An Interview with Charles Maday Jr. of The History Channel

Ronald J. Grele

In this issue we continue our series of interviews with people doing history outside of the university setting, and offer a look inside The History Channel. Charles Maday, Jr., Senior Vice President, Programming of The History Channel, met  Ronald J. Grele, former Director of the Oral History Research Office at Columbia University, last August at the offices of the cable channel in New York City. --Eds.

Ronald J. Grele: You did graduate work at Northwestern?
Charles Maday, Jr.: That's where I focused  on television. I was in the television department but took film courses. I was only there a year for the graduate program. After that I went out and looked for a job in public television and went to Buffalo and got a job at the public television station. I was like an intern. I wasn't paid very much, but I never really produced anything. I was put right into a management position where I ran a management training program, where we were in school television. Early on, public television was very much more oriented to schools.
RG: K-12?
CM: K-12. Right. Instructional television. And that was the big business, if you could call it a business. It was the big effort in public TV. It was elementary and secondary education, because the revenue came from the school districts who paid community stations for carrying this material. Federal funding was only just beginning.
RG: What kind of programming would they want?
CM: Well, they wanted instructional programming. It was right at the time Sesame Street was starting [in 1970]. But these were basically shorter supplemental instructional series, which teachers would use in the classrooms. One of the problems was that you had to have a centralized taping and playback system, so it was awkward for teachers to use them. But it was an interesting period, because there was all this interest in television, and using television in different ways rather than just as an entertainment medium.
RG: How long did you stay in Buffalo?
CM: I was in Buffalo two or three years, and then I went to Schenectady in school television again. I was in charge of all the programming, and it was very successful. It was one of the top ten stations in the country for its size. Because we were near the state capitol, we had a series, Inside Albany, covering the state legislature, which is still on today. I was program manager there for probably ten years. After that I went to Boston to something called the Interregional Program Service.
RG: What is that?
CM: The Eastern Educational Network was one of the regional networks formed for the public television stations before PBS. It was a very powerful interconnect with lines that ran throughout the East Coast. Before satellite, the interconnect enabled the stations to share programming. I was hired to come in and in effect manage the buying and distribution of documentary programming. But at that point, there was not a lot of programming. One of the things I did do was search the international marketplace for programs. PBS really set the tone by bringing foreign products into the United States. It was inexpensive, high-quality programming. WGBH is famous, and of course Masterpiece Theater began in that period. Then with the Discovery Channel, I remember we put together a very good catalog of documentary programs. So I got in from the ground floor, and from 1975 on I was viewing just about everything produced internationally. We put together, I think, a very good series of offerings for the public. That was the kind of thing I did.
RG: This must have given you a broad knowledge of what was out there in the world of documentaries.
CM: I saw just about everything available. I also saw a lot of drama and other programming, but I was always more interested in documentary programming because of my political science background. We did a lot of history programming at Schenectady. We had World of War from Thames Television, which was the first major documentary series to be syndicated. Then we ran Victory at Sea, which we still have under contract. We didn't produce a lot of our own; we did mostly talk shows or interview programs, and we didn't have the resources then. We had a variety of programs, too, including arts and performance. It wasn't all just documentary.
RG: Right before you came to A&E Television Networks, what was the world of historical documentation like? What were the strong and weak points?
CM: Well, I suppose before I came to A&E, I would say that the foreign producers, especially the BBC, were dominant in the field, although there is a tradition of documentaries on television in the United States dating from the late 1960s. There have been two trends in documentary production. The first was communicating social change. The people deeply involved in documentary film making were very interested in social change. They wanted to change the world, and were reflecting what you might even call a radical view at the time. I think in the 1970s and into the 1980s, when television became more specialized, the documentary niche became much broader and more of an entertainment service. Although the desire to present documentaries for social change was still there, there was also the view of providing documentaries primarily designed for information and entertainment. If you look at Discovery, if you look at A&E, the History Channel, and the Learning Channel, they're basically not presenting documentaries for social change--although they may have that impact--they're not designed to change people's minds. They're designed to provide information and entertainment.
RG: I'm thinking back to some of those CBS documentaries during the 1950s and 1960s, Harvest of Shame, and so on.
