Summer Sunday USA

Summer Sunday USA
Genre	Newsmagazine
Directed by	George Paul
Presented by	Linda Ellerbee and Andrea Mitchell (episodes 1–9); Tom Brokaw (episode 10); Roger Mudd (episode 11)
Country of origin	United States
Original language	English
No. of seasons	1
No. of episodes	11
Production
Executive producer	Steve Friedman
Producers	Karen Curry (senior producer), Pat Dalton, Allison Davis, Kathy Fields, Wendy Goldstein, Cheryl Gould (senior producer), Kim McCarthy, Debra Pettit, Meryl Rubine, Pat Ruch, Nancy Steiner, Daniel Webster
Production location	United States
Running time	60 minutes
Production company	NBC News
Original release
Network	NBC
Release	July 1 (1984-07-01) – September 9, 1984 (1984-09-09)

Summer Sunday USA is an American prime-time television news program that aired on NBC for 11 episodes, from July 1 to September 9, 1984. Linda Ellerbee and Andrea Mitchell coanchored the first nine episodes, which were broadcast live from a different location in the United States every week. Tom Brokaw hosted the tenth one (a repeat of an NBC Reports special), and Roger Mudd anchored the last one.

Summer Sunday USA was the first news program that incoming NBC News president Lawrence K. Grossman green-lighted, demonstrating the network's commitment to creating a successful prime-time news series after several failed attempts in the 1970s and early 1980s. It was an experimental program designed to test the journalistic potential of a newly introduced K_u-band (commonly styled as Ku-band) satellite news-gathering vehicle capable of transmitting live broadcasts from anywhere, but it was hampered by technical and other problems. Although ratings and reviews were poor, it was the first national network prime-time news series to fully integrate this technology and the first such series to be anchored by two women. It exemplified an era when technological experimentation and journalistic risk-taking were more possible in network news than they would be in succeeding eras.

Anchors

Ellerbee and Mitchell were the anchors of the initial nine episodes of Summer Sunday USA, making it the first national network prime-time news series anchored by two women (in 1976, Ellerbee and Catherine Mackin had anchored an NBC News special on the new Congress, which Ellerbee identified as the first single-episode network news program anchored by two women). In addition, 95 percent of the staff was female.

Ellerbee had worked for NBC as a reporter and anchor since 1976. She and Lloyd Dobbins (later Bill Schechner) had anchored NBC News Overnight, which aired from July 5, 1982 to December 2, 1983. While it was a critical success, it was cancelled for lack of sufficient advertising support. Even though its small but devoted audience launched a campaign to save it, they ultimately failed. In addition to Ellerbee, several individuals who had worked on NBC News Overnight, including Cheryl Gould, John Long, Debra Pettit, and Daniel Webster, would work on Summer Sunday USA. Mitchell had served as NBC's White House correspondent since 1981 and continued in that role during and after Summer Sunday USA's run. In addition, she had contributed to NBC News Overnight and had substituted for Ellerbee.

Format

For nine successive weeks in July and August 1984 Summer Sunday USA was broadcast live from a different location in the United States. Destinations were mapped out at the beginning of production, but were subject to revision. Each episode focused on a broad theme loosely connected to the respective location, such as America (Washington, DC); the New South (Wake County, North Carolina); the state of American cities (Baltimore); and water (New Orleans). Some episodes were broadcast from cities where newsworthy events were taking place. For example, one aired from the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco; one from the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles; one from Max Yasgur's farm in Bethel, New York, to commemorate the fifteenth anniversary of Woodstock; and one from the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas. To the extent that Summer Sunday USA took place from a different location each week, it evoked the "On the Road" segments that journalist Charles Kuralt produced for the CBS Evening News from 1967 to 1980, in which he traveled throughout the United States in a motor home with a small crew, reporting on stories he found along the way. However, in contrast to these segments, it was broadcast live and focused more on hard news and current events.

Summer Sunday USA was broadcast from a newly introduced Ku-band satellite news-gathering vehicle, which Ellerbee called the "truck." In the early 1980s, the use of the Ku-band, a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum in the microwave range, revolutionized satellite news gathering. In 1984, NBC pioneered the shift from terrestrial to satellite program delivery by launching its Skypath service using Ku-band transponders. This decision validated the use of the previously overlooked Ku-band spectrum, which had been considered undesirable due to rain-fade risks, and helped pave the way for the widespread adoption of mobile satellite news gathering after the first vehicles designed for uplinking live video newsfeeds to satellites, like Summer Sunday USA's truck, were introduced.

