Although Grant Tinker's career in television spanned more than 30 years and a number of positions in network programming and production, he is best known for his work in the 1970s and 1980s as founder and president of MTM Enterprises, and as "the man who saved NBC" when he served as the network's  chair and chief executive officer from 1981 to 1986. Throughout his career, he has been associated with literate, sophisticated programming usually referred to as "quality television."

His stint as chair and chief executive officer was not Tinker's first experience with NBC. In 1949, after graduation from Dartmouth College, he became the network's original executive trainee, learning about each of its departments before settling into a job in the station's night operations. He left the network in 1951 for employment in a series of production and programming jobs in radio, television, and advertising. He served as director of program development at McCann Erickson in the early 1950s, when advertisers were responsible for producing much of the networks' schedules, and at Warwick and Legler, where he rehabilitated Revlon's corporate image after it had been tarnished in the quiz-show scandals. He also served as Benton and Bowles's vice president in charge of programs, where he was involved in developing Procter and Gamble's The Dick Van Dyke Show, and where he met his second wife, Mary Tyler Moore. 

Tinker returned to NBC in the early 1960s as west­ coast head of programs, with responsibility for program development of a number of popular series, including Bonanza. I Spy, Dr. Kildare, and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. After returning to New York to serve as the network's vice president in charge of programs, he left NBC to work as a production executive at Universal (where he was instrumental in birthing It Takes a Thief and Marcus Welby, M.D., as well as The ABC Movie of the Week) and Twentieth Century-FOX.

When Mary Tyler Moore was offered a 13-episode series commitment from CBS in 1970, the couple formed MTM Enterprises to produce The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Tinker put into practice his philosophy of hiring the best creative people and letting them work without interference from executives at the networks or at MTM. He built MTM into a "writers' company"that produced some of the most successful and award­ winning series of the 1970s and 1980s. Beginning with the writer-producer team of James Brooks and Allan Burns, who created The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Tinker and MTM nurtured the talents of a host of top writers and producers whose work would go on to dominate U.S. network television schedules and the Emmy Awards through the 1990s. The staff included Gary David Goldberg, Steven Bochco, Bruce Paltrow, Mark Tinker, Hugh Wilson, Joshua Brand, and John Falsey. MTM's early hits were primarily sitcoms in the Mary Tyler Moore mold (including spin-offs Rhoda and Phyllis) as well as The Bob Newhart Show and WKRP in Cincinnati. Beginning in the late 1970s and 1980s, however, MTM produced a number of network television's most successful and innovative dramas, including Lou Grant, The White Shadow, Remington Steele, Hill Street Blues, and St. Elsewhere, shows that benefited from Tinker's combination of benign neglect in creative matters and tenacious support in dealing with the networks.

In 1981 Tinker left MTM to become chair and chief executive officer of NBC, the perennial last-place network. With no shows in the Nielsen top ten, and only two in the top twenty, NBC had suffered through a season of dismal profits (one-sixth the level of ABC's or CBS's) and affiliate defections. Based on the  belief that good-quality programming makes a strong network, Tinker worked with programming chief Brandon Tartikoff to revitalize NBC's prime-time schedule. They allowed low-rated but promising series to remain on the schedule until those programs built an audience, and they courted the best producers to supply the network with programs. Under this philosophy, NBC re­ covered the upscale urban audience prized by advertisers, earned industry approval with more Emmy Awards than CBS and ABC combined, and finally rose to first place in the ratings with such blockbusters as the famed Thursday night lineup-Cosby, Family Ties, Cheers, Night Court, and Hill Street Blues-billed as "the best night of television on television." That his programming strategy relied heavily on work from MTM (Hill Street Blues, St. Elsewhere, Remington Steele) and MTM alumni (Goldberg's Family Ties, Charles Burrows and Glen and Les Charles's Cheers) eventually cost Tinker his share of MTM, when NBC's parent company RCA ordered him to sell in the early 1980s. In any case, NBC's turnaround helped shore up the network system in an era when new programming alternatives such as cable and VCRs had begun eroding the once-monolithic network audience. Tinker left NBC in 1986, shortly after it was acquired by General Electric.

Tinker next tried to repeat the success of MTM Enterprises by forming GTG (Grant Tinker-Gannett) Entertainment with the communications giant Gannett, producer of the syndicated news-magazine USA Today on TV and the dramatic program WJOU, which aired for a short time on CBS. The partnership was dissolved in 1990. Since then, Tinker has written an autobiography, served on the boards of a variety of charitable organizations, and maintained his position as watchdogfor good taste on television. Tinker joined Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman in calling for more responsible programming during Congressional hearings in 1998, and was an outspoken critic of the genre of "reality programming" in 2000 and 200 I. Tinker has earned a variety of awards celebrating his career in television, including the Producers Guild's Lifetime Achievement Award in television ( 1991) and induction into the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences' Television Hall of Fame (1997).