Friday Night Videos

History

Friday Night Videos was initially produced by Dick Ebersol. From 1974 until 1981, as Director of Late Night Programming at NBC, he co-produced The Midnight Special with its creator, Burt Sugarman. Ebersol left The Midnight Special in 1981 to become executive producer of Saturday Night Live, a show he co-created with Lorne Michaels. Following his departure, The Midnight Special was canceled and replaced by the Canadian sketch comedy program SCTV, which served as a temporary filler on NBC's late Friday night schedule for two years.

SCTV was a quick, inexpensive solution to an emergency scheduling gap caused by Ebersol's urgent exit and was likely not intended as a permanent replacement. While at SNL, which had regained momentum thanks to breakout cast members Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo, Ebersol decided to create another Friday night music-based program. Rather than reviving The Midnight Special, his concept grew into Friday Night Videos, which replaced SCTV in 1983. SCTV continued for one more year on the pay cable channel Cinemax in the U.S. before ending production in 1984.

In its early years, MTV remained a phenomenon accessible only to a minority of American households, as many areas lacked cable television service, particularly rural regions and inner-city neighborhoods, and not all cable providers carried MTV initially. Friday Night Videos capitalized on this, becoming the next best option for many viewers. While it primarily showcased music videos by popular top 40 acts, it offered more variety than its cable rival, featuring artists from pop, rock, R&B, and rap.

Initially, like The Midnight Special and SCTV, the show ran 90 minutes and consisted of music videos introduced by an off-camera announcer. It also included classic artists from the 1960s and 1970s in "Hall of Fame Videos", major stars profiled in "Private Reels", and new clips making their network debuts as "World Premiere Videos".