Neality TV

Tapping into nostalgia for classic shows and movies, Neal Sabin has built plucky Weigel Broadcasting—operator of WCIU, Me-TV, and the new This—into a regional TV dynamo

By Josh Schollmeyer

(page 2 of 3)

Among the hits from the Me-TV lineup: The Mary Tyler Moore Show, I Love Lucy, and Star Trek

He makes television from an expansive former print factory due east of Oprah’s Harpo headquarters in the West Loop. Persistent arm-twisting of City Hall earned the building the address of 26 North Halsted (as in Channel 26)—a designation not exactly reflective of its location on the city’s grid. An oversize winding staircase takes visitors from the street-level entrance up to Weigel Broadcasting’s second-floor administrative nerve center. In the Spartan lobby, a movie theatre–style popcorn machine provides snacks for waiting guests. Publicity photos of the stations’ marquee personalities hang everywhere. Chief among them—Svengoolie (a.k.a. Rich Koz), the comically greasepainted and bewigged horror movie host whose fabled program Sabin resurrected in 1995. (Fourteen years later, it continues to air every Saturday night on WCIU.) “Neal jokes that the only reason he keeps me around is because I remember all of the comedy lines that he uses from old TV shows and movies,” Koz says. The Svengoolie set—imagine the main room at Zanies if it were relocated to purgatory—is kept safely in the concrete bowels of the Weigel building, where all original programming is shot.

Like the rest of the premises, Sabin’s office is awash in blue-collar décor and ethos. His desk, chair, and guest accommodations (small couch, coffee table, stack of newspapers) are Ramada Inn basic. On a nondescript bookshelf across from his desk sit a quintet of 15-inch television monitors (sound down, incessantly glowing), where his eyes stray often and which occasionally spark his innate local pride. “It’s interesting to watch the opening of The Bob Newhart Show,” Sabin tells me when one screen flickers with a nightly Me-Too broadcast of the droll comedian’s first sitcom, set in Chicago. “Marshall Field’s is gone. The Wrigley Building is still there, but the National Association of Realtors Building has been redone like three times.” In his Lake View dwelling, nearly every room comes complete with a television set (nine in all). He watches them as might a normal televiewer solely when they are tuned to the premium cable channels (HBO and Showtime, to be precise, and the shows Weeds, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Dexter specifically). “There are no commercials in those shows,” he explains. “When I watch shows with commercials, I’m writing down all of the sponsors to see if they’re buying ad time on our stations.” He makes it a point not to watch his stations before bed for fear that any on-air blunder (usually perceptible to him alone) may render sleep fitful and his blood pressure elevated.

He is aided, abetted, indulged, enabled, and, most important, financed by the Shapiros, who have owned Weigel Broadcasting since the late 1960s. Howard Shapiro, the 83-year-old paterfamilias, took control of WCIU from John Weigel—father of the late sportscaster Tim Weigel and tsunami of tumult—soon after the station launched. Until Sabin arrived in 1994, it remained the province of stock-market fanatics and telenovela enthusiasts—its format a hybrid of business, Spanish, and foreign-language programming. Howard’s erudite son Norman tasked Sabin with ameliorating the family’s chronic format challenges, luring him away from Channel 50, where, as whiz kid program director, Sabin had spent the previous 11 years. One standard (and affectionate) Howard Shapiro quip: “Meet Neal Sabin. He is making me a millionaire. I used to be a multimillionaire.” Today, both the Shapiros and Sabin are Midwest media moguls; Weigel Broadcasting also controls seven other regional television properties (four in Milwaukee and three in South Bend) in addition to the four stations here in Chicago. The total number of people in their employ—about 240.

