The Full Story of Friday Night Videos · NBC's Late Night Answer to MTV

The man who created NBC's answer to MTV has never pretended it was an original idea. He says he copied MTV outright, got sued by two other parties who claimed he had copied them instead, and beat the suits by pointing at the network he had actually taken it from. Then he called the whole thing hardly a creative invention, and it ran for nearly nineteen years.

Friday Night Videos was NBC's late night music video program, created by Dick Ebersol and premiered July 29, 1983. It filled the Friday slot left by SCTV and gave music videos to the millions of American homes that had no cable and therefore no MTV. It ran 90 minutes at first, added celebrity guest hosts in 1985, won an Emmy for its title design, and lasted until 2002.

The slot that needed filling

The program exists because of a gap in two different places at once: one in NBC's Friday night schedule, and one in America's cable map.

Dick Ebersol had run NBC's late night programming through the 1970s, co-producing The Midnight Special, before leaving in 1981 to take over Saturday Night Live. His departure left the Friday late night hour to SCTV, which the archival record treats as a stopgap rather than a plan. By 1983 Ebersol wanted music back in that slot, and he was no longer a network executive when he built the thing that went there. He is precise about that status on tape: "I was a producer for hire. I was not an NBC employee."

The second gap was the one that made the show worth making. MTV had launched on August 1, 1981 and had already made the music video a mainstream form, but it was a cable channel in a country that was not finished being wired. Plenty of households had no cable television at all, and many of the systems that existed did not carry the channel. Remind, revisiting the premiere in 2023, describes a viewership that knew music videos existed and had no way to watch them, with the alternatives sitting behind other paywalls: HBO's Video Jukebox from December 1981, and Night Flight on USA from June 1981.

Friday Night Videos arrived on July 29, 1983 as the version of that experience you did not have to subscribe to anything to see. The premiere's own voiceover, as Remind reports it, told the audience exactly what the show assumed about them: "For many of you, Friday Night Videos will be your first experience with music video ..."

"Which I clearly ripped off"

The origin story most shows tell is about invention. Ebersol's is about copying, and he tells it against himself.

Speaking to the Television Academy Foundation in 2009, he described the program as a formulaic music video show and named its source without softening it: MTV, "which I clearly ripped off."

What happened next is the part nobody would invent. Ebersol described being taken to court over it: "And I actually got sued by two people, claimed I'd ripped them off, and my defense was that I'd ripped off MTV." The outcome was two words: "And I won."

His reasoning was that there was no proprietary idea in the room to steal. He had been putting videos on television for years already, one or two a week inside The Midnight Special in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Assembling a whole program out of them was a difference of quantity, not of concept, and he put it that simply: "I was just running music videos." His own verdict on the format is blunter than any critic's: "It's hardly a creative invention."

That assessment sits oddly against the show's own opening night promise to introduce America to a new art form, and both things were true at the same time. The form was new to the audience. It was not new to the producer.

How the show was actually fed

The interesting question about a program like this is not where the videos came from but how a weekly 90 minutes got built, and Ebersol describes a production that became close to frictionless once the pattern was set.

Ebersol's summary of the mature operation is one line: "Friday Night Videos was easy." His own weekly role reduced to selection: "I would just listen to the stuff, give the producers a playlist." From there the staff assembled everything between the clips. "They would record the interstitial material, and the show would air."

He is careful to date that ease to the show's maturity rather than its birth: "It wasn't that way in the beginning." He claims the founding design as his: "I set the style for it."

That style is what a viewer actually remembers. The videos ran uninterrupted and unhosted, introduced by an unseen announcer rather than an on camera personality, which made the broadcast feel less like a variety show than like a channel. Recurring slots gave the ninety minutes a shape: older acts turned up in Hall of Fame Videos, individual performers were profiled in Private Reels, and new clips were branded as World Premiere Videos. For its first years the audio went out in stereo over FM radio at the same time, a simulcast arrangement that predated NBC's rollout of television stereo.

Video Vote, the 900 number, and the free T-shirts

The segment that made the show participatory rather than passive was Video Vote. Two clips played back to back and viewers called a national 900 number, at a small charge per call, to pick one. The winner faced a new challenger the following week, and a clip that survived four weeks was retired as a champion. Viewers on the West Coast, who saw the program on tape delay, were excluded from voting.

The mechanic did two things at once. It gave a one way broadcast a feedback loop that its cable rival did not have, and it produced revenue from the audience directly. When the calls needed encouraging, the show gave away T-shirts every fifteen seconds during the voting window.

The other structural change came in 1985, when the unseen announcer was joined by celebrity guest hosts, usually in pairs, beginning with Malcolm-Jamal Warner and Lisa Bonet, both then on NBC's own Cosby Show. The archival record notes a small production consequence that says a lot about how tight the format was: once hosts were talking, the show sometimes had to shave the ends off videos to make the time back.

