Howard Stern's new talk show on HBO will not have much in common with his 1990 show on WWOR

"Welcome to the ugliest show on television," Howard Stern told viewers late on the night of July 14, 1990. The hook baited, what viewer could resist? Just how ugly? Just how Howard? Soon, they would find out.

A couple of days later, the Newsday review (by John Anderson) of his inaugural TV show elaborated: "Stern's material can be tasteless, racist, sexist and homophobic, but hey ... what's a few character flaws between friends?"

Stern, who grew up in Roosevelt, already had plenty of those. WXRK/92.3 FM's "The Howard Stern Show" was the bawdiest, baddest, most beloved (to fans) hangout on radio — "Lesbian Dating Game," the Wack Pack (Underdog Lady, Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf, Rachel the Spanker, Mayor Crackhead.) Stern's radio show was plenty ugly. Now television?

This was 36 summers ago, and it now seems quaint (or redundant) to observe that the TV world and Stern have changed. Announcing his new HBO Max show recently (premiering Sept. 17), the network called him "one of the best interviewers in the business," while Stern said "I’m thrilled to be joining the ranks of such prestigious television." He is now the respected elder statesman of satellite radio (the HBO show will effectively be an adaptation of his weekly SiriusXM one). The KRock days are ancient history. But back in 1990, the King of All Media was just getting started.

Stern decided to launch his first TV talk show from a studio at WWOR/9 in Secaucus, New Jersey, and got a Levittown native to help him. Dan Forman — then a young assistant news director at the station — recalls, "I was working at the station already and was a fan and willing to do it for nothing, so I volunteered, grabbed a couple of people from public affairs and we created this thing with five people and his staff. Howard had expected this to be his big-time shot on TV, [then] he looks around and goes, 'Uhh, 'this is what my shot is?' But he went along with it."

Forman says "We were in Secaucus, they [Stern's staff] were at the radio station, in the city. [Infinity Broadcasting chief] Mel [Karmazin] didn't want anything to do with TV so we were not welcome in the building [on West 57th Street]. In the beginning, we had these conference calls where we'd come up with ideas and be on the speaker phone brainstorming, like 'Who can we get as a guest?' Nobody wanted to go on, so we launched with Jessica Hahn." She was the Massapequa native at the center of the sex scandal that toppled televangelist Jim Bakker a few years earlier, also a Stern favorite on radio.

Getting guests for the TV show was a challenge. "We got people like Jessica, or Arlene Francis and Kitty Carlisle," says Forman, then "we'd run a chyron [screen caption] listing thoses who wouldn't come on, and what their agents or managers had said when we had asked. Frank Sinatra's? 'No [expletive] way.'"

Ch. 9 ordered four specials, then after the show was a hit, another 13. Producing the show was hard work. After Stern finished his morning show, he'd head out to Secaucus for a full week of production. The efforts paid off. By that fall "The Howard Stern Show," which aired Saturday at midnight, was beating the second half hour of "Saturday Night Live." Half a million New York-area households were tuning in.

Finally, the guests came, too. "When we got Bob Hope on at the end of those 13 weeks, I really thought we'd arrived," recalls Forman. "Why did Bob Hope of all people do the show? He had gone on [Stern's] radio program to promote his own show in Valley Forge [Pennsylvania]. It was a small venue but it sold out after he went on, so he agreed to do the TV show. But this was a horse of a different color. He said he'd give us a half hour, so we showed up with some cameras at the Garden City Hotel where he was staying, with Howard wearing a Bob Hope mask. He then interviewed him on a putting green, with two women on either side wearing American flag bikinis," a nod to Hope's long-running USO shows. 

The show lasted a couple more summers, then Stern — tired of the work and the commute — bailed. Forman went on to have an Emmy-winning career, as news director of WCBS/2, WNBC/4 and WABC/7, where he led the station's coverage of 9/11. Yet you wonder if his happiest memories were at Ch. 9.

"Howard knew we could not just interview these people. We had to come up with something to allow them to be funny."

"I call it," Forman says, " the golden years of television."