Each episode of the program included a mix of live and taped segments. One regular segment was "Trading Places," in which a newsworthy person was given the opportunity to ask questions about their coverage in the media to a panel of reporters. Guests included Sen. Gary Hart, who ran for the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination; Rev. Jesse Jackson, who also ran; and Minister Louis Farrakhan, who endorsed Jackson but had made a series of incendiary antisemitic statements. The Farrakhan segment was plagued by technical problems. Ellerbee, who served as moderator, and the reporters—Ken Bode of NBC News, Nat Hentoff of the Village Voice, and David Nyhan of the Boston Globe—were in San Francisco, while Farrakhan was in Chicago. Ellerbee was the only person who could hear Farrakhan (she later learned that a technician had turned off the reporters' earpieces), so she had to repeat his statements to the panel. In her first memoir, "And So It Goes": Adventures in Television, she states that many viewers claimed that she had treated both Farrakhan and the reporters unfairly. Nevertheless, besides reviews of the first episode, the Farrakhan segment received more media coverage than any other segment in the program's run, primarily because Farrakhan made the claim that Adolf Hitler was "a very great man." Later in the episode, Mayor Ed Koch of New York demanded that Democrats reject "the racism of Farrakhan and Jesse Jackson."

Another regular segment was "Face-Off," in which two people in the news confronted each other. For example, in one episode Sen. George McGovern, the 1972 Democratic presidential candidate, and James G. Watt, President Ronald Reagan's controversial first Secretary of the Interior, faced off against each other, as did Mayor Ed Koch of New York and former Gov. Jerry Brown of California in another. Producer Cheryl Gould, who had worked with Ellerbee on NBC News Overnight, conceived a regular segment titled "NTV," which was similar to a segment seen on that program. Inspired by the popularity of MTV, the cable television network that rocketed to fame after its establishment in 1981 by showing music videos 24 hours a day, it consisted of video essays told with images and music, and no narration. For example, in the first episode video editor John Long, who had also contributed to NBC News Overnight, created a video essay on the new wave of immigration to the United States, filmed in Miami and set to Neil Diamond's 1980 song "America." In the second episode, whose theme was the New South, Long contributed a video essay combining images of the rural South he filmed in 1963 and in 1984, scored to the 1970 song "It's Not Easy Being Green," interpreted as a metaphor for the experience of being Black in the Deep South.

Additional regular segments included "Voice of the People," in which correspondents interviewed ordinary citizens; "Week in Review," a look back at the past week's news; and "This Week and Next," a look forward at the coming week. Unsuccessful segments were dropped after the first episode, including "The News Quiz," in which one of the anchors would ask viewers a question about the news and then reveal the answer after a commercial break. In the first (and only) News Quiz, viewers were asked: Which of the three remaining Democratic presidential candidates is tallest? (a question that Ellerbee stated was inspired by the then-current popularity of the game Trivial Pursuit). Some segments, such as "Stunt of the Week," never made it to the air (executive producer Steve Friedman described a hypothetical stunt as placing one unlocked bicycle in New York's Central Park and another in a rural area and waiting to see which one was stolen first).

Episodes

The following episode summaries are compiled from contemporary news articles and television listings, as well as Ellerbee's and Mitchell's memoirs, and are incomplete.

