The 70s began for me in 1975—on April 1, 1975, to be exact. That was the day I signed on to move to New York and begin work on a new late-night comedy/variety series for NBC. And it was going to be live. As it turns out, April Fools’ Day is the right day to start work on something like that.

The year 1975 was a hinge moment in America. The president of the United States had recently resigned in disgrace, and politics was deeply unsettled. The Vietnam War had ended with the last helicopter taking off from the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon. New York City was flat broke. It was a moment of chaos, doubt, and, of course, opportunity. The perfect time to start a new comedy show.

In the first part of the decade, I had worked as a writer in Los Angeles on various television shows. And although the work was exciting, network television hadn’t changed much since I was a boy. Most of the other writers I was working with were older than I was and had been in TV since the 50s. Many of them had even made the transition from radio to television. I worked on The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show for NBC with Bob Schiller and Bob Weiskopf, who had written I Love Lucy; George Balzer, who had written for The Jack Benny Program for 35 years or so; and Keith Fowler, who had worked on The Honeymooners with Jackie Gleason. I learned a lot from them. They taught me how to write for television—the television I had grown up with.

When I worked on Laugh-In, at NBC, it was the No. 1 show in the country, with an audience at its peak of about 30 million. It aired in the same time period— Monday night at eight—as Here’s Lucy, on CBS, with an audience at its peak of about 15 million. CBS and NBC pretty much ruled the world. That’s the way it was. Why change a thing?

L.A. was a lot of fun in the early 70s. With the collapse of the big studios in the decade before, all sorts of people my age were now making movies—Scorsese, Coppola, Lucas, and Spielberg, to name a few. I was as envious of them as I had been of the singer-songwriters who had defined the 60s. They were in tune with what was going on in the country. My generation was beginning to make some noise, but, where I worked, we were still in reruns. Everywhere, artists were alerting us to the reality that things were not, in fact, all right. Television, on the other hand, was still reassuring us that everything was fine. Lucy was still in the Top 10.

No matter what the idea happened to be, and no matter what talent might be involved, someone from the network (or from an advertising agency) would always say, “It’ll never work in prime time.” What you needed to be a hit on TV then was an audience of about 30 million people. And 30 million people are not all likely to embrace something new at the same time. Really, what are the odds?

Whatever show I was working on, words like “new” and “experimental” were used in almost every network meeting, and everyone was encouraging and supportive. And of course it was understood: nothing new or experimental was going on the air. I was very frustrated and very well paid.

I wasn’t really aware of it then, but I was part of the baby boom. We had come of age at a time when the country still believed in public-school education, that the suburbs were the future, that prosperity was a good thing, and that 55 was old. But now the institutions we had grown up with—the pillars that stabilized society—were shaky. Outside the Burbank Studios, a storm was raging, but inside the studio where I worked, things were still pretty calm.