He misplaced the primary spherical of his marketing campaign to have Pete Seeger, absent from tv after being blacklisted within the Fifties, carry out his antiwar ballad “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy.” The section was pulled in 1967 however broadcast a yr later.

“Television is old and tired,” Mr. Smothers instructed McCall’s journal in 1968. “Television is a lie. The people who censor our shows are all conditioned to a very scared way of thinking, which is reflected in the kind of programs the networks put on. Television should be as free as the movies, as the newspapers, as music to reflect what’s happening.”

CBS started insisting that an advance tape of every week’s present be despatched to the community and its associates for his or her evaluate. In April 1969, when the tape of a present that included a satirical sermon delivered by the comic David Steinberg, did not arrive on schedule for the second time, CBS knowledgeable the brothers that they’d damaged their contract and that the present, whose possibility had been renewed two weeks earlier, could be canceled.

The transfer was not an entire shock.

“Tommy has been sticking pins in CBS ever since he started feeling his oats when he found he could command good ratings,” Percy Shain, the tv critic for The Boston Globe, wrote. “He has been at times snide, ugly, resentful, bullheaded. In his various arguments with the network he has refused to compromise one iota. Every deletion meant a battle.”

TV Information, in a stern editorial, deemed the cancellation “wise, determined and wholly justified.”

For the remainder of his life, Mr. Smothers remained satisfied that President Richard M. Nixon, who had assumed workplace simply three months earlier after defeating Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, had pressured CBS to cancel the present.

“When Nixon said, ‘I want those guys off,’ they were off,” he instructed “Speaking Freely,” a tv program produced by the First Modification Heart, in 2001. “If Humphrey had been elected, we would have been on.”