innovation.

“There is no group of people who are more surprised by the success of 60 Minutes than we are,” said Don Hewitt, the show’s creator and executive producer. “We thought it would be a moderate success, but nobody ever imagined in their wildest dreams that we’d be in the top ten for 22 years, which really impresses us because [I Love Lucy] only had 12 [years].”

The event, 60 Minutes at Age 35: A Seminar, was sponsored by the National Television Academy and hosted by the Fordham Schools of Business. Hewitt was joined in the Law School’s McNally Amphitheater by 60 Minutes colleagues Mike Wallace, Morley Safer, Lesley Stahl, Steve Kroft, Bob Simon and Andy Rooney. Bill Small, vice chairman for news and documentaries at the National Television Academy and former dean of Fordham’s Graduate School of Business Administration, served as the event’s moderator.

“We had six years [when]nobody paid any attention to us,” said Wallace of the news magazine’s formative years. “[Then] there was a gas shortage and people would stay home on Sunday afternoons instead of going to see grandma. And they fiddled around with their dials and, little by little, they began to look at us. And by the time they began to look at us, we were ready.”

Since then, 60 Minutes has been at the forefront of every monumental news story from the Vietnam War to the war in Iraq, from President Nixon’s resignation to the Monica Lewinsky scandal. But the program has also provided inspirational glimpses of less high-profile people, such as teacher Marva Collins, whose dissatisfaction with Chicago’s educational system led her to found Westfield Preparatory School in 1975.

“The stories were what I wanted to cover,” said Stahl, who joined the 60 Minutes team in 1991 after a distinguished news career in Washington, D.C. “That’s the best thing about 60 Minutes. We do choose are own stories and that, to me, is the true gift.”

When asked where he gets his ideas for his end-of-broadcast editorials, Rooney answered with his trademark blend of gruff humor and sarcasm.

“Well I don’t come up with them, they come up to me,” said Rooney. “People do ask me that and it’s a dumb question. … The way ideas come to a writer is that he or she sits down at a typewriter or a computer and damn well decides to have an idea.”

In terms of wondering how the audience will eventually receive stories, Kroft pointed out that there are many surprises along the way.

“It’s amazing how sometimes you have a tremendous impact by doing stories,” said Kroft. “It’s also amazing sometimes that you have a great piece that points out a great injustice, but nothing will change at all. Many times, the greatest reward and the biggest feedback you get is when you actually do something that changes something.”

This summer, reruns of 60 Minutes are in the top five in the ratings race, proving that the news magazine still has appeal. Some longtime members of the team are occasionally criticized for being too old for their jobs, but Wallace noted that the team is what makes 60 Minutes a lasting success.

“I’m struck by … the wisdom, the experience, the understanding, the sophistication, the humanity of this group of people with whom I’ve been working for 35 years,” said Wallace. “It’s extraordinary that we’ve been permitted over 35 years by the company, by the American people, to do what we do week to week.”