Why 'The Ed Sullivan Show' is a hit once again

After the really big finale 54 years ago, and the death of its legendary host three years later, "The Ed Sullivan Show" is having an extended moment. A YouTube channel on the classic variety show sailed past a million subscribers in June. "Sunday Best," a Netflix film about the show's impact on Black performers, dropped July 21. In the meantime, beautifully restored clips have spread across the entire television (Me TV), streaming (Pluto) and social media (Facebook) ecosystem.

Why endearingly square Ed? Why now? The answers are all part of a story that truly begins on June 20, 1948, with a Harlem-born Broadway newspaper columnist who had a gift for spotting talent, notably Black talent. CBS feared NBC was about to move "Uncle" Milton Berle to 8 p.m. on Sundays, so Sullivan's new variety show was likely intended as prime-time cannon fodder.

You know the rest of this part of the story: TV glory and cultural hegemony (Elvis, The Beatles) followed over the next 23 seasons, or 1,068 episodes. A crowning achievement of TV history finally wrapped March 28, 1971.

Enter a London-born TV producer whose career was launched just as Sullivan's was winding down. Through the 1970s and '80s, Andrew Solt made a name for himself producing films on an eclectic range of icons, from John Lennon to Marilyn Monroe. When securing rights to some clips for one on the Rolling Stones, he befriended longtime "Sullivan" producer Bob Precht (who died in 2023), also keeper of the vast Sullivan archives.

As Solt, now 77, recalled in a recent phone interview, Precht had a pressing concern. Mostly preserved as kinescopes — filmed directly off the TV screen — those 1,068 episodes were deteriorating. Solt offered to buy them all.

"I came up with a crazy number then threw it at [Precht]," he says. "The first question from Bob was 'How are you going to get the money?' My wife and I put up the house [as collateral], the cars, the dogs, and risked it all with a massive bank loan. There were nights when I'd wake up with, 'What the hell was I thinking?' "

Solt's immediate plan was to patch some clips together for a prime-time program. Nearly 40 million people watched "The Very Best of Ed Sullivan" on CBS Feb. 17, 1991, and over the decades since, Solt's small company, SOFA Entertainment, has produced dozens of other "Sullivan" clip shows — on the Stones, The Supremes, Elvis, the Muppets, and even Topo Gigio, that other puppet which became a national sensation after first appearing on "Sullivan" in 1962.

With the help of Universal Music Enterprises, SOFA had cleared the music rights of the clips "in perpetuity," Solt says, but when "something called streaming came along," they needed to secure a whole new set of rights to survive in this new landscape. "Thank God my son came in," he says.

Before joining six years ago, Solt's son, Josh, 44, had been an executive with Google Play. He'd also grown up with "Sullivan," or as he recalled, his TV diet as a kid ranged from " 'Saved by the Bell' to 'Ed Sullivan.' "

"I'd always loved the music ... but was also a huge sports fan, and loved seeing [guests like] Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays, and Joe Namath and Kareem [Abdul-Jabbar]," the younger Solt says. Mickey Mantle, who had announced his retirement a week earlier, went on "Sullivan" (March 9, 1969) to discuss his decision.

Josh Solt understood what viewers and his father always had — that there was an enormous variety of content across those episodes, from opera to Motown, from novelty actors to comedians. After launching the YouTube channel, his team created various playlists to navigate some 3,000 clips culled from an estimated 10,000 performances. (In a nod to the original, a new clip, or "hidden gem," is released each Sunday at 8 p.m.)

Solt more recently tapped veteran documentary filmmaker Sacha Jenkins to direct Netflix's "Sunday Best," a particularly moving account of Sullivan's role in bringing Black performers to a vast TV audience for the first time. (Jenkins died in May at 53.)

Why has "Sullivan" endured? Perhaps as a reminder of a time when TV was communal, or when someone — endearingly square Ed, of all people — had the courage of his deeply held convictions.

Andrew Solt says "Ed Sullivan was important because he gave us great pleasure," while the show's story is "the story of how we got where we are."

Maybe it's just as simple as that.