Top of the Rock: Inside the Rise and Fall of Must See TV Read online

  Copyright © 2012 by Warren Littlefield

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Photo of Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner courtesy of Carsey-Werner Productions.

  All other photos by NBC Universal Photo Bank.

  Jacket design by John Fontana

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Littlefield, Warren, 1952–

  Top of the rock: inside the rise and fall of must see TV:

  Warren Littlefield; with T. R. Pearson. —1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. NBC Entertainment (Firm) 2. Television programs—United States—History—20th century. I. Pearson, T. R., 1956– II. Title.

  PN1992.92.N37L58 2012

  791.45097309′04—dc23 2011031776

  eISBN: 978-0-385-53375-1

  v3.1

  Behind every successful television series is a development executive who, at some point in the insanity of the development process, put his ass on the line so that the show might live.

  This book is dedicated to those executives.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Players Guide

  1 Where Everybody Knows Your Name

  2 Bill & Jack

  3 Yada Yada Yada

  4 Master of My Domain

  5 King of the Hill

  6 Voilà!

  7 Tossed Salad and Scrambled Eggs

  8 Six of One

  9 I’ll Be There for You

  10 County General

  11 He’s Just a Little Kid!

  12 It Rhymes

  13 Batting for the Other Team

  14 Story Camp

  15 Thank You and Good Night

  16 “You’re Fired!”

  Acknowledgments

  Photo Insert

  Introduction

  One phone call changed everything.

  After a decade as Brandon Tartikoff’s lieutenant at NBC, I’d finally gotten the chance to run the entertainment division on my own. Brandon had taken a job at Paramount Pictures, leaving me as the guy to pick the shows and set the schedule. Credit for NBC’s success would be mine, but so would blame for its failure. At that moment, the latter seemed far more likely than the former.

  It was the early nineties, and we were flagging as a network. We were flagging a little as a nation as well. Economic malaise had returned with the beginning of the Gulf War and an accompanying spike in the price of oil. High unemployment and government deficits were putting downward pressure on the advertising marketplace. My timing sucked. We’d had a good run, but our shows were old. In the fall of 1991, The Cosby Show was entering its eighth season. The Golden Girls its seventh. L.A. Law its sixth. Viewership was off for each, and our general audience numbers across the schedule had plunged by double digits in a year’s time. We’d managed to win the May sweeps, but it was the barest of victories. We were neck and neck with CBS and ABC after leading the pack throughout the eighties.

  Brandon had timed his departure impeccably. I found myself holding both an exalted new title—NBC Entertainment president—and the bag.

  I drew my chief strength and consolation from our top-rated comedy, Cheers. It may have been approaching its eleventh season, but Cheers wasn’t showing its age. Its audience was larger than ever. Cheers had started life in the cellar—it was the seventy-seventh highest-rated show out of seventy-seven at the end of its opening season—but it had become a perennial top ten show and a revenue powerhouse for NBC.

  For me, Cheers was a sentimental favorite as well since I’d been associated with it from its inception. I could well remember the pitch for Cheers, conducted over breakfast in the private dining room at NBC in Burbank. Director Jim Burrows with Les and Glen Charles, who would create and executive produce the show, had visited a Boston bar where customers (and their stories) entered through a revolving door. Over scrambled eggs and bacon, they spun out the nearly limitless comic possibilities such a setting would afford. The only sensible response was “Let’s do it!”

  We knew we had a gem from the beginning, even if viewers needed a year or so to catch on. With the premiere of The Cosby Show in 1984—Cheers’ third season on the air—NBC could boast a Thursday night lineup consisting of Cosby, Family Ties, Cheers, Night Court, and Hill Street Blues. These five shows made for a remarkable evening of television, what we at the network thought of as our “Night of Bests.”