The Emmy, and the year its creator gets wrong

Friday Night Videos won exactly one Emmy, and the record of it is a small lesson in why this lane separates dates from memories.

The Television Academy's own awards database lists a single nomination and a single win: Outstanding Graphic and Title Design, 1985, credited to Dick Ebersol, Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton. Jankel and Morton were the British directing team behind Cucumber Studios, later known for creating Max Headroom, and the award was for the look of the thing rather than the thing itself.

Ebersol remembers it warmly and dates it wrong. On tape in 2009 he places the win "I think in 1984," recalls that it beat the prime time competition for best graphic look, and says the show "won an Emmy for that." The pride is accurate and the year is not. The award record is the record; the producer's recollection is a telling, and this page keeps them apart rather than splitting the difference.

The slot dance, and who ended up owning it

The program's placement moved with the rest of NBC's late night board rather than on its own merits. Ebersol describes it starting around 12:30 because Letterman was then working Monday through Thursday only, and being pushed back to roughly 1:30 once Letterman decided he wanted Fridays too. The result was a three deep Friday stack that he sums up in five words: "So it was Carson, Letterman, and us."

By his account the show was "doing incredibly well for both NBC and for us" through those years, produced outside the network by his own company rather than in it. That arrangement ended in April 1989, when Ebersol took the presidency of NBC Sports and cleared his outside holdings. In his telling of that week, GE bought Friday Night Videos from him outright.

The program long outlived both its creator's involvement and its own premise. It shed thirty minutes in 1987, dropped the guest hosts in 1991, was retitled Friday Night in 1994 as it absorbed general entertainment content, became the stand-up showcase Late Friday in 2001, and ended on May 24, 2002, by which point the cable gap it was built to fill had closed completely.

How the telling has grown over the decades

This section normally tracks a story growing across decades of maker interviews. On this row it cannot, and saying so plainly is more useful than faking it.

• 1983, the program itself. The premiere's voiceover frames the show as an introduction to an unfamiliar form, which is the only self-description from the era that survives in general circulation.
• 2009, Television Academy Foundation. Dick Ebersol sits for a seven part oral history, interviewed by Dan Pasternack over two sessions on June 23 and 24, 2009. Friday Night Videos gets a single chapter, shared with Later with Bob Costas and his move to NBC Sports. Everything quoted on this page comes from it: the copying admission, the lawsuits, the playlist method, the Emmy memory, the slot.
• 2023, Remind. Jeff Pfeiffer's retrospective reconstructs the cable gap the show was built for and quotes the premiere's own voiceover, but carries no maker interview of its own.

The honest state of the record. One person who made this program has told its story at length, once. That is a genuine limit and it is disclosed here rather than dressed up. Two further accounts are known to exist and could not be read for this page: Ebersol published a memoir of his television career in 2022, and the show's off camera announcer Nick Michaels gave a trade magazine interview in 2003. Neither could be reached, so neither is quoted, and nothing has been inferred from either. What can be said is that where the one deep telling can be checked against a record, the record wins twice: on the Emmy year, and on the show being a copy rather than an invention, which its creator concedes before anyone else can say it.

The honest bottom line

Friday Night Videos was a knockoff, by the explicit admission of the man who made it, and its business model included charging its own viewers by the call to vote. It had no house personality for two years, ran on a playlist one producer assembled by ear, and its single Emmy was for graphics rather than anything it did with music. It survived because it solved a problem nobody else was solving: for a few years in the middle of the 1980s, if the cable company had not reached your street, this was where the videos were. The show that copied everything was, for a large part of the country, the original.

Sources

• Television Academy Foundation, The Interviews, Dick Ebersol oral history, part 6 of 7, interviewed by Dan Pasternack over two sessions on June 23 and 24, 2009. All Ebersol quotations on this page are from this interview, transcribed from the chapter covering Friday Night Videos.
• Television Academy, Friday Night Videos awards record, Outstanding Graphic and Title Design, 1985.
• Remind, "In July 1983, If You Were a Music Fan Without MTV, NBC's 'Friday Night Videos' Came to Your Rescue", Jeff Pfeiffer, July 28, 2023.
• Wikipedia, "Friday Night Videos", used for the programming skeleton (network, premiere and end dates, runtime changes, segment names, announcers, retitlings) and cross-checked against the sources above where possible. The article carries a more citations needed notice, so nothing contested rests on it alone.
• Wikipedia, "Annabel Jankel", for the identification of Jankel and Morton as the founders of Cucumber Studios, makers of TV title sequences, and co-creators of Max Headroom.

Friday nights still exist, grab a seat in the room and stay up late. More show stories live at /full-story/. Related: the full story of Club MTV and the full story of Puttin' On the Hits. The songs and artists themselves are the80sbubble's territory rather than this site's.

Frequently asked