By the late 1950s, as television began reaching larger portions of rural America, their viewing habits began to be reflected in overall television ratings. Sylvester "Pat" Weaver was fired in 1956 after his strategy of programming highbrow "spectacular" productions once a month on NBC proved to be a ratings failure against more conventional fare on CBS. Rural sitcoms and Westerns boomed, perplexing even the writers of the shows and being treated as an opportunity for callous exploitation by the network executives, who nonetheless hated the programs, as did most critics. Americans' fondness for the rural sitcom and Western formats would last well into the 1960s.