No.	Title	Original release date
1	"Washington, DC"	July 1, 1984 (1984-07-01)
Broadcast live from the National Mall in Washington, DC (theme: America). Segments include: Mike Jensen at the New York Stock Exchange on an NBC News poll's findings on the state of the economy; Mike Leonard at Wrigley Field in Chicago on why the fun has gone out of professional baseball; a Voice of the People segment with Steve Mallory reporting from Gorky Park in Moscow and Heidi Schulman from Griffith Park in Los Angeles; "person on the street" interviews in London, Paris, and Tokyo; John Long's video essay on the new immigration; Andrea Mitchell's interviews with Chinese defector Hu Na in Detroit and undocumented Salvadorean immigrant "Rosa Maria" in Washington, DC; Ken Bode and Connie Chung on Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale's potential running mate; a Trading Places segment, with Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Gary Hart questioning reporters covering his campaign; a Face-Off segment with former Secretary of the Interior James G. Watt and former Sen. George McGovern; Mitchell's interview with Mike Love of the Beach Boys.
2	"Wake County, North Carolina"	July 8, 1984 (1984-07-08)
Broadcast live from a tobacco farm in Wake County, North Carolina (theme: the New South). Segments include: a Face-Off segment with Rep. Charles Rose of North Carolina and Matthew Myers, executive director of the Coalition on Smoking OR Health, on the regulation of cigarettes and smoking; a report on the hotly contested 1984 North Carolina US Senate race between Democrat Jim Hunt and Republican Jesse Helms; a story on politicians and preachers and some who are both; a Trading Places segment, in which 1984 Democratic presidential candidate Rev. Jesse Jackson questions reporters covering his campaign; a report on how the registration of Black voters is changing politics; an analysis on what has changed and what has not since the 1965 Selma to Montgomery march for civil rights, reported by NBC News correspondent Richard Valeriani, who had covered the original march; and a video essay by John Long combining images of the rural South he filmed in 1963 and in 1984, scored to the 1970 song "It's Not Easy Being Green.".
3	"San Francisco, California"	July 15, 1984 (1984-07-15)
Broadcast live from San Francisco, where the Democratic National Convention took place July 16–19, 1984. Segments include: a story by NBC News correspondent John Hart examining the chaotic 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and the growing faultlines dividing the coalition of interest groups that constituted the party; a video essay on San Francisco; a Trading Places segment, in which Minister Louis Farrakhan, who had made antisemitic remarks, questioned Ken Bode of NBC News, Nat Hentoff of the Village Voice, and David Nyhan of the Boston Globe; a Face-Off segment between Mayor Ed Koch of New York and former Gov. Jerry Brown of California.
4	"Washington, DC"	July 22, 1984 (1984-07-22)
Broadcast live from Washington, DC (theme: the role of the United States in international affairs). Segments include: a report from NBC News correspondent Fred Francis, in Nicaragua, on the CIA's covert mining of Nicaraguan harbors to undermine the Communist Sandinista government, which had asked the World Court to end the operation; Mitchell's interview with United Nations Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick on US military conflicts in Central America.
5	"Los Angeles, California"	July 29, 1984 (1984-07-29)
Broadcast live from Los Angeles, where the 1984 Summer Olympics took place July 28–August 12, 1984. Segments include: an interview with Peter Ueberroth, president of the Los Angeles Olympics Organizing Committee; a live report from Seoul, South Korea, site of the 1988 Summer Olympics; Ellerbee's interview with the vice president of NBC Sports, which had unsuccessfully bid for television rights to the 1988 Summer Olympics (Carl Lewis, a track and field athlete who would win four gold medals that summer, was scheduled to interview journalists for the Trading Places segment, but he cancelled his appearance).
6	"Baltimore, Maryland"	August 5, 1984 (1984-08-05)
Broadcast live from Baltimore (theme: the status of American cities). Segments include: a report on the prosperous city of Seattle; a story on the good feeling created in Detroit by the Tigers' successful baseball season; a segment with New Orleans Mayor Ernest Morial and Peoria Mayor Richard Carver.
7	"Bethel, New York"	August 12, 1984 (1984-08-12)
Broadcast live from Max Yasgur's farm in Bethel, New York (theme: the fifteenth anniversary of the 1969 Woodstock music festival). Guests include Joan Baez, Angela Davis, Country Joe McDonald, Arlo Guthrie, Richie Havens, William Kunstler, Bobby Seale, Grace Slick, and a local farmer whose barn had been invaded by hippies during the festival. In addition, college students in Boston, Oklahoma, New York, Florida, and Berkeley are also interviewed.
8	"Dallas, Texas"	August 19, 1984 (1984-08-19)
Broadcast live from Dallas, where the Republican National Convention took place August 20–23, 1984 (theme: the relationship between television and political conventions). Segments include: Ellerbee's interview with Tom Brokaw on the high stakes in convention coverage.
9	"New Orleans, Louisiana"	August 26, 1984 (1984-08-26)
Broadcast live from New Orleans (theme: water). Ellerbee later wrote: "Our subject was water: too much water, not enough water, the quality of water, the sport of water, the poetry of water, and, in one instance, the effect of water on the weather."
10	"Iacocca—An American Profile"	September 2, 1984 (1984-09-02)
Repeat of NBC Reports: Iacocca—An American Profile, hosted by Tom Brokaw (originally aired on January 29, 1984).
11	TBA	September 9, 1984 (1984-09-09)
Roger Mudd examines the 1984 Democratic and Republican presidential candidates and their platforms.

