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Long before HBO turned Sunday night into TV-monoculture ground zero, there was Ed Sullivan. Born in Harlem and raised in Port Chester, New York, the sportswriter, syndicated columnist and radio-program personality was tapped by CBS to host a weekly variety show for the television network. The master of ceremonies had a few ideas about what he wanted to do. For starters, there were a handful of old-timey vaudeville acts that, by 1948, had no place left to perform. Sullivan felt they deserved a home, and this new medium would provide it. He believed that viewers across America deserved to experience the finest — and the most eccentric — culture that New York City had to offer, all from the comfort of their living rooms. And he wanted to showcase a lot of music. Specifically, Black music.
Everyone knows the stories about the respective Ed Sullivan Show appearances of Elvis and the Beatles, and how his immensely popular Sunday night program inspired several generations to pick up guitars, grow their hair long, and play rock & roll. What’s less talked about is the way that Sullivan’s “rilly big sheew” gave Mahalia Jackson, Harry Belafonte, James Brown, the Jackson 5, “Little” Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, Diana Ross, Bo Diddley, Tina Turner, Nat King Cole, Gladys Knight & the Pips, Jackie Wilson and dozens of other Black artists a chance to speak to a national audience, notably at a moment when some parts of America wanted to isolate them or silence them altogether. And this is where Sunday Best comes in. Quietly slipped onto Netflix last week without much fanfare or promotion, Sacha Jenkins’ invaluable documentary reappraises Sullivan’s legacy not as a TV pioneer — that’s always been set in stone — but as a show-don’t-tell social activist. You go in thinking of the stiff, easily imitable Sullivan as simply a boomer boob-tube icon. By the end credits, you recognize that he was a low-key resistance fighter for civil rights and racial equality, who used his power to televise a social revolution one musical act at a time.
Even if you check this doc out just for the sheer talent on display, you’ll get your money’s worth. Billy Preston rips into “Agent Double-O-Soul” as Ray Charles backs him on piano. Cole and fellow crooner Tony Martin turn their “The Sunny Side of the Street” duet into a one-act play. The Ike & Tina Turner Revue make extremely good on the title of “Bold Soul Sister.” Diddley demonstrates how his signature syncopated rhythm essentially gave early rock & roll a blueprint. Several James Brown sets offer testimonials that the man from Georgia was indeed the hardest working man in show business. And Sullivan introduces a 12-year-old named Toni Harper who takes families, huddled in front of their TVs across the United States, to church with one of the most stirring renditions of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” ever aired.
Most of these clips have been available for a while (the above playlist comes courtesy of the official Ed Sullivan Show‘s YouTube channel; they’ve been diligently posting nuggets from the archives for 15 years now). Jenkins’ documentary puts all of them in much-needed context, in order to make the case that, despite the constant threat of censorship and the network’s hand-wringing over alienating the Southern market, Sullivan bucked the system and stood by the acts he wanted to give the spotlight to. Sunday Best credits this partially to his Irish roots, which gave him a front-row seat to how “non-Americans” (read: immigrant populations) were maligned, abused and mistreated. Belafonte recorded several interviews with the filmmaker before his death in 2023, and recounts being blacklisted by CBS for his politics. Sullivan asked for an audience with the singer, and said that he was told Belafonte was engaging in anti-American activities and thus, per network brass, was forbidden from appearing on his program. Belafonte mentioned Ireland taking on British oppressors in the early 1900s. How was this different from Black Americans fighting for basic human rights in the USA? Sullivan had him on the show that same week.
And it repeatedly underlines that his strong sense of Sullivan calling out injustice when he saw it, regardless of potential clapbacks from the powers that be, was well-honed before he stepped in front of a TV camera. It singles out a 1929 football game between New York University and the University of Georgia, in which the former benched Black quarterback Dave Myers because the latter “asked that the color line be drawn.” Sullivan was a sports editor at the time, and wrote a column blasting NYU for caving to pressure from their Southern counterparts. Later, when Sullivan was starting up his show and in need of talent, he called upon jazz musicians, vocalists, dancers and entertainers like Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and Sammy Davis Jr. to appear, even though the budget prevented him from paying them much. Because he had supported them when it was still unpopular to do so outside of certain circles, they supported him. What might have began as a quid pro quo situation continued long after The Ed Sullivan Show became the must-see TV of its day.
Not even key sponsors pulling ads stopped him from booking Black performers, from treating them with the dignity and respect they deserved, and from displaying his friendship with them onscreen — even if some viewers below the Mason-Dixon thought Sullivan holding Diahann Caroll’s hand was the equivalent of a mortal sin. Sunday Best plays fast and loose with chronology, skipping between eras and musical genres and landmark historical moments seemingly at will. It’s all in the name of presenting Sullivan’s insistence on supporting Black artists and subversively selling a movement by bringing these artists who spoke, directly and indirectly, for the cause. The guy with the really big show wasn’t 100-percent perfect when it came to protecting talent from network censors — just ask the guy who wrote “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues.” But he understood that humanity and diversity were one and the same, and the man that Flip Wilson dubbed “the most important finger-pointer in show business” knew the importance of who, when and why he had to point his finger at those who benefited from it in more ways than one.
This is the kind of thing that Jenkins, a journalist and prolific documentarian, specialized in: connecting the dots in a way that was insightful, enlightening, fun and pure catnip for cross-pop-cultural nerds. (See Fresh Dressed ASAP if you haven’t seen it yet.)That he didn’t get to see Sunday Best drop on Netflix and advocate for it is tragic; his death at age 53 this past May has robbed us of a true, one-of-a-kind talent. You wonder what he would have said about Stephen Colbert’s current situation, in which a host of a popular TV program spoke out against what he considered to be injustice on a mass scale and was unceremoniously given the hook. The network that fired him? CBS. His home base? The Ed Sullivan Theater.
