He moved like a sleepwalker, mangled his sentences on live television, and was so stiff that viewers wrote in asking if he had Bell's palsy. Time magazine compared him to a cigar store Indian. Yet this unpolished newspaperman became the undisputed cultural kingmaker of the 20th century.

This episode unpacks how a man with zero ability to sing, dance, or act built a shared cultural reality for an entire nation. Long before MTV or the internet, Ed Sullivan was the bottleneck through which America experienced jazz, Broadway, and the birth of rock and roll, the unifying campfire of Sunday night television.

• His unlikely path from high school athlete and sportswriter to ruling the Broadway gossip scene as a rival to Walter Winchell
• Why his complete lack of personality worked: he was the ultimate straight man who let the talent  ...