Production

Development

In the 1970s and 1980s, NBC tried to emulate the success of the CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes by creating its own evening news program. However, these efforts produced a long line of failures, including Weekend, First Tuesday, NBC News Overnight, and Monitor (First Camera). On April 30, 1984, Lawrence K. Grossman, who had served as head of PBS, took over as president of NBC News. One of his first priorities was to develop a prime-time newsmagazine. As he stated that spring, "Somewhere the idea got started that a news division wasn't a news division unless it had a successful magazine show." Shortly after his arrival, he began to develop a prime-time news program titled Summer Sunday USA to be broadcast live on Sunday evenings from 7 to 8 p.m. against 60 Minutes for eleven weeks that summer.

Grossman hired Steve Friedman, who had helped turn around NBC's morning show Today, as Summer Sunday USA's executive producer. Friedman, who worked on both shows simultaneously, brought over several of his Today colleagues, including director George Paul and senior producer Karen Curry. He declared that he wanted to demonstrate that NBC News was ready to try new things, including things he could not do on Today, fully leverage the division's many correspondents, and experiment with live on-location broadcasting with low-risk stakes because viewership traditionally declined in the summer.

Grossman considered various NBC News journalists as potential anchors or reporters, perhaps on a rotating basis, for Summer Sunday USA. Ellerbee and John Chancellor, Connie Chung, Bernard Kalb, Marvin Kalb, and Roger Mudd were among the names reportedly considered. Early reports stated that Mudd would anchor episodes from the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco and the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas, but these plans were not executed. Instead, after Ellerbee and Mitchell had made their planned exit from the show, Mudd would anchor the last episode of the program—profiles of the 1984 Democratic and Republican presidential candidates and their platforms.

In May 1984, Grossman asked Ellerbee to serve as coanchor because he admired her storytelling. He told her that the program would be "new and completely different," that it would be broadcast each week from a different location from a truck equipped with new satellite technology, and that she did not need to worry about ratings. He asked Mitchell, whom he described as a "'first-rate, tenacious, indefatigable reporter," to be Ellerbee's coanchor.

In her memoir Talking Back … to Presidents, Dictators, and Assorted Scoundrels, Mitchell states, perhaps jokingly, that she received the invitation from Grossman after all the male anchors at NBC had turned down the opportunity: "So our bosses at NBC came up with a novel alternative format that they boiled down to 'live television, with two chicks and a truck.'" She also recalls that criticism of the program as "lightweight," including by NBC News correspondents, reflected an "old-boy aspect that beats up on anything that's new or different. The shots hurt the network, and that's dumb because we're all in this together."

At the annual meeting of NBC affiliates in May 1984, Grossman tried to generate interest in the program. He proclaimed: "We're designing 'Summer Sunday, USA' to try new things, take some risks, give visibility to some of our best people and stimulate interest leading up to the conventions—a determined effort to uncork the new energies and initiatives at NBC News." But ultimately, 15 percent of NBC's affiliates, including those in Boston and Buffalo, declined to air the program, instead choosing to air more profitable syndicated shows, like the weekly music countdown program, Solid Gold. The general manager of NBC's Boston affiliate explained that he did not air Summer Sunday USA because he was not inclined to schedule a program into a timeslot for only eleven weeks. Perhaps spurred by the fact that Grossman was the former president of PBS, two public television stations, WGBH-TV in Boston and WNED-TV in Buffalo, decided to air the program after the NBC affiliates in those cities refused. But because the program was not airing on NBC affiliates in these cities and did not carry commercials, these decisions did not have a positive effect on its ratings. Instead, the fact that only about 150 of NBC's 206 affiliates aired the program likely contributed to its consistently last-place position in the weekly ratings.

