Nickolas Davatzes, Force Behind A&E and the History Channel, Dies at 79

Nickolas Davatzes, who was instrumental in making the cable television networks A&E and the History Channel, which now attain into 335 million households about the planet, died on Aug. 21 at his household in Wilton, Conn. He was 79.

The trigger was difficulties of Parkinson’s disorder, his son George mentioned.

Mr. Davatzes (pronounced dah-VAT-sis) was president and main executive of A&E, at first the Arts & Entertainment Network, which he ran from 1983 to 2005 as a joint undertaking of the Hearst Corporation and the Disney-ABC Television Team. He released the Record Channel in 1995 and remained a forceful advocate for academic and public affairs programming, marketing it inside the business and in appearances just before Congress.

By the mid-1980s A&E had emerged as the sole surviving advertiser-supported cultural cable provider, mainly by acquiring programming and setting up a bankable audience by negotiating distribution rights with nearby cable techniques.

“After 60 days below, I instructed my spouse I did not think this point had a 20 per cent likelihood, since each time I turned close to there was a further obstacle,” Mr. Davatzes explained to The New York Instances in 1989. “I applied to say that we ended up like a bumblebee — we weren’t supposed to fly.”

But they did. A&E grew to become worthwhile inside 3 many years by supplying an eclectic menu of daily programming that, as The Situations set it, “might involve a biographical portrait of Herbert Hoover, a system about the embattled buffalo, a dramatization of an Ann Beattie limited tale and a change from the stand-up comedian Excitement Belmondo.”

“We really do not want to replicate ‘The A-Team’ or ‘Laverne & Shirley,’” Mr. Davatzes told The Moments in 1985. “There is a more youthful era that has never ever observed any believed-provoking entertainment on television. They’ve seen a rock star destroying a guitar just about every 16 minutes, but they’ve hardly ever observed classical new music.

“By community criteria,” he continued, “our viewership will usually be limited. But that is the purpose of cable — to existing more than enough options so that men and women can be their very own programmers.”

Underneath the A&E umbrella, the community encompassed a broad blend of enjoyment and nonfiction programming. It made a singular identification with scripted exhibits (“100 Centre Road,” “A Nero Wolfe Mystery”) and collaborations, like its wildly well known co-creation with the BBC of “Pride and Prejudice,” a mini-collection centered on the Jane Austen novel starring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle.

The community ongoing to expand its scope to include things like documentary sequence like “Biography” “Hoarders,” which may possibly be categorized as an anthropological review of compulsive stockpiling and the Background Channel’s encyclopedic scrutiny of Adolf Hitler.

Mr. Davatzes was awarded the Countrywide Humanities Medal by President George W. Bush in 2006. The French govt made him a chevalier of the Purchase of Arts and Letters in 1989. He was inducted into the Broadcasting & Cable Corridor of Fame in 1999.

Right after his demise, Frank A. Bennack Jr., the government vice chairman of Hearst, identified as him “the father of the Background Channel.”

Nickolas Davatzes was born on March 14, 1942, in Manhattan to George Davatzes, a Greek immigrant, and Alexandra (Kordes) Davatzes, whose mom and dad ended up from Greece. Both of those his moms and dads worked in the fur trade.

Right after graduating from Bryant Significant University in Astoria, Queens, he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics in 1962 and a master’s in sociology in 1964, the two from St. John’s College, the place he satisfied his potential wife, Dorothea Hayes.

In addition to his son George, he is survived by his spouse one more son, Dr. Nicholas Davatzes a sister, Carol Davatzes Ferrandino and 4 grandchildren. An additional son, Christopher, died right before him.

Immediately after serving in the Marines, Mr. Davatzes joined the Xerox Corporation in 1965 and shifted to facts technology at Intext Communications Systems in 1978. A close friend released him to an government at the fledgling Warner Amex cable company, who recruited him around lunch and experienced him indication a deal drawn on a cafe napkin. He went to work there in 1980, together with cable tv pioneers like Richard Aurelio and Larry Wangberg.

The Arts & Entertainment Network took shape in 1983, when Mr. Davatzes helped set the ending touches on a merger between two having difficulties cable units: the Amusement Community, owned by RCA and the Rockefeller loved ones, and the ARTS Network, owned by Hearst and ABC.

His system in the beginning was twofold: to focus on generating the community far more available to viewers, and not to be diverted by making first packages, in its place focusing on obtaining existing types.

“If you are in programming, we know that 85 per cent of every single new present that goes on the air generally fails,” Mr. Davatzes mentioned in a 2001 interview with The Cable Center, an instructional arm of the cable business.

“Our all round strategy is to create a sane economic model,” he stated in 1985. “I like to inform folks operating for us that we don’t try to eat at ‘21.’”