CM: Obviously you wouldn't present something like Harvest of Shame unless you had an agenda to change things. You wanted a better life than migrants. And it was an editorial. I don't think people would say today that it was very entertaining. They'd say it was frightening, it was an extension of the news division. But I think there are many approaches, and you're always interested in being provocative and interesting. I don't think you'd want to be dull and not challenge people. I think almost everybody in TV wants an edge, or they want to provoke the audience, because when you're in TV, you have this sense of an audience out there who you don't really know, and the only way you can really get to them is provoke them, wake them up in some way, present something that they're going to pay attention to, and you then have to try and rise above the noise level in today's society.
RG: You've been quoted as saying that you're always looking for some new angle rather than something that's just rehash.
CM: Well, take history buffs. They can watch a program on the Civil War Journal that we may have shown fifty times, and they never get enough of it, because it's their interest. Also, after watching, one forgets, so it's good to see it again, and perhaps find something new. But you're also always looking for something new to include like personal stories that haven't been told before. That's the key to a successful show.
RG: How do you know what's rehashing and what's new?
CM: Well, because we interview so many historians, the new tends to come out. A number of different approaches exist, and a number of different understandings. Some people are more traditional in their interpretation of the past. Others take a new direction, or undertake new investigations. I might think, "Well, that documentary was a fairly traditional approach to World War II, and I wouldn't teach it that way," but there's still this leading professor at a major college teaching the old way who considers the old subject matter to be quite as valid as it was twenty years ago. I think a lot of people would like to see everything reflect the latest, but that's not the way the world is. The world isn't new, so everything isn't the latest. And there are many pockets of traditionalism, so you have to be careful about taking only one approach to the presentation of information, and saying it's going to be this way. Nothing can be orthodox because that's not interesting today to people. For example, something "trendy" is to look at the Founding Fathers in a new way, and we have a series that looks at them as individuals with all their personal foibles. Yet there are still many people who probably prefer to teach the Founding Fathers' accomplishments without these more intimate details. I think we do try to reflect both of these sides in the network, and try to avoid totally alienating people. That's the idea of balance. You hear all the time: "The program wasn't balanced."
RG: Who do you hear that from?
CM: Usually from people that disagree with a point of view that's in a program. They want all points of view reflected, and that's impossible, because you can't have all points of view in one program. Obviously you want it balanced in some way, but it can't be done so that for every statement there's a counter statement.
RG: When you came to A&E, do you recall when you first heard about the History Channel?
CM: I can tell you how that started. I got here in 1987, and the History Channel was launched in 1995. We presented a number of history programs on A&E, and they were very successful. They attracted a different audience, upscale men, a very appealing audience to advertisers. They're hard to reach. They tend to not watch as much television. The concept is they watch sports and very little else, which is not true, but the ad community thinks that. So, Nick Davatzes and the people leading the network felt they could make a business out of historical documentaries, and they looked at a number of alternatives. They looked at some sports things. They also saw what was happening in cable at the time. Channel capacity was going up, and the operators were saying, "If you can give us a few more good ideas, good programs, we think we can sell more people on cable."  So at that point, we knew the documentaries were successful, and that a whole network built on historical documentaries could sustain a business plan, and that the operators would support it. It's sort of a joke that most cable operators are history majors. They tend to be generalists, and include people who went into business and did different things in college. A number of them are lawyers who took history as an undergraduate major. So they were interested in it, and it was an easy sell from that point of view. We put together a plan since we had a good inventory of product  that we could switch to the History Channel. We knew we had to develop some new things, too. Early on we were much more dependent on historical films than we are today, because they were readily available, and we had a number of film packages. We were on every night with a historical film. This evolved, and now we are one hundred per cent original, with nothing acquired.
RG: Once it debuted, the figures are quite striking.
CM: Well, it grew very quickly, and it had a lot to do with what was going on in Congress at the time concerning cable regulation. A window opened at the right moment which allowed operators to increase their rates if they could add more service, and that was a time when things like Home and Garden Television and the History Channel were launched, and they were all very successful. The History Channel is successful because it has a base of interested core viewers, which sometimes a general network doesn't.
RG: And your core audience consists of upscale men thirty-five to forty-nine?
CM: Well, the key group is twenty-five to fifty-four, and the breaks for ad sales are very important if you're ad supported, because your affiliate agreements tend to be long-term contracts. With your ad business, you can grow quickly, or grow year to year, depending on the ad market. So from a business point of view, you tend to lean more aggressively in advertising, which is why these groups of men twenty-five to fifty-four are very important.
RG: I was wondering if that equates with the criticism of the History Channel that I picked up, which was that you had never met a war you didn't like?
