Charlie's Back

Well, it wouldn't have been the first time CBS made a programming mistake...

When CBS bigwigs saw a rough cut of A Charlie Brown Christmas in November 1965, they hated it.

"They said it was slow," executive producer Lee Mendelson remembers with a laugh. There were concerns that the show was almost defiantly different: There was no laugh track, real children provided the voices, and there was a swinging score by jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi.

Mendelson and animator Bill Melendez fretted about the insistence by Peanuts creator Charles Schulz that his first-ever TV spinoff end with a reading of the Christmas story from the Gospel of Luke by a lisping little boy named Linus.

"We told Schulz, 'Look, you can't read from the Bible on network television,' " Mendelson says. "When we finished the show and watched it, Melendez and I looked at each other and I said, 'We've ruined Charlie Brown.' "

Good grief, were they wrong. The first broadcast was watched by almost 50% of the nation's viewers. "When I started reading the reviews, I was absolutely shocked," says Melendez, 89. "They actually liked it!"

And when the program airs today at 8 p.m. ET on ABC, it will mark its 40th anniversary - a run that has made it a staple of family holiday traditions and an icon of American pop culture. The show won an Emmy and a Peabody award and began a string of more than two dozen Peanuts specials.

There's something almost quaint with the complaint that "You can't read from the Bible on network television" in today's context. But that aside, A Charlie Brown Christmas is probably my third favorite Christmas special, behind the claymation Rudolph and the always-enjoyable Grinch. I'm glad CBS didn't succumb to the stupidity of programming executives.

Of course, they're now supposedly trying to hire Katie Couric to anchor the Evening News, so perhaps I should note that the 1965 decision was probably an exception rather than the rule.