I was young, yes, but I do remember when the Beatles performed on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964. And I also remember the next day at school when it was all anyone could talk about. We were excited and inspired — because of the music, but also because it was obvious that those cheeky mop-tops didn’t give a crap about how they outraged people with their looks, their attitude, and their noisy music. Squares (parents) hated the Beatles. Perfect.
That February performance was big news all over the country and prefigured a tectonic shift in music, fashion, sexuality, and civil rights. The Beatles came to America, Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali, and three civil rights workers were murdered in Mississippi. Something was happening — a cultural sea change. Everyone felt it and many feared it and nothing could stop it. Farewell, Bobby Darin. Hello, Bobby Dylan. Pass me a joint, man.
It’s hard for anyone born after the advent of cable television to imagine, but in 1964, there were four basic television options: NBC, ABC, CBS, and PBS. Ed Sullivan’s Sunday night show on CBS was almost literally “must-see TV,” due in no small measure to the fact that the public’s choices were so limited.
The Sullivan Show’s competitors the night the Beatles performed were two forgettable one-season flops: The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters on ABC and Grindl, starring Imogene Coca on NBC. (Poor Imogene never knew what hit her.) Small wonder then that more than 73 million people tuned in to watch the Fab Four, making it one of the highest-rated TV shows in the history of prime-time television at that point.
The idea that a band performing on a network show of any kind could draw those kinds of numbers in 2025 is a fantasy. The public’s attention is splintered into dozens of media platforms, hundreds of channels, thousands of websites. Even so, through the years, a show has sometimes managed to break through and enter the public consciousness.
I’m old enough to remember “offices,” which some of you will recall were places where people employed by the same company came to work in a single building for several hours a day. In those halcyon times of yore, workers would often run into each other in the “break room” or by the “water cooler,” and would engage in conversation, often about television shows that were popular enough that you could assume your co-workers probably watched the same ones you did. I remember lots of funny chats about Seinfeld, for instance, and how certain lines became part of the cultural zeitgeist. Were you the “master of your domain”? “Yada, yada, yada.”
Now those days are gone, and there’s really only one show that can get everybody talking, even though lots of people truly hate it. They say it’s in poor taste and insults their intelligence. They contend that its flippant cruelty is horrifying — not the least bit entertaining. They say its celebration of greed and conspicuous consumption is immoral, and its oppressive portrayal of minorities is racist.
But some people really love the show. They enjoy its provocative and disturbing storylines, its daring and unpredictable plot twists, its lewd insult humor, and especially its over-the-top lead character, with his cotton-candy hairdo, Tropicana makeup, adolescent vanity, and “super model” wife.
Love it or hate it, as Ed Sullivan would say, it’s a “really big show.” And it’s inescapable. The lead character’s name was in each of the top five headlines on The New York Times website Sunday. Pundits and columnists write countless op-eds about him. TV hosts and panelists dissect each turn of the show’s never-a-dull-moment plot. You can get the show’s T-shirts, mugs, flags, tennis shoes, even bitcoin. The show makes billions of dollars for the nation’s media conglomerates and for all their remoras, down to podcasters, merch salesmen, and Substackers — which is one reason it’s so hard to imagine it ever ending. But it will. Whether it’s due to the continued mental, physical, and moral decay of its lead character, a horrifying revelation of some sort, or a tectonic election, the final episode will come, as it does for all shows and all actors — even mop-tops who don’t give a crap about how they outrage people with their looks, their attitude, and their noisy bullshit.