CM: Well, I think we are led to a certain extent by ratings. I wouldn't deny that, although ratings are not the only determinant since we do a number of things that are not ratings-dependent, such as Save Our History. This is an example of the other approach to documentary making I was talking about, where there's a social agenda. It's very clear what we're saying about this, and some of the things are provocative. But, yes, the network generally is dependent on income and the number of people that watch in this core group of men twenty-five to fifty-four. So we're programming what sells, which is really what publishers do. If I was a publisher, no one would criticize me for publishing a number of books on World War II, if this was what sold well. I'd try to get all the top authors on World War II, in order to have as many titles as possible. I wouldn't think twice about it, because that's what is driving the market. But, like a publisher, we also try to get away from that, because we don't want to end up being only a World War II network. We've done This Week in History, which is different, and we're doing a new history quiz, so we're looking for new forms and formats that can reach a different audience, too, but with historical information.
RG: Did you sense that something was stirring out there, that people wanted something about history at this particular moment?
CM: I think there's always a core group of people that like history programming. I think they've been there for the last twenty-five, thirty years, and that they're underserved. But it's said you don't really become interested in history until you hit your thirties, and thus it's kind of ironic for history teachers that the very group they're teaching has the lowest interest in history.
RG: We complain about it all the time.
CM: When we do focus groups, we hear  expressions like, "I never took history in school," and "I didn't like it in school, but now I like it." And at a certain age, people become historical persons in their own right with their own accumulated histories. They can remember their pasts which helps develop an interest in other aspects of the past. I think, though that there is an undercounted number of younger people who watch the History Channel. It's not all men in their forties, but we can't really get a count on college students who watch. In sample studies there are whole categories of people that are unrepresented, such as single people and Hispanic homes, so I would guess we get more younger viewers than we think. But when you're older, I think you have more interest in where you fit in the past, where you fit in the scheme of things. And that happens later in life.
RG: This resonates with something Ken Burns said about the success of his programming. It comes at a moment when the American public is searching for identity.
CM: I think that's true because I think you're seeing a change in direction from, let's say, the 1990s to now. With prosperity, the lack of a great foreign menace, and with a quieting down from the large scale revolutionary and evolutionary things that were happening in the 1960s and 1970s, I think we're now seeing a society with more time for reflection. Today's issues are less pointed, and softer. For example, where's the drama in today's political conventions? There isn't any. But if you look back in history, you can find great and exciting dramatic moments that don't exist today. I'm not sure that interest in history is driven by a collective search for identity as I think Ken Burns has suggested. I think it's more this individual search for identity that comes as you get older, and since the population is aging, people are more reflective. And since the news isn't competing by constantly demanding their attention to important issues, it leaves a void, which can be filled by interest in past events, although, of course, this can change in a flash. All you need is a major accident in the Soviet Union, or a war to break out somewhere, and people's minds come off history to the more immediate, "will I survive next week?" focus.
RG: When you say that more and more your programming is self-generated . . .
CM: We create all of our programming, but we commission other people to produce it. We have about twelve major production companies that we work with.
RG: Do you think that the History Channel, A&E, and other cable channels have brought these companies into existence?
CM: Well, they tend to be smaller, more dependent companies, of maybe fifty to a hundred people. They're not Warner Brothers with their big money. When you develop a relationship with a small company, you also create an obligation, so a special relationship is formed which is very hard to break off.
RG: What kind of people are your suppliers? Are they communications people? Television people?
CM: They tend to be people interested in something as vague as reality programming. They tend more to come out of the news tradition. Although some have been in the news business, some are feature documentary producers--and by that I mean they may have worked on magazine shows where they were involved with smaller pieces of documentary and wanted to do more full-length things--but they're all interested in reality programming. All of them have an interest in history, but none of them are historians. For example, I don't think Ken Burns is really a historian. He's a filmmaker who's interested in history. And they're all rather like him: filmmakers who are interested in history.
RG: Activists?
CM: I think the number one characteristic of these people is their high level of curiosity. They're not activists in the traditional sense of having a political agenda. I think they are activists who are excited by new information, stories, and the real world. They're interested both in present happenings as well as in news of the past, and the ideas they have about the past.
RG: These are people who would go to professional historians for consultations?
CM: Yes, they would go to them. And since we're not experts ourselves, we are very dependent upon the honesty and integrity of the historical community to tell us not only what they believe but what they know to be true. It's seldom that we have a problem with this dependence. There are also some subjects that are more speculative than others, which require a wider range of opinion, and there are others we just do for fun, which aren't truly historical, but people enjoy them.
