A LITTLE TALE OF TWO DUDES WHO IMPACT THE NEWS

Yesterday I promised my Masketeers on Twitter a story that involved both Andy Lack and Jeff Zucker who run CNBC and CNN respectively and, under the guise of news, support the current administration as both news channels attempt to maximize their ratings. I have called them ratings whores which they are but this is just a fun story about the biz. Enjoy

Where to begin? OK let’s start here. Sometime in February 1993 NBC’s DATELINE decided that it would be cool to blow up some GM trucks and claim that they were unsafe. Let’s say that didn’t work out too well for them. To no one’s surprise heads rolled including the Executive Producer of DATELINE and the President of NBC NEWS.

One of my roles as head of scheduling at NBC was to be the liaison between the news division and entertainment. As part of that gig I was sort of the unofficial DATELINE program exec. Jeff Diamond, the Executive Producer of DATELINE, and I would talk quite often.

I still remember calling Jeff up the day after this happened and before the admission that this was ‘staged”. GM was insane and I suggested that we rent out Madison Square Garden and do a “two out of three fall” event where we ram cars into the trucks. Loser donates a million dollars to the winner’s charity. . I’m always thinking like a wrestling promoter. Jeff  was not buying it.

Michael Gartner was replaced by Andy Lack as President NBC News and Neal Shapiro was the new Executive Producer of DATELINE. My friend Jeff Gaspin was the NBC News executive in charge of prime time programs and, when he was looking for an executive producer for a news magazine, interviewed Andy for the gig.  Jeff told him he was not qualified so he was was gone pretty soon after Andy arrived. That’s how things work.

I don’t remember if Neal called me or I called him but, regardless, it was the beginning of a fantastic partnership. We liked each other as human beings and, with so many DATELINEs on the schedule, we would try to match the stories to the surrounding entertainment shows so as to maximize ratings (never said I wasn’t a ratings whore).

We had names for DATELINE depending on where they played. LAW&DATELINE was paired with LAW&ORDER. TOUCHED BY A DATELINE was on a night with softer programming and WHEN DATELINE ATACKS played Sunday at 7 following sports. News and Entertainment worked in perfect harmony to make DATELINE a valuable and profitable franchise for the Peacock. Then there was this young whippersnapper Jeff Zucker.

Zucker had been overseeing THE TODAY SHOW where he was always more interested in razzle dazzle than news. A little while after I left NBC Scott Sassa fired Garth Ancier (Entertainment President) and Jeff came in to run Entertainment. This was the height of the reality era and I guess Bob Wright (the head of NBC) felt someone with Jeff’s background was what the network needed. Things unraveled pretty fast under his leadership but Jeff kept failing upward.

Anyway, back in May 1993 we were told by New York that we were adding another news magazine to our schedule. The magazine would not be called DATELINE but rather NOW WITH TOM BROKAW AND KATIE COURIC and wunderkind Jeff Zucker would be executive producing. I think we were even told where it would go on the schedule but I could be wrong about this.

Don Ohlmeyer had come to the party as President, NBC West Coast. Don was a very competitive and intimidating dude which was just fine with me and some other execs like my pals Vince Manze and John Miller in marketing. Don was fine with all these news magazines on the schedule as long as they delivered ratings and he was aware that there was a strong channel of communication between Neal and I. Zucker on the other hand wanted no input from Entertainment.

This is all a setup for an incident that happened sometime in the 1993-94 season. It was either in November or February I don’t remember but we were at the start of a sweep and, at that time, sweeps were very important to the networks and especially the network affiliates. I don’t remember why but I was working from home on the day of “the incident”.

Bill Clinton had appointed some controversial figure to head the Justice Department’s Civil Rights division, if my memory serves me, and it started a bit of a tiff in DC. Brokaw or Couric (I think in was Tom) got the individual for an exclusive interview for NWTBAKC. News magazines were entertainment first and news second (kind of the way all news is now) so featuring this lengthy interview in the center of both the show and a night surrounded by scripted series was guaranteed to be a ratings disaster. It was.

We get the ratings and Ohlmeyer immediately calls me.

“What the fuck was that motherfucker (referring to Zucker) thinking putting that interview on in a sweeps period”

I calmly explained to Don that Jeff was working with the biggest star at NBC News and I’m certain that Brokaw would do whatever he wanted to do. I told Don that Jeff is a very competitive person and I’m sure he feels terrible about this but his hands were tied. I tried to defend Jeff to Don but Don did not want to hear it.

“I want you to call him and ask him what the fuck he was thinking and tell him how upset we are.”

“Don I’m pretty sure he feels terrible about this and nothing is gained by calling him.”

“You call him and get back to me with what he has to say about this.”

I was sitting at my kitchen counter (ironically where I am writing this right now) and I call Jeff.