When fashioning business strategy, Sabin favors the wisdom of Looney Toons characters over Sun Tzu or Jack Welch. To wit, at the edge of his desk a snarling visage of Daffy Duck demands, “Bigger. Better. Faster. Cheaper.” And when setting priorities, Sabin often considers a line from an old Bugs Bunny cartoon: “Is this trip really necessary?” He reasons, “I’m probably the only person who runs a TV station that has a Bugs Bunny–as–Carmen Miranda cookie jar in his office.” Sans cookies, the neon-bright jar shares a shelf neatly lined with ratings books. Wherever Sabin goes, ratings seem to follow. He scored his first detectable numbers with a music video show in the nascent days of Channel 50. Ever since, the daily Nielsen tallies have been his dirty, horrible, no-good vice. “The ratings are my drug,” he says. His highest marks—past or present—still stir within him a warm delirium. (He recites them so often that it can inspire an altogether different delirium in those around him.)

One day he pledges to me that he will write the book Everything I Needed to Know I Learned from the Three Stooges. “To this day Moe’s words, ‘Quiet, numbskulls, I’m broadcastin’,’ are far more memorable than those of my radio-TV-film mentors at Northwestern,” he swore in a guest column he wrote for the Chicago Tribune in 1993. Like Curly, he sports a nearly bald dome. Whiskers, though, perpetually cover half of his face. He and the chief Stooge, Moe Howard, share a beleaguered leitmotif. “When did you first feel successful?” I ask. “Soon, I hope,” he responds half seriously. As a result, he demurs reflexively. His most cherished career artifact—an elegantly framed replica Superman cape—is kept at home rather than the office. The Shapiro family gave it to him for his 50th birthday. The accompanying card read, “For us, the ‘S’ stands for ‘Sabin.’” He has lived life entirely in the northern regions of the city and beyond—growing up in Skokie and taking up postcollegiate remodeling projects in Roscoe Village, Lincoln Square, Evanston, and, now, Lake View. He cohabitates there with his longtime partner Jeff Jacek, a senior corporate global compliance auditor at Abbott Laboratories. If the television thing hadn’t worked out, Sabin is certain he would be selling real estate—probably happily.

Worry jolts him awake every morning at exactly three. “People always tell me not to take things personally, but I can’t figure out how to divorce myself from work,” he says. “How do I not be personally hurt when we’re not doing well?” This could be why the other piece of advice everyone gives him is “Try yoga.” He borrows further life wisdom from the anthem to the guilty-pleasure film Flashdance, “What a Feeling.” Its signature lyric: “Take your passion, and make it happen!” “That’s my corny theme song, because that’s what I do—take my passion and make it happen,” he says.

Regarding that passion, his five-foot eight-inch frame was quite possibly hard-wired with coaxial cable at birth. A common occurrence throughout his childhood: “I broke the tuner on my parents’ old Motorola furniture television so many times, switching between all of the channels and shows I wanted to watch, that it got to the point where the repairmen took the set out of the house because they wanted to try to better understand what I kept doing to it.” And: “My father was a corporate attorney who traveled a lot for business. I would ask him to bring back TV guides from the cities he went to so I could see the lineups that other cities had. Then I would write them all down and make up my own lineups. I even made up some of my own shows—a talk show or whatever. This was when I was ten years old.” Two years later: “My parents helped me start a business showing cartoons at kids’ birthday parties. I would watch the kids’ reactions to different cartoons as they were shown, and I’d note which shorts got the best reaction. I’d revise the order of the cartoons so I’d deliver on my promise to the moms—‘One hour peace and quiet’ during the party.”

Says Feder, “That’s what he’s doing today, only it’s a much bigger projector, and he’s got a lot more cartoons.”

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And now, a word from the competition: “I guess this is unusual—me singing the praises of my competitor,” says Ed Wilson, president of Tribune Broadcasting, owner and operator of WGN locally and 22 other television stations nationally. (Chicago magazine is also a Tribune Company holding.) In Las Vegas a week or so earlier at the massive annual industry gathering NATPE (the National Association of Television Program Executives), Wilson expressed similar admiration for Sabin during a lunch panel entitled “How Broadcasters Thrive in This Economic Climate”: “I take my hat off to Weigel in Chicago. We watch them every day, and we hope that we can emulate them.” Later he confided to Sabin, “Everyone is rooting for you, Neal.” Wilson tells me, “He’s done a very good job of creating brands. In this new world of 300 channels, you’ve got to have a brand. And when you go to Weigel’s channels, you immediately get a feel of an attitude and brand.”

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