RG: What's an example of something you do for fun?
CM: Well, take myths and monsters. Although there's no evidence that a dragon ever existed, a historian could legitimately ask, "where did these beliefs come from?" The idea, after all, does exist historically, since people seem to have believed in dragons from early times. Thus, a historian can explore the origins of such mythology.
RG: Who brings such an idea to you?
CM: We--that is, the program staff--have our own ideas. They watch a show, and take note of the times audience interest goes up.
RG: How large is the staff?
CM: We have about ten people, that's all. But, again, we have an extended family which numbers in the hundreds and even thousands if you included everybody working with the History Channel.
RG: What are these ten people like?
CM: They are television people, and really, to be in television, your prime interest has to be in television, although we do get letters from historians saying, "I'm a historian. I'm available to work with you." When I first started here, I was in charge of documentary and also comedy at A&E, although not the latter at the History Channel. So, as far as my own interest in television is concerned, I'm not a generalist, because I'm interested in reality more than anything else, but in a sense I'm not a historian either. I think most of our people are interested in, and enjoy  technology. You can't look down on it. A lot of people look down on television, but you can't be prejudiced against it, which many people in the academic community are. You won't be very successful in television if you bring prejudice against it with you. But if you enjoy it, then you'll be very successful in it.
RG: Do you see yourself as competing in any way with PBS?
CM: I think we compete with PBS for audience. Not for dollars, of course. Those are two different piles of dollars. We compete with Discovery, the Learning Channel, and PBS to a certain extent. I think we all compete for audiences, because we're all in the same niche.
RG: I was thinking of your Civil War series.
CM: I think Ken Burns is different. He's a very high level, very good filmmaker, and he produces in a way that is more typical of PBS programs. But he also has a luxury that we don't have, because we have to fill a whole network. He can work for two or three years on, let's say, a ten-hour series, and eat up a great deal of money in development. Since we can't do that we're even more dependent than Ken Burns is on historians, because they're doing the development. It's very important for us to interview the people who have already done the research work rather than try to recreate it on our own. And, because we have less time, I'd say, we're more closely linked in some ways. Ken Burns can go off and do The Civil War just with Shelby Foote because he doesn't need to have ten people. But because we need to get the program done on time, in order to fill the air time properly, we do require ten people's input, twenty historians' input, and we can't spend three or four years with one particular researcher.
RG: What was the story about the scuttling of the series on private enterprise?
CM: I suppose you mean, The Spirit of Enterprise? Well, I think we were misguided in thinking we could serve the interests of particular companies and maintain editorial independence. We had an arrangement where we went to the company and said, "We'll do your history, the history of the Ford Motor Company, and put you on the air, and you may or may not advertise in it." Just as you would have done had you hired a historian to write a legitimate company history. I think the problem with the History Channel is that it's seen as akin to news, and news departments are becoming increasingly concerned about editorial encroachment by commercial interests. I think when we did this, it wasn't the television community who got upset. It was the newspapers that picked up on it, because their reporters and the critics are much more concerned than we are that someday what they write will be dictated by commercial interests. So they criticized us for that. And I think they were right. We haven't done anything like that since because the perception of editorial independence on the History Channel can't be compromised or people wouldn't trust what was on the network.
RG: That leads to my last question. What is it that the History Channel will not do?
CM: Historical fiction, probably.
RG: Well, there is that blurring of the line all over the place.
CM: Right. When the Edmund Morris book on Reagan came out [Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Regan, Random House, 1999], I found the characters issues intriguing. But I don't think all of our audience is sophisticated enough to figure out what was real from what was perhaps fictional. I don't think we're ready to blur those lines. And I don't think we want to do things that are so contemporary that they haven't yet acquired a historical thread. We're not ready to do drama yet, even though it could be true in a sense, and also because it's very expensive to do. A&E is doing some very good and interesting historical drama, but they're bigger than we are, and can afford to do it. I don't think we would create a reality show that's just there for sensational purposes. If it doesn't have historical value, I don't think we'd do it.  I don't think we're open for commissioning. We really don't like the idea of people commissioning us to do something because it's very bad from an independence point of view. We like to be the commissioners, although we will do coproduction and listen to ideas, because that's different, since we can make an independent judgment. Although, for example, a well-known public service organization might love to have something for their anniversary, I'm very afraid of that area. We might be doing a public service, and it would be great to know about the society and how they developed, but they always have an ulterior motive which makes it hard to work, so I'm against that. And after all, we don't need the money, because we're successful.