Here is the conversation:

Me: “Jeff I…………

Zucker: “What the fuck do you want me to tell you…………………and he proceeded to go all Donald Duck on me for at least ten minutes.

I put down the phone and let him rant. At some point the Masked Wife passed by. She knew I was calling Jeff and just looked at me and said “Zucker?” and I nodded.

Once there was a lull in the rant I jumped in and tried to calm things down by explaining Don asked me to call. I told him I understood his dilemma and let’s move on. This  just started another tirade.

I called Don back and said that Jeff and I spoke and he understood our concerns. I didn’t go into details. Don seemed satisfied. He got his pound of flesh and I figured I had moved on the next insanity of network television. I was wrong.

About an hour after my “conversation” with Jeff, Andy Lack called me.

“Masked, I don’t want you to ever talk with my people again.”

“OK Andy”

I can only imagine what Zucker told him I said to him.

A few hours later Andy called again to reiterate that he was not kidding and I can no longer talk with his people. I again reassured him I would abide by his order.

I stopped calling Neal. I never talked to Zucker about his show because I knew that was useless. I never told Ohlmeyer or anyone in entertainment about Andy’s call to me. I just didn’t think it made sense to create friction over this.

About three weeks after ‘the incident” Neal called me wondering what was going on. Why wasn’t I calling him. I told him about Andy’s orders. He said that’s bullshit and that we needed to talk and we did.

A few weeks later we were having our usual afternoon meeting with Don and something came up about news. Don asked me to handle it. This was my opening.

“Don, Andy has forbidden me from talking to anyone in News”

He asked why and I reminded him of the Zucker call. After the meeting Don asked me to stay and he called Lack. It was a pretty awesome reaming of the President of NBC News. It was so effective that several years later when we cancelled the Monday Movie and added another DATELINE  to the schedule Andy cowered in a corner during the pretty intense debate between me and Warren Littlefield (pro cancel) and Don who wanted to keep the movie. At one point he came over to me and thanked me for defending news but said if he opened his mouth Don would attack him. It was chickenshit on his part but I got a Tiffany clock from Andy as a thank you.

While we are all quarantined I thought I would give you a little look behind the curtains at two executives who are playing a major role in how many of you are perceiving the reality of the current situation.

Stay safe gang.

A STORY ABOUT MODERN FAMILY

Pilot season 1996. I went to a table read for a multi-camera comedy called “Just Shoot Me”. The executive producer was a dude named Steve Levitan who had worked on several comedies most notably “Frasier” and “Wings”. I thought it was a pretty solid table read with a very professional cast including George Segal. We would order 6 or 8 episodes for mid-season.

At the upfronts in May ’96 I met Levitan at a party hosted by Tom Fontana at his club in NoHo. I introduced myself and (this happened to me a lot) he said he heard I did not like his pilot. You see the development execs would always blame me when they needed to tell a show runner why their show didn’t make it on the schedule or was pushed to mid-season. I told Steve that wasn’t true. We sort of bonded.

                                                                                                   

In the fall of 1996 NBC put a really awful comedy on the air called “Men Behaving Badly”. It was one of the few shows where my boss Warren Littlefield and I threw down some serious words with each other. I did not feel it was ready to go on the air, he did, he won. It bombed.

In December Steve Levitan was asked to step in and salvage “Men Behaving Badly”. While Steve was attempting to “fix” the show we needed something to fill the MBB slot.

Meanwhile over at ABC they were about to put on a comedy starring Arsenio Hall who was red-hot at the time. It was scheduled to run in the now empty MBB time slot. Before the holiday break Warren called to discuss what to do and I suggested we put “Just Shoot Me” in there. Warren and others at NBC were not fans of the show. I told him if we don’t use “Just Shoot Me” we needed to go with repeats against Arsenio and did we really want to throw in the towel. Warren suggested we watch the six or eight episodes, along with my pals in marketing Vince Manze and John Miller, and decide what to do when we all returned to Burbank in January.

Sometime over Christmas break, Warren called and asked if I had watched them. I said “Yeah, four of them weren’t that bad”. “That’s four more than I liked” he said. The marketing guys hated them as well. We argued and Warren eventually agreed to put Shoot Me on the air in March. It turned out the ratings for Shoot Me were surprisingly good and Arsenio was a disaster. “Men Behaving Badly” couldn’t be fixed and we would order a full season of “Just Shoot Me” for the 97-98 season. It had a good run during the Must-See-TV era.

When season two started Steve McPherson, who was our program exec on Shoot Me before going on to run ABC, stopped by my office to tell me Levitan wanted to use my name in an episode. Steve asked if I was OK with that. I said sure but can I see the script first. Never saw the script and one day McPherson hands me a rough cut of “My Dinner With Woody” which aired in the November sweep. Here it is:

https://vimeo.com/594758021

Still don’t know if it was a thank you or a fuck you from Levitan.

