Summer Sunday USA is an American prime-time television news program produced by NBC News 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. The last two episodes were presented by Tom Brokaw and Roger Mudd, respectively.
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 since the early 1970s. It combined coverage of current events with analysis and contextualization of topical issues, as well as lighter human-interest features, all reported by the anchors and NBC News correspondents. It was also an experimental program designed to test the journalistic potential of a newly introduced Ku-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 Dobyns (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, Summer Sunday USA 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. Moderator Ellerbee and the reporters were in San Francisco, while Farrakhan was in Chicago. Only Ellerbee 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 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 claimed 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," 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