Jim McKairnes

M.A., a veteran of more than 30 years in the media industry, including 15 years at CBS Television, Jim McKairnes is a business executive, writer and producer, college media instructor, and TV historian.

He was born and raised in Philadelphia, graduating from the city’s Temple University School of Media and Communications with a Journalism degree. He entered the field as an entertainment-magazine editor and freelance writer in the Southeast – which eventually took him to Los Angeles to pursue a long-held dream of working in network television. A chance encounter with producer Norman Lear soon after arrival led to McKairnes to being introduced to and then hired at CBS.

At CBS, McKairnes served in the Scheduling & Planning department, where it was determined his small-screen expertise could best be applied. He was part of the team that took the network from worst to first place in the 2000s. In addition to his Scheduling duties, McKairnes contributed to all areas and dayparts of CBS during his tenure, from Promotions and Sales to Affiliate Relations and Daytime and Specials. He also created and co-produced the 2003 micro-series CBS Moments, showcasing the network’s history as it marked its 75th anniversary.

Rising to the level of Senior Vice-President at CBS, McKairnes was recruited by Discovery Communications in 2006 to head up that Maryland-based company’s eleven networks as its Executive Vice President of Scheduling. Eventually he returned in Los Angeles, where he was invited to return to CBS, this time for a role on the company’s studio side, serving as Senior Vice President and charged with advancing its development slate in the cable space.

McKairnes has had multiple pay it forward-type focuses since leaving CBS in 2010. First, he’s involved himself in the storytelling end of media -- developing podcasts, contributing to the Archive of American Television, authoring TV-related essays, and writing both a sitcom pilot and a quartet of TV-related books. He’s also accepted invitations to teach at the college level, first in Chicago at DePaul University, from 2010 to 2013; then in Philadelphia, where he served as Verizon Chair at alma mater Temple University from 2013 to 2015. And he’s continued to guest-lecture, as well as hold media discussions based on his books. His most recent, spun from the class of the same name that he created at Temple University, is All in the Decade: 70 Things About 70s TV That Turned Ten Years Into a Revolution. It, in turn, led to the 2020 weekly podcast The Good, the Bad, and the TV.

Jim McKairnes currently splits his time between Los Angeles and Nashville, where he held a two-year position at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU) as well as worked as a TV/Media History instructor with the Osher Foundation’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) program. He has also taught classes for both the Nashville Film Institute and Nashville Community Education., and he’s involved in local nonprofits, including the Vanderbilt Carrell Children’s Hospital and The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. In 2018, he earned his master’s degree in Media & Communication at the University of New England (Australia). He’s a proud advocate on behalf of disability inclusion and mental-health awareness, as well as on television history.