  NBC may have been floundering generally in the early nineties, but Cheers remained our rock. Its audience was huge and reliable (for both original episodes and repeats) and was divided almost evenly between men and women. That’s rare enough in the TV business to approach unique. Better still, Cheers was a bull’s-eye show for advertisers’ dream demographic, the coveted eighteen- to forty-nine-year-old urban viewer with disposable income. It was also an Emmy magnet of unquestioned quality and pedigree.

  Produced on stage 25 on the Paramount lot in Hollywood, Cheers was dependable and trouble-free. Two dozen high-caliber episodes each season. A great stable of series regulars with new ones thrown in for variety from year to year. The show was funny as hell and functioned as the spine of the network. It was a tent pole smack in the middle of Thursday night. Without it, we were sure to wallow and drift. I knew I’d need Cheers and its reliable success if I were to have any hope of turning NBC around, and there was no reason to think I wouldn’t have Cheers to lean on.

  Then the call came in.

  I was in a meeting in my office at the NBC complex in Burbank when Patty, my assistant, stuck her head in the door.

  “Ted Danson is on the phone,” she said.

  Professionally, I knew Ted well. Personally, only a little. I’d skied with him once in Colorado, but he rarely phoned me. I decided to step out and take the call at Patty’s desk. I thought Ted might have a cause he wanted me to contribute to or an event he wanted me to attend.

  Like most Americans who’d passed a newsstand or checked out at a grocery store in the previous six months, I had a fair idea of what Ted had been up to. During his last hiatus from Cheers, he’d starred opposite Whoopi Goldberg in Made in America, a limp comedy about artificial insemination. In the course of the ten-week shoot in Oakland, Ted and Whoopi had become an unlikely item.

  I can’t say I was terribly surprised. This sort of thing happens regularly in the entertainment business. Actors on a movie set often behave like counselors at summer camp, so liaisons and divorces are more the rule than the exception. I was only troubled by the fact that Ted starred in a wildly popular weekly comedy that Whoopi claimed to have never seen. The TV executive in me took wounded offense.

  Ted and I exchanged pleasantries, and then he dropped the bomb.

  “This is my last season on Cheers,” Ted told me. “I’m not coming back.”

  I was staggered. I hoped it was a negotiating ploy, but I couldn’t imagine why it would be. Ted was already the highest-paid actor on television at $400,000 an episode.

  “I’ve thought about it a lot and discussed it with Whoopi,” Ted told me, “and we think this is what I need to do.”

  By this point, panic had set in. I perched on the edge of Patty’s
desk and tried to figure out what to say. What to do. How to breathe.

  “Whoopi thinks I need to find out who Ted is. If I don’t, she says I’ll never grow as a person.”

  “I know who Ted is,” I wanted to tell him. “Ted’s the guy who makes $10 million a year starring in one of the highest-rated shows on television. Ted can afford to find out who Ted is in the off-season.”

  I had the sharp, metallic taste of rank desperation in my mouth. My mind was racing. I began to wonder what my next career might bring. Back in New Jersey, I’d put myself through college as a teamster truck driver. Maybe they’d take me back?

  “I just wanted you to hear it from me,” Ted said. That was him all over. Classy as hell. I couldn’t fault Ted, but I was devastated nonetheless.

  Looking back, I can appreciate how pivotal that moment was. NBC’s “Night of Bests” was well behind us, and the phenomenal success of Must See TV was just over the horizon. But I was too shaken and too close to the ground to see any of that at the time. Cheers was suddenly in my rearview mirror. Ahead lay barren road. What would happen next was anybody’s guess.

  Fortunately for me—fortunately for us all—what did happen next was television at its very best. From 1993 through 1998, NBC exploded every conventional notion of what a broadcast network could accomplish with a prime-time lineup. On Thursday nights in particular, everybody watched the peacock. We beat the three other networks combined by wide margins. Mad About You. Frasier. Seinfeld. Friends. Will & Grace. ER. At its height, NBC’s Thursday prime-time schedule of Must See shows attracted a staggering seventy-five million viewers and generated more revenue for NBC than the other six nights of the week combined. In today’s fractured entertainment market, NBC averages an anemic audience of less than six million for its Thursday night lineup.

