Nick at Nite

Nick at Nite (stylized as nick@nite since 2002) is an American nighttime programming block on Nickelodeon. The block's programming broadcasts from prime time to late night, with the airtime varying depending on the night. The block initially consisted of syndicated sitcoms and films from the 1950s to the 1970s. Nick at Nite gradually shifted its programming to primarily airing sitcoms as recent as the mid-1990s to the 2010s. The block was launched on July 1, 1985, and it replaced A&E on Nickelodeon's channel space after it spun off into its own 24-hour channel. The block launched present-day TV Land in 1996. The Nickelodeon Group, a division of Paramount Skydance's networks unit, generally regards Nick at Nite as a separate channel that shares space with Nickelodeon on the channel due to the block targeting adult audiences. Nielsen has reported Nick at Nite ratings separately from Nickelodeon since 2004.

In 1984, A&E Networks (a joint venture between Hearst, NBC, and ABC) announced their plans to spin off A&E into a separate 24-hour cable channel. Nickelodeon's general manager, Geraldine Laybourne, was asked by MTV Networks President Bob Pittman to develop programming for the vacated time slot. This was to take advantage of valuable satellite time as A&E was moving to its own channel. Laybourne sought the help of programming and branding consultants Alan Goodman and Fred Seibert of Fred/Alan Inc. – who were previously successful in MTV and Nickelodeon's extensive 1984 rebranding – to come up with new programming ideas. The transition to a 24-hour broadcast for Nickelodeon took place in June, with some cable providers substituting the primetime schedule of other niche-interest networks onto the channel space.

After being presented with over 200 episodes of The Donna Reed Show (a 1950s sitcom which Laybourne despised), Goodman and Seibert conceived the idea of the "first oldies TV network." They modeled the new evening and overnight programming block on the successful oldies radio format "The Greatest Hits of All Time" and branded the block with their next evolution of MTV- and Nickelodeon-style imagery and bumpers. Head programmer Debby Beece led the team to the name "Nick at Nite" for the new block; a logo originally conceived for the block was based on Nickelodeon's "pinball" logo introduced in 1981, which was discontinued with that network's rebrand. Fred/Alan developed the original logo with Tom Corey and Scott Nash of Boston advertising agency Corey McPherson Nash, creators of the well-recognized Nickelodeon orange splat logo (Nick at Nite's logo design would maintain a separate, yet similar visual appearance and design from its parent network).

Nick at Nite debuted at 8 p.m. Eastern Time on July 1, 1985 as a block on Nickelodeon. Its initial programming (running from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m., seven nights a week) was a mixture of sitcoms, movies, and one drama series. The block was led by Dennis the Menace, and accompanied by The Donna Reed Show, the offbeat comedy Turkey Television (which, like Dennis, also aired on Nickelodeon), and Route 66. A nightly film presentation, branded as the Nick at Nite Movie, aired at 9 p.m. ET through the end of the decade, and included such classic films as the 1947 film The Red House and the 1937 film A Star Is Born. The same five-hour block of programs originally repeated from 1 a.m. and ran until Nickelodeon began its broadcast day at 6 a.m. ET. As Nick at Nite grew, it would add to its library of shows expanding out to rerun sketch comedy, such as episodes from the early seasons of SNL as well as the Canadian series SCTV. It also briefly reran the 1970s mock local talk show Fernwood 2 Night. As the years went by, the channel's sitcom library expanded to over a hundred shows.

By the early 1990s, Nick at Nite began running a full schedule of programming, with overnight hours filled with a mixture of secondary runs of shows airing on its evening schedule and series that were no longer shown on the evening lineup. In 1995, Nick at Nite celebrated its tenth anniversary with a week-long event, in which the channel aired "hand-picked episodes" of almost every series that had aired on Nick at Nite since its July 1985 debut. Each episode was introduced with its milestone history, episode number, and pop culture references to the individual program's original run on Nick at Nite. A special tenth Anniversary on-screen bug was shown at the bottom left corner of the screen for 10 seconds once per half-hour show, and was used for the entire 1995 year, much in the same vein as the 20th Anniversary logo in 2005 (in contrast, Nick at Nite did not make any acknowledgment of its 25th or 30th anniversaries following changes in management). The block launched a network in 1996 known as Nick at Nite's TV Land, which in 1997 rebranded to just TV Land.

In March 2004, Nielsen began splitting up Nick at Nite and Nickelodeon in its primetime and total daytime ratings reports, due to the different programming, advertisers and target audiences between the two services; this caused controversy among executives of some cable channels who believed that this move manipulated the ratings, given that Nick at Nite's broadcast day takes up only a fraction of Nickelodeon's programming schedule. Nickelodeon's and Nick at Nite's respective ratings periods encompass only the hours they each operate under the total day rankings, though Nick at Nite is rated only for the primetime ratings; this is due to a ruling by Nielsen in July 2004 that networks have to program for 51% or more of a particular daypart to qualify for ratings for that daypart. For the channel's 20th anniversary celebration in June 2005, TV Land aired an episode from almost every series that had appeared on Nick at Nite.

On January 4, 2006, after the MTV Networks became part of a new Viacom company, Cyma Zarghami replaced Herb Scannell as Nickelodeon's president, and Nick at Nite was placed into Viacom's newly formed Kids & Family Group led by Zarghami.

On January 1, 2007, the coloring of Nick at Nite's logo was changed from blue to orange, matching the coloring of Nickelodeon's logo. Nick at Nite's focus was changed under Nickelodeon control from recognizable television comedy series to family-led situation comedies, including the animated original series Glenn Martin, DDS. On September 3, the network introduced a new logo based on Nickelodeon's longtime "splat" logo, with the orange "splat" formed in the shape of a waning gibbous moon – this effectively integrated the Nickelodeon branding onto Nick at Nite for the first time, as the varied logos that were used from its 1985 launch utilized variants of the Futura Condensed font (the 1984 to 2009 Nickelodeon logo designed by Seibert and Goodman used the Balloon typeface) with various shape backgrounds and a small circle with the word "at" (replaced by an "@" symbol overlaid on a circle background on July 1, 2002 for visual symmetry, owing to the character's building ubiquity from the Internet and eventually into general pop culture) lodged between and staggering the "I"'s.