At a meeting of journalists and critics in June 1984, Grossman described Summer Sunday USA as "unabashedly experimental." He declared: "We're going to use it to find new ways of presenting news and information. Some of it may not work. But we'll consider it a success if we come out of it with ideas that we can use for a permanent program." Agreeing that the program was experimental, Ellerbee, too, anticipated that some things would work, while others would not, and that the latter would be jettisoned. Grossman, Friedman, and Ellerbee all declined to call the program a newsmagazine—partly to distinguish it from 60 Minutes and partly because, as Friedman admitted, every program that the network had labeled a newsmagazine had failed.

Production of Summer Sunday USA proceeded rapidly throughout June in preparation for the July 1, 1984 premiere. Because Mitchell was working full-time as NBC News's White House correspondent from Monday through Friday, Ellerbee would spend the week planning the episodes with Friedman and the producers. On Friday night Mitchell would fly to the city from which that week's episode was broadcasting, write the script with Ellerbee on Saturday, rehearse and do the broadcast on Sunday, and then return to Washington, DC, immediately afterward to begin the cycle again.

Premiere

The first episode of Summer Sunday USA was broadcast live from the National Mall in Washington, DC, on Sunday, July 1, 1984 from 7 to 8 pm. The theme, selected because it was airing shortly before July 4, was America. It opened with a segment from Mike Jensen, NBC's financial correspondent, reporting live from the New York Stock Exchange on an NBC News poll's findings on the state of the economy. Because the exchange was closed, however, it was empty. Similarly, Mike Leonard, a Today correspondent, reported live from Chicago's Wrigley Field on why the fun had gone out of professional baseball. Yet, because that day's game had ended and the ballpark was closed, it, too, was empty. Steve Mallory, an NBC News foreign correspondent in Europe, and Heidi Schulman, an NBC News government and public policy correspondent in Los Angeles, broadcast a "Voice of the People" segment live from Gorky Park in Moscow and Griffith Park in Los Angeles, respectively. Other correspondents conducted "person on the street" interviews in London, Paris, and Tokyo, asking residents their opinions of Americans.

Part of the episode dealt with the subtheme of immigration to the United States. For the NTV segment, John Long contributed a pretaped video essay scored to Neil Diamond's 1980 song "America." Consisting of still and moving images from Ellis Island, the Lower East Side in New York, and Little Havana in Miami, it visually juxtaposed earlier waves of immigration from Europe with the current wave from the Caribbean and Latin America. Another segment examined who gets to be an American by contrasting the stories of Hu Na, a young tennis player from the People's Republic of China who was granted asylum after she defected in 1982, and "Rosa Maria," an undocumented immigrant who was denied asylum after fleeing political violence in El Salvador. However, because of technical difficulties, it became the most notorious segment in the entire series. Mitchell, in Washington, DC, tried to interview Hu Na, in Detroit, but audio problems prevented Hu Na from hearing her questions. In addition, Hu Na's English-language skills were limited. As Mitchell recalled, "I raised my voice and repeated myself—still nothing. Finally, I was practically screaming at the poor kid, who still responded with a blank stare. As it turned out, no one had checked to see if she spoke English." She then pivoted in desperation to Rosa Maria, who had covered her face with a straw hat to conceal her identity. Ellerbee wrote that Mitchell "went ahead with the interview, never mentioning the hat, never seeming to notice she was interviewing a hubcap. … Unintentionally, it provided one of television's funniest moments."

On the political front, Ken Bode and Connie Chung, anchor of NBC News at Sunrise and the Saturday edition of NBC Nightly News, discussed the potential running mates of presumed Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale. For the Trading Places segment, Sen. Gary Hart, who had recently lost his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination to Mondale, questioned reporters covering him, including David Broder of the Washington Post. For the Face-Off segment, the Beach Boys were invited to confront former Secretary of the Interior James G. Watt, who had banned them from performing at the July 4, 1983 concert on the National Mall because he claimed they were unwholesome and encouraged alcohol and drug use. He was later forced to retract his ban, but by then they had committed to another appearance. The Beach Boys, however, refused to face off against Watt. Appearing in their place was 1972 Democratic presidential nominee, Sen. George McGovern. But instead of the confrontation the producers sought, the two were congenial. As television critic Tom Shales commented, "unfortunately, Watt put on his vaguely born-again grin and decided to play Mr. Sweetie. 'This is a great country and I'm certainly proud of it,' he beamed." At the end of the episode, Mitchell interviewed Mike Love of the Beach Boys, who was in Atlanta. After he talked up his upcoming projects, she snapped at him, "Aside from the promotional announcement, what about Jim Watt?"