  At the time, we hardly understood the magnitude of what we were accomplishing in broadcast television. I’d like to say the remarkable success of Must See TV was the result of impeccable foresight and strategy from me and my team at NBC, but there was a lot of luck and no little alchemy involved as well. At the network, we developed and steered where we could, but our fundamental goal—and my guiding principle as president of entertainment—was to get into business with talented people and let them be talented. It sounds simple enough, but when I look at NBC’s fortunes this past decade, I wonder if it’s not a lesson that needs relearning.

  To that end, here’s the story of how we did it, the ultimate insider’s guide to Must See TV. Because our success was a team effort, this is a team history, an intimate account of a golden era in broadcast television told by the people who helped make it happen—the writers, the directors, the producers, the actors, and, yes, the suits like me. Whatever you do, don’t touch that dial.

  Players Guide

  Talent

  JASON ALEXANDER—Actor, writer, producer, and singer. Best known for his role as the neurotic George Costanza on Seinfeld.

  ANTHONY EDWARDS—Actor, producer, and director. With a big-screen blastoff in Top Gun, is best known for his soulful lead role as Dr. Mark Greene for eight seasons on ER.

  KELSEY GRAMMER—Five-time Emmy Award–winning actor, director, and producer. Best known for his historic twenty-year portrayal of psychiatrist Dr. Frasier Crane in Cheers and Frasier. Currently executive producing and starring in Boss on Starz.

  SEAN HAYES—Multiple Emmy Award–winning actor, comedian, and producer. Known for his role as Jack McFarland in Will & Grace. Currently cast as Larry in the upcoming Three Stooges feature film and executive producer on NBC’s new drama Grimm.

  HELEN HUNT—Academy Award–winning actress for As Good as It Gets. Writer, director, and producer who starred in Mad About You with Paul Reiser.

  LISA KUDROW—Emmy Award–winning actress and producer. Best known for her role as the offbeat and unpredictable Phoebe Buffay in Friends.

  ERIQ LA SALLE—Actor, producer, director. Best known for playing the hardwired Dr. Peter Benton on ER for eight seasons.

  MATT LEBLANC—Actor and producer who played the lovable Joey Tribbiani on Friends. Also starred in the spin-off Joey. Currently plays a fictional version of himself in Episodes on Showtime.

  JOHN LITHGOW—Multiple Oscar-nominated actor, musician, and author. Known for his tremendous range in his feature film roles and playing Dick Solomon, the head of the alien household, in 3rd Rock from the Sun.

  JULIANNA MARGULIES—Emmy Award winner. Will always be remembered for her portrayal of nurse Carol Hathaway for six seasons on ER but is currently giving that legacy a challenge as the star of The Good Wife on CBS.

  ERIC MCCORMACK—Emmy Award–winning actor, musician, writer, and producer best known for playing Will Truman on NBC’s Will & Grace. Currently stars in the TNT drama series Perception.

  DEBRA MESSING—Emmy Award–winning actress best known for playing Grace Adler in Will & Grace. Currently starring in the NBC drama Smash from executive producer Steven Spielberg.

  MEGAN MULLALLY—Multiple Emmy Award winner for playing the opinionated Karen Walker on Will & Grace.

  DAVID HYDE PIERCE—Four-time Emmy Award–winning actor, director, and musician. Best known for playing psychiatrist Dr. Niles Crane on Frasier.

  PAUL REISER—Comedian, actor, author, and musician. Best known for creating, co-writing, executive producing, and starring in Mad About You.

  DAVID SCHWIMMER—Multiple award–winning actor, producer, and director. Best known for playing paleontologist Ross Geller on Friends.

  JERRY SEINFELD—The King of Comedy. Emmy Award–winning writer, executive producer, actor, director, and comedian. Best known for starring as a semi-fictional version of himself on Seinfeld.

  MARK SWEET—The king of multi-camera comedy audience warm-up. Over four thousand episodes from Cheers to Mike & Molly.

