Enterprise

1981

Half-hour program on the "real-life adventure" of big business. Newsman Eric Sevareid, who served as host, described the series as neither "chamber of commerce boosterism" nor anti-establishment; rather, "an effort to report how various industrial sectors actually work."

Production

Seasons

13 Episodes • Premiered 1981

1. Wildcatter

Bill Brodnax (Taurus Petroleum) drills for gas in the Cajun country of southern Louisiana. Witness how drilling is planned, financed, and carried out. In the closing moments, viewers learn alongside the wildcatter and his backers whether the well does in fact strike gas.

2. The Colonel Comes to Japan

Loy Weston, the American chairman of Kentucky Fried Chicken Japan, presides over 324 stores. Witness the setting up of a new outlet in northeast Tokyo.

3. Gulliver's New Travels

Examining the future of AT&T as its telephone monopoly ends and a new era of tooth-and-nail competition begins.

4. Fast Horse in a Bull Market

The bizarre preparations for an auction where millionaires bid for race horses. (Tom Gentry Farms)

5. Bankrupt

Inforex was a $70 million-a-year computer firm that rode the high-tech wave to prosperity in the early 1970s. Founded in 1968, it had burst on the scene with the IKE, a television-like data entry machine that had rendered the old punchcard systems obsolete. But the company had never been able to come up with a profitable second product.

6. The Making of a Package Deal

Entertainment industries, searching for safer products with bigger returns on investments, have joined forces to create 'properties'. Witness one such property progress from inception to spinoff.

7. Dogfight Over New York

One of the new airlines challenging the giants of the industry in the wake of deregulation, New York Air is followed from start-up to inaugural flight.

8. Catfish Fever

Unhappy with the unpredictability of cotton prices, many Mississippi Delta farmers are converting their hardscrabble land to catfish "farms" of 80-acre ponds.