The Christmas special CBS feared would fail — and why it changed television forever

“Television is taking a major risk,” television reporter Val Adams warned in The New York Times on August 8, 1965. The industry, he wrote, was preparing to air a half-hour animated special in color based on the beloved newspaper comic strip Peanuts. By lifting Charlie Brown, Lucy, and the rest of the cast off the printed page and giving them motion and sound, television was, in Adams’s view, interfering with the deeply personal imaginations of millions of readers who already carried fixed ideas about how these characters should look, speak, and behave.

For nearly fifteen years by that point, newspapers across America — though not The Times itself — had faithfully delivered the daily misadventures of the Peanuts gang to front porches each morning. Since October 2, 1950, the strip’s blend of personal disappointment and social awkwardness had resonated deeply. For little more than the symbolic price of Lucy van Pelt’s five-cent therapy booth, readers could revisit their own childhood anxieties through Charlie Brown’s quiet despair and the sharp wit of his friends. That connection would endure for decades, as creator Charles Schulz later reflected, noting that love was never returned, baseball games were always lost, grades were perpetually poor, the Great Pumpkin never appeared, and the football was forever yanked away.

Those long-held expectations loomed large when CBS prepared to broadcast its first animated adaptation of the comic strip on December 9, 1965. Yet the greater risk for the network wasn’t simply how audiences would respond to seeing Peanuts animated — it was how airing a children’s cartoon during prime time might disrupt CBS’s carefully engineered programming philosophy.

As later accounts would emphasize, “A Charlie Brown Christmas” included several unconventional choices that set it apart from typical animated fare: child actors instead of professional voice performers, jazz rather than orchestral music, an unfiltered Bible passage, and the complete absence of a laugh track. Yet experimentation with bringing the characters to screen had begun years earlier, most notably in a 1959 Ford Motor Company commercial. Schulz, famously protective of his creation, only agreed to further animation after seeing the work of former Disney animator Bill Melendez, who managed to preserve the comic’s deceptively simple visual style.

Melendez returned to the world of Peanuts several years later when Schulz agreed to participate in a documentary project with television producer Lee Mendelson. Mendelson envisioned a short film about Schulz and the origins of his strip and requested a few minutes of animation to accompany it. Though the documentary failed to find a buyer, the effort left an impression. When Charlie Brown appeared on the April 9, 1965 cover of Time magazine, one Madison Avenue advertising firm remembered the project — McCann-Erickson, the agency representing Coca-Cola.

During the 1960s, the rivalry between Coca-Cola and Pepsi played out most fiercely on television. “The Pepsi Generation” campaign emerged in 1963, and by the following year Pepsi had doubled its advertising output, increased its television spending significantly, and tripled its market research budget. That same year, Pepsi partnered with Disney to showcase “It’s a Small World” at the New York World’s Fair, underscoring how central television and spectacle had become to brand identity.

Seeking its own countermove, Coca-Cola approached Mendelson with an idea: sponsor a family-friendly Christmas special for 1965. Could it be built around Charlie Brown? Mendelson agreed immediately — before consulting Schulz — but the cartoonist ultimately signed on. Within days, the pair submitted a single-page, triple-spaced outline. Coca-Cola approved it without hesitation.

CBS, however, initially rejected the proposal outright. Their resistance wasn’t rooted in a disbelief in animated programming; NBC’s “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” had aired successfully in 1964, and ABC had already scored a major hit with Hanna-Barbera’s The Flintstones. The issue lay in CBS’s rigid scheduling philosophy. Network president James Aubrey viewed specials as disruptions that interfered with “habit viewers,” audiences conditioned to expect the same types of programs at the same times each week. Children, in his view, belonged to Saturday mornings — not prime-time evenings.

Despite his volatility, Aubrey had overseen a period of strong ratings for CBS, long known as the “Tiffany network” for its reputation for quality. That identity had been forged in the postwar years through exceptional broadcast journalism led by Edward R. Murrow. Yet tensions between journalism and entertainment simmered for years. Murrow eventually departed CBS after public disagreements with corporate leadership over what he saw as television’s failure to adequately address serious world issues. Network president Frank Stanton defended the balance, arguing that audiences could be both informed and entertained.

Under Aubrey, CBS perfected the formula of consistent weekly scheduling, locking in mystery dramas, westerns, and sitcoms at fixed times to dominate ratings. According to later reporting, only after Aubrey was dismissed in early 1965 did the network begin to seriously entertain the idea of non-documentary specials. Even then, such programming was rare and typically tied to major personalities or significant events.

In that context, Charles Schulz and Peanuts qualified — barely. With Aubrey gone and the proposal arriving just months later, CBS had little experience producing half-hour animated specials for prime time. Still, executives ultimately agreed to air “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” influenced in part by Stanton’s friendship with Schulz. The creative team was left with just six months to produce a format none of them had attempted before.

The essentials soon took shape: ice skating scenes, the fragile little tree, Linus’s recitation from Scripture — which Schulz insisted remain despite resistance — and Charlie Brown’s familiar expressions of insecurity. These elements reflected the quiet, understated tone fans recognized from the strip.

Three weeks before the CBS screening, Mendelson and Melendez previewed the finished work in a small room with fellow animators. Doubts surfaced immediately. The pacing felt slow, the music didn’t always align perfectly, and the children’s voices sounded awkward. Melendez, turning to Mendelson, reportedly said, “I think we’ve ruined Charlie Brown.”

That concern was echoed by Neil Reagan, an executive at McCann-Erickson, who bluntly remarked that the project didn’t seem very good. Some issues could be adjusted — lyrics were added to the opening jazz piece “Christmastime Is Here” — but other aspects, particularly the cadence of the children’s dialogue, were harder to refine.

When CBS executives finally viewed the special just days before its scheduled airing, reactions were lukewarm. Fred Silverman, then a young programming executive, later recalled a general sense of disappointment, noting that the show didn’t translate as smoothly as anticipated.

Despite their misgivings, CBS proceeded with the broadcast, largely because the slot had already been reserved. Early reviews, however, hinted at a different outcome. Time magazine praised the special, suggesting it was one children’s program worth revisiting.

On December 9, 1965, more than 15 million households tuned in. What CBS feared would fail instead captured nearly half of all American television sets. The response was overwhelming, and the special quickly became a classic.

In the aftermath, CBS ordered additional Peanuts specials and announced an annual rebroadcast. Over time, the success of “A Charlie Brown Christmas” reshaped network thinking, opening the door to future animated holiday programming and fundamentally altering prime-time television’s relationship with animation.