  NOAH WYLE—One of ER’s brightest stars who began his eleven-year ER run playing medical student John Carter. George Clooney once proclaimed, “If I ever get to be young again, I want to be Noah Wyle.” Currently starring in Falling Skies on TNT.

  Writers, Producers, and the Director

  JIMMY BURROWS—The most successful director in television comedy—ever. Multiple Emmy–winning executive producer of Cheers and Will & Grace. Directed the pilots of Taxi, Cheers, Wings, Frasier, Friends, Will & Grace, NewsRadio, 3rd Rock from the Sun, Dharma & Greg, Mike & Molly, 2 Broke Girls, and many more.

  MARCY CARSEY—Perhaps the most creative nonwriter in the TV business. Former ABC TV executive who together with Tom Werner formed Carsey-Werner Productions, television’s most successful modern-era independent production company. Their hits include The Cosby Show, Roseanne, That ’70s Show, A Different World, and 3rd Rock from the Sun.

  PETER CASEY—Multiple Emmy Award–winning writer and producer who went from The Jeffersons to Cheers and then created and executive produced Wings and Frasier with writing partners David Lee and David Angell. Sadly, David Angell died on September 11, 2001. He and his wife, Lynn, were aboard American Airlines Flight 11, which crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

  DAVID CRANE—Multiple Emmy Award winner and brilliant comedic writer. The creator and executive producer of Friends along with his longtime friend and writing partner, Marta Kauffman, with whom he also created Dream On. Kevin Bright was also an executive producer of Friends. David is currently co-creator and executive producer of Episodes on Showtime.

  MARTA KAUFFMAN—Multiple Emmy Award–winning writer, producer, co-creator, and executive producer of Friends and Dream On.

  DAVID KOHAN—Emmy Award winner who co-created and executive produced Will & Grace with his longtime writing partner and best friend, Max Mutchnick.

  DAVID LEE—Multiple Emmy Award winner, executive producer, writer, and director who went from writing on The Jeffersons to Cheers and then created and executive produced Wings and Frasier with Peter Casey and David Angell.

  STEVE LEVITAN—Multiple Emmy Award–winning writer and producer whose credits include Frasi
er and The Larry Sanders Show. Created Just Shoot Me! and co-created and executive produces ABC’s hit comedy Modern Family.

  MAX MUTCHNICK—The comedically larger-than-life Emmy Award–winning co-creator, writer, and executive producer of Will & Grace.

  GEORGE SHAPIRO—Jerry Seinfeld’s loyal, trusted, and lifetime manager and an executive producer of Seinfeld.

  JOHN WELLS—Multiple award–winning writer and executive producer who was the creative glue of ER for fifteen years. Currently executive producing Southland on TNT and Shameless for Showtime.

  TOM WERNER—Like his partner, Marcy Carsey, a former ABC TV executive who created a comedy hit machine with Carsey-Werner Productions. In 2002 became a co-owner of the Boston Red Sox.

  HOWARD WEST—With George Shapiro, also Jerry Seinfeld’s longtime manager who was considered “the money man” in Jerry’s deals.

  DICK WOLF—Creator and executive producer of all of the Law & Order series brand (over 900 hours of television).

  The Suits

  JOHN AGOGLIA—The highly regarded head of NBC business affairs from the mid-eighties through the mid-nineties. A strong deal maker who was so comfortable wearing the “black hat” in a negotiation that he kept one hanging in his office.

  PRESTON BECKMAN—The son of a New York City taxi driver and proud of it. Holds a Ph.D. in sociology and was NBC’s iconic scheduler and strategic planner throughout the nineties. Currently executive vice president for strategic program planning at the highest-rated network, Fox Broadcasting.

  BOB BRODER—A legend in the talent agency business and the only agent that director Jimmy Burrows has ever had. Transformed the boutique agency he created when International Creative Management acquired it in 2006. His handpicked management team became ICM’s senior management, and Bob became ICM’s vice-chairman.