Aftermath of premiere

After the first episode of Summer Sunday USA placed last in that week's ratings and television critics slammed the program, Friedman acknowledged that production was too rushed, that fewer but longer segments would be better, and that Ellerbee and Mitchell did not appear to be a cohesive team. Ellerbee recognized that the program was not up to her usual standards. NBC had hoped that the Ku-band satellite news-gathering vehicle would spur innovative journalism by enabling live on-location broadcasting, which the reporters of 60 Minutes could not do. However, the pressure to use the technology, which was unreliable, compromised the quality of the first few episodes in particular. As Shales remarked, "The prized piece of equipment here is a 'Ku-band' truck that satellites its signal back to the network from almost anywhere, and when you have such a truck, you consider it your mandate to go someplace."

Ellerbee later observed that the truck "cut a swath through our journalism all summer." Similarly, Mitchell suggested that letting the technology drive their journalism meant that they had to develop the rationale for the program as they went along. As Ellerbee concluded, they needed to shift gears: "After the first program, we held a few truths to be self-evident, if slow to sink in. Our secret weapon was not enough. A truck is not a program. A truck is a truck. We needed more than flashy toys. We needed something to say, and we needed to limit a one-hour program to one hour's worth of programming ideas. Certain completely new and different concepts were allowed to creep away in the dark of night. At the head of that parade was 'The News Quiz.'" She, Mitchell, and the producers also decided that each future episode would have a more focused theme, defined by the location from which they were broadcasting (which had been determined in advance by network executives).

While Summer Sunday USA continued to be plagued by technical programs in subsequent episodes, its journalistic focus steadily improved. Ellerbee was particularly pleased with the seventh episode, broadcast live on August 12, 1984 from Max Yasgur's farm, the site of the 1969 Woodstock music festival. This episode successfully used satellite technology to broadcast live conversations with some of the festival's original participants from a historic setting, exploring broader issues relevant to her generation. She observed: "The fifteenth anniversary was the peg, but the point of the program was to look at that time we like to call the 'sixties' … . The question was whether anything that had happened back then caused permanent change, or had the whole thing been no more than a cultural hiccup. I turned forty that week, and chose the 'Woodstock' program as a birthday gift from me to me, because the subject was one which had interested me for years and one I'd wanted to write about." She stated that by the next week's broadcast from the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas, was beginning to feel good about the program.

Nevertheless, the program's ratings never improved. At the end of the ninth episode, Ellerbee issued her farewell to viewers, which echoed the words that Dobbins had used at the end of the final episode of Weekend: "It has been fun. It is now over. And so it goes." Two more episodes of Summer Sunday USA, hosted respectively by Brokaw and Mudd, aired. Then it was replaced by Silver Spoons and Punky Brewster, two sitcoms targeted to children and teens—NBC News's implicit acknowledgment that it could not compete with 60 Minutes.

Grossman tried to put a positive spin on the first news program he developed at NBC by admitting that he learned that "we have a lot to do on the technical and production end of live programming." He added: "I was pleased that some real progress was made on that score after the first couple of programs." He left NBC in 1986, after disagreements with the network's new owners. Friedman returned to Today. Mitchell refocused on her role as NBC News's White House correspondent. And Ellerbee contributed regular Friday commentaries, called "TGIF," to Today. In 1986, she left NBC and signed a three-year contract with ABC, where she developed her next program, Our World, which lasted for one season. The same year she published her best-selling memoir, "And So It Goes": Adventures in Television.

Reception

Ratings

Ratings for the first episode of Summer Sunday USA were disastrous: It was the least watched network television show of the week ending July 1. For each of the first nine weeks of its run, it remained the least-watched network show of that week. For the last two weeks, it was the second-least watched show.

