For most of the past 25 years, Jeff Sagansky has followed the same ritual every morning. He gets up early and pores over the previous day’s Nielsen ratings, those omnipotent numbers that detail who’s watching what on television from dawn to prime time. “I love the competition,” he says with boyish enthusiasm, “and the Nielsens are our daily report card.”

A veteran of NBC and CBS, where he helped develop hits such as The Cosby Show, Cheers, and Touched by an Angel, Sagansky, president and CEO of Paxson Communications Corp., is now working his magic at the nation’s newest network, PAX TV. Founded just three years ago and dedicated to presenting shows that are “family-friendly,” Florida-based PAX already covers 84 percent of the country with 65 UHF stations that it has either bought or built. “This is a wonderful opportunity,” Sagansky beams. “How many times in your life do you get to start a network from scratch?”

In a stellar career that has also included stints running several movie studios and a national theater chain (as well as leading the initial U.S. rollout of Sony’s PlayStation), Sagansky has always had his heart in television. Of his boyhood in Wellesley, Massachusetts, in the 1950s, Sagansky recalls that TV characters like the Cartwrights in Bonanza “became an important part of my life.” In high school, he followed the industry in Variety. After graduating from Harvard College in 1974, he opted to attend HBS only when he couldn’t find a job in Hollywood.

Armed with his MBA, Sagansky spent a year as an analyst at CBS in New York before heading to the West Coast, where he worked at NBC and then with an independent production company. In 1982, he found himself back at NBC’s Burbank facility, in charge of the network’s series programming, working alongside industry giants such as Brandon Tartikoff and Grant Tinker. There he began honing the skills that have since secured his own reputation as a television programmer extraordinaire.

The key, Sagansky observes, is finding the right niche, “a lesson I learned in triplicate from HBS professor Steve Greyser.” At NBC, that meant developing “smart, urban shows” aimed at baby boomers that turned the peacock network’s fortunes from bronze to gold. From 1990 to 1994, Sagansky achieved similar success at CBS, lifting that network from third place to first after just one year as president of the Entertainment Division. “My job,” Sagansky explains, “has always been to manage the entire creative process so that the exciting initial concept is still compelling at the end of production.” Today, as the competition turns increasingly to reality programming, Sagansky sees PAX as a welcome alternative. Offering a prime-time mix of wholesome reruns purchased from other networks, as well as a growing number of its own shows, PAX saw its ratings surge last season by 25 percent. Under Sagansky’s leadership, the new fall schedule features ten hours of original programming each week, including a series called The Ponderosa, a prequel to the Bonanza shows he enjoyed so much as a boy. “This time around,” Sagansky smiles, “my two daughters will be watching with me.”

—James E. Aisner