Donald Ohlmeyer
Donald Ohlmeyer
U.S. Media Executive
Donald W. Ohlmeyer was president of the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), West Coast, a position he held from 1993 until his retirement from the company in 1999. As president of the West Coast division, Ohlmeyer was responsible for the operations of NBC Entertainment and NBC Productions, both of which produce television programs for the network and other venues. American television network production of such internally developed programming has increased since the Federal Communications Commission relaxed its financial-syndication (fin-syn) regulations, which previously limited such self-production.
Don Ohlmeyer.
Courtesy of the Everett Collection
Bio
Ohlmeyer is a veteran television producer-director who won many Emmy Awards from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. He started his career at ABC Sports in 1967, and moved up the career ladder, working on Wide World of Sports, a groundbreaking program in terms of technological broadcast innovation and breadth of coverage. At ABC, he directed three Olympic broadcasts in addition to producing Monday Night Football, an early ratings success and one of the first U.S. prime-time network sports programs (boxing notwithstanding).
Ohlmeyer moved to NBC in 1977 as Executive Producer of Sports and worked on network coverage of the World Series and the Super Bowl. Combining his careers at ABC and NBC, he has produced or directed television coverage of championships in every major sport in the United States.
While at NBC, Ohlmeyer branched out into feature-film production with The Golden Moment: An Olympic Love Story, an award-winning made-for-TV movie. He left NBC in 1982 to form his own production company, Ohlmeyer Communications, which produced made-for-TV films, award programs for MTV, and network series. In the latter category, Lifestories was an early reality-based series that garnered positive reviews from television critics for its story treatment, but failed to generate a large enough audience for renewal. Ohlmeyer won an Emmy as producer of Special Bulletin, a harrowing 1983 depiction of nuclear terrorism that utilized a television news approach for verisimilitude.
Don Ohlmeyer is a rarity among American television executives in that he moved into senior management from the production side of the business. As producer-executive Grant Tinker also demonstrated at NBC, this type of background can be valuable in assessing potential projects and encouraging program submissions from producers. Ohlmeyer leveraged his knowledge of sports, feature films, and special-events coverage into a key position managing the production efforts of NBC at a time when the broadcast networks had an economic incentive to develop more of their own programming.
After his retirement from NBC in 1999, Ohlmeyer worked on Monday Night Football for ABC for a season, then retired from television management in 2001. He currently teaches at Pepperdine University in the Los Angeles area and is writing a book on broadcast programming.