Episode No.	Date	Rank	Rating/Share
1	July 1	63	3.5/8
2	July 8	65	3.6/8
3	July 15	61	3.2/7
4	July 22	57	3.2/7
5	July 29	54	2.8/6
6	August 5	54	2.7/5
7	August 12	54	3.2/6
8	August 19	65	3.3/7
9	August 26	58	3.4/7
10	September 2	68	4.1/10
11	September 9	57	6.7/12

Reviews

Reviews of Summer Sunday USA were almost universally negative. Tom Shales of the Washington Post described the program as a "colossally pointless" show whose "key troubles … were chronic overcrowding of a premiere, to a perfectly ludicrous state, and the old TV heebie-jeebie of letting your equipment run your show." He continued: "Overbooked and overgimmicked, the hour left the two anchors no room to breathe, and Friedman absent-mindedly didn't even bother to include them both in the same shot until near the end of the show." Variety's reviewer derided the program as "an exhausting viewing experience" and observed that live feeds were used repeatedly for no good reason: "Never … did the hour-long cornucopia of interviews make a point of going to these cities, except to have NBC showcase its correspondents live. To go live simply to go live makes for 'so what?' television." Although it claimed that Ellerbee and Mitchell were background to the technology and lost control of some segments, it acknowledged that they "handled the multi-ring circus with vim." Newsday's Marvin Kitman had a similar view about both the misuse of technology and about the anchors.

By contrast, Martha Bayles of the Wall Street Journal criticized Ellerbee as detached and cynical, Mitchell as "dead earnest, refusing to display any softness or amiability," and even the program's presumed audience as "probably those members of the '60s generation who have preserved their self-righteousness to the point of feeling chronically overqualified, both morally and mentally, for the roles they now play in the big chill of adult society." Similarly, John Carman of the Atlanta Constitution declared that Ellerbee and Mitchell were a "bad match as hosts" and condemned the program itself as an "embarrassment" to the anchors, Grossman, and NBC News. Finally, while Bonnie Malleck of the Kitchener-Waterloo Record complimented aspects of the program, especially the episode on the 1984 Democratic National Convention, she also stated that "earlier criticisms of the show's uncohesive look, technical snafus and lack of direction seemed well-founded as the program exuded an appearance of too much on the menu and too little preparation behind it."

Home media

Summer Sunday USA has not been released on DVD. Videocassettes of the first nine episodes of the program are held in the Copyright Collection of the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. A copy of the tenth episode, which originally aired as NBC Reports: Iacocca—An American Profile on January 29, 1984, is in the collection of the Paley Archive at the Beverly Hills Public Library and at the Paley Museum in New York.

Themes and analysis

After Summer Sunday USA went off the air, NBC made subsequent attempts to launch another prime-time new series, finally finding lasting success with the 1992 premiere of Dateline. It was the first prime-time network news series to fully integrate live, on-location broadcasting using a Ku-band satellite news-gathering vehicle. After its introduction in 1984, this type of vehicle transformed television news-gathering, especially of breaking news, by facilitating live reporting from remote areas and easing deadline pressures. NBC helped its affiliates purchase such vehicles, and by late 1986, nearly 80 television stations in the United States had them. In addition to learning how to use this cutting-edge technology more effectively during the course of the series, Ellerbee, Mitchell, Steve Friedman, and Lawrence K. Grossman also came to understand that it could not replace rigorous reporting. In 1986, Grossman told a journalist that while NBC News had the capacity to report from anywhere in the world through satellite uplinks, it had to focus on quality journalism to differentiate itself from its competitors. Eventually, satellite news-gathering vehicles evolved into compact systems, such as flyaway and suitcase systems.

Summer Sunday USA was also the first prime-time network new series to be anchored by two women. While the one-man/one-woman coanchor team would become common in network news series in the following years, the two-woman anchor team would remain rare. The next such team did not emerge until 2013, when Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff became coanchors of the PBS News Hour.

Further reading

• Ellerbee, Linda. "And So It Goes": Adventures in Television. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1986.
• Mitchell, Andrea. Talking Back … to Presidents, Dictators, and Assorted Scoundrels. New York: Penguin Group, 2005.
• Shales, Tom. "'Summer': No Picnic: On NBC, Ellerbee & Mitchell Hit the Road." Washington Post, July 3, 1984, D1, D8.

References

• Brooks, Tim, and Earle Marsh. The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows, 1946–Present, p. 1329. New York: Ballantine Books, 2007.
• Einstein, Daniel. Special Edition: A Guide to Network Television Documentary Series and Special News Reports, 1980–1989, pp. 336–339. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1997.