I left NBC and headed over to FOX. By then Levitan had made a deal with the FOX TV studio and, before I got there, the network had picked up Steve’s show called “Greg the Bunny”. Let’s just say it was a bit of a departure for him and leave it at that. I think we held off putting it on the air for quite a while. We eventually aired the thirteen episodes and that was that.

“Greg the Bunny” was followed by “Oliver Beene” a sweet family period comedy and then “Stacked” starring Pam Anderson which was the best attended pilot shoot ever. Neither show gained traction and both were cancelled after one season. FOX knew animation, but, with no “That 70’s Show” or “Married With Children”, it was difficult to launch a live action comedy. I could sense Steve was starting to get a bit frustrated with the network.

Pilot season 2007 Steve developed a comedy called “Back To You” with Kelsey Grammer and Patricia Heaton as the leads. Ironically, Ty Burrell was featured prominently in the pilot. Our head of comedy development at the time came in to see me to express her frustration with having to give up a slot for this show. The powers that be at FBC had decided that “Back To You” would be on the FOX schedule in Fall 2007. She was not totally wrong in expressing her frustration given that the show about TV news at a local station felt very CBS. It was smart and good which is not a FOX comedy. We also had nothing to pair it up with.

I explained to her that we weren’t going to win this battle and “Back To You” will be our highest testing comedy (it was) so we wouldn’t have that argument to make. “Back To You” was paired with “Til Death” starring Brad Garrett (we needed to pick it up for a second season and Brad treated the Masked Wife and me to a Mulberry Street pizza as a thank you when we ran into him on Ventura Blvd.). “Back To You” did not gain traction and now we get to the point of this post.

In the 07-08 season there was a WGA (Writers Guild) strike. Peter Chernin who was running entertainment at NewsCorp made it clear we needed to be prepared for a lengthy strike. As we were gearing up Kevin Reilly came over from NBC to oversee the network. The strike starts in November and the scripted shows were shut down. Somewhere on my blog I tell the tale of having to let Keifer Sutherland know that 24 was being pushed for a full year. I thought he was going to kill me, but I digress.

We run out of episodes of “Back To You” as well as most of our scripted shows. Sometime in mid-February I’m driving back from lunch when I get a call from Levitan. He told me that the strike was over and he asked that I not return BTY to the schedule. He suggested we wait and bring it back next season. He had ideas as to how to make it a better show and  a better fit for FOX. I had no problem with this. He was a smart guy and he was important to our studio. I knew that bringing it back would probably be a death sentence and by then American Idol was on the air and we were going to win another season with or without “Back To You” on the schedule.

I told Steve that I was on board and would bring this up with Kevin and Peter Liguori, Kevin’s boss. I did not win the argument and had to call Steve and tell him they wanted the show to return. It was not a pleasant call and Steve unloaded on me and the network. He said that he was done with FOX and would tell the heads of our studio not to offer his shows to us. I went back again to my bosses and told them we were pissing off a valued creator. They were unmoved.

In May 2009 Steve remains true to his word and develops a family comedy which is sold to ABC. After we get back from the upfronts I get the competitive pilots. One afternoon I sit down at home to watch MODERN FAMILY. Now there are only two times where I lost my shit over work while at home where the Masked Wife threatened to throw me out of the house if I didn’t chill; once when I was forced to make a scheduling move I knew was a fatal mistake, and after I finished watching the MODERN FAMILY pilot.

There are few pilots where you just know. ER, 24, Jane The Virgin and Modern Family all gave me that feeling that I was watching something special. Everything about MODERN FAMILY worked. I knew nothing about the show going in so the way they revealed that these three distinct units are a family was perfection, and the “Lion King” ending was up there with the Cosby/Theo moment. All the characters were clearly defined and what dawned on me were the infinite combinations. For example, if you wanted to tell a story involving four of the eleven characters, there were 330 different combinations of characters. You would never run out of family dynamics. And there was love, so much love. You start with all these strong bonds and then you add the faux documentary style which worked. I just lost my shit. We blew any chance at MODERN FAMILY coming to FOX. All we had to do was give Steve Levitan a second chance at “Back To You”.         

I never saw the testing on the pilot but my gut was it was strong and maybe the studio felt they had something here and giving it to FOX was not the smartest thing to do. ABC was a far better fit just as BACK TO YOU may well have succeeded on CBS and then there would be no Ty Burrell. It’s all interconnected.

Anyway, the series lived up to the pilot and I give props to all involved in making one of the classic family comedies of all time….at least in my opinion. Steve and I stayed in touch. He was a Wisconsin grad as was the Masked Daughter and we hung out at a Badger bar watching them win in the Final Four. Oh, and he finally did another comedy for FOX. It bombed.