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Thursday, April 16th, 2026

Ed Sullivan’s Granddaughter Reacts to His Rock Hall Induction, Compares Him to Stephen Colbert

It’s been a good week for the Ed Sullivan estate and those associated with it.

Within a six-day period, the 2025 Netflix documentary Sunday Best: The Untold Story of Ed Sullivan received nominations for Emmy and Peabody Awards, and on Monday (April 13) night, it was revealed that the legendary late TV host will receive the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame‘s 2026 Ahmet Ertegun Award for non-performers, making him one of a handful of broadcasters to  be so honored.

The ceremony takes place Nov. 14 at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles.

“We’re thrilled,” Margo Precht-Speciale, Sullivan’s granddaughter and producer of Sunday Best, tells Billboard via Zoom along with Andrew and Josh Solt, whose SOFA Entertainment Inc. acquired rights to The Ed Sullivan Show from the family in 1990. “More than anything my grandfather was a man driven by a genuine love of talent, and he brought that love to the American public on his show every Sunday night. Millions of people would watch and the next day discuss who they saw on his show. People would buy records. It had a tremendous impact on the American culture at the time, and also today.”

Airing from 1948 (known as The Toast of the Town until 1955) to 1971 on CBS — with an inaugural episode that featured W.C. Handy, aka the Father of the Blues — the Sullivan Show averaged 40 million viewers each Sunday night. Over the course of its 1,068 episodes, it hosted 74 future Rock Hall inductees among its more than 10,000 performances — the most famous, of course, being the Beatles performance on Feb. 9, 1964, for which a reported 73 million viewers (and 60 percent of all television sets in the country) tuned in to watch. Prior to that, Elvis Presley’s Sept. 9, 1956 appearance attracted 60 million viewers (82.6 percent of the television audience).

Read more at Billboard.com