SCHEDULING MUST-SEE-TV PART 8

We ended the 1996-97 season with a new group of comedy assets. I figured we were putting off the decision on cancelling a movie night since we had ordered a bunch of made-fors for ’97-’98. It turned out that I was wrong, and that led to some unpleasantries from which we never fully recovered.

As Must-See TV was exploding into a cultural phenomenon in the ’90s, and as we were generating network profits that will never be seen again, I gave my boss Warren Littlefield a copy of David Halberstam’s book “The Breaks of the Game.”

Halberstam followed the 1979-80 Portland Trail Blazers, a team that had won the NBA Championship two years earlier and a one he saw as building a long-term dynasty. Halberstam’s intent was to write about the formation of that dynasty. Instead, he ended up writing a book about how difficult it was to sustain success and the factors that work to undermine long-term dominance. I told Warren to read it because, as successful as we were, this was probably our fate.

If there was a turning point for us — that moment when we became the Portland Trail Blazers — it was when we cancelled our Monday movie night. We entered the 1997-’98 season with 18 comedies on our schedule. I have often been told that it was an act of insanity, although I point out that when I came into the scheduling job in the ’91-’92 season, there were 18 comedies on the NBC schedule. We had a clear strategy for taking advantage of “Dateline,” a high degree of repeatability with comedies and an effort to prepare for the ending of “Seinfeld.” This all resulted in a very profitable schedule. The issue wasn’t strategic; it was organizational. There were too many type-A personalities, myself included.

The scheduling meeting in May 1997 was the turning point because of the internal damage it did to the organization. Although Warren and I told senior management that we needed to table the movie discussion until October, the decision was made to have the conversation in May. The problem was that our movie group had already ordered original movies for the ’97- ’98 season, so cancelling the Monday movie would have resulted in tens of millions of dollars in product with no room for it on the schedule. Real lines were drawn within the organization, and I left the last meeting being told in no uncertain terms that the movie would remain on Monday night. I was also convinced that when we came back from the upfront in New York City, I was going to be fired.

CEO Bob Wright stepped in at the last minute and made the decision to go down to one movie night. We had done the homework, and Bob saw the upside to the bottom line. The irony was that over the next few seasons, the other networks would also begin to reduce and eventually eliminate their movie nights. Unfortunately for us, the internal damage had been done, and the scars remained for quite a while.

Because we were able to test out and expose several comedies to a large audience through putting them behind “Friends” and “Seinfeld,” we were able to put together a female-skewing block of comedies on Monday with “Suddenly Susan,” “Fired Up,” “Caroline in the City” and “The Naked Truth.” We were able to establish “Dateline” as the only newsmagazine in the Monday 10 p.m. time period. I worked closely with Neil Shapiro the EP of “Dateline” to tailor the stories to our comedy block. The Monday gamble paid off, and we did not touch this night for the entire season.

I really believe that our Tuesday comedy block of “Mad About You,” “NewsRadio,” “Frasier” and “Just Shoot Me” was a more solid group of comedies than the Thursday MSTV mothership. Over on Thursday we used the leadout timeslots to launch new product. At 8:30 was a rather lame comedy, “Union Square.” It was another “Friends” wannabe and sort of similar in format to CBS’ current “Superior Donuts.” “Union Square” didn’t cut it, and we needed to move “Just Shoot Me” to 8:30 and try out a few new comedies on Tuesday, including “Lateline,” another newsroom comedy starring now-Sen. Al Franken.

Remember, in the beginning of this post I talked about how difficult it is to maintain a dynasty? Also remember way back at the start of the MSTV story I told you about time period commitments? Well, winter was coming to the Must-See TV schedule. At 9:30, following “Seinfeld,” we aired a comedy from Warner Bros. and the creators of “Friends” — “Veronica’s Closet.”

The time period commitment was creeping back on to the schedule. Gulp!

In my first post on the history and strategy of Must-See TV, this was the second paragraph:

“I thought it would be fun to spend a few days [well, it turned out to be all summer] and take you behind the scenes of the scheduling decisions which resulted in Must-See TV. At the end of the day it’s all about the shows, but back then, where those shows were positioned on the schedule still mattered. Also, most of the series that made up MSTV were not produced by the network studio (big difference from how things are today), so issues such as time period commitments played a big role in decisions. As you will see, the biggest gamble of moving ‘Frasier’ and ‘Wings’ over to Tuesday night to establish a second ‘front’ was done because we found ourselves surprisingly commitment-free. Success changed that.”

The 1997-98 season was probably peak MSTV. Although we were scarred and tensions were high within the organization as a result of the whole process of cancelling the Monday movie, we still had the horses of “Seinfeld,” “Friends,” “Frasier,” “Mad About You” and “ER.” We had a comedy-rich schedule with players such as “Just Shoot Me,” “NewsRadio,” “3rd Rock from the Sun” and “Caroline in the City.” “Law & Order” and “Homicide” were dependable performers, we had four “Datelines” and Fridays and Saturdays that made sense. It was a stew of sales-friendly programming where our successful shows were supporting the relatively weaker product. But we had a tension within the organization … and we had “Veronica’s Closet.”

We didn’t own most of our programming, and we were probably most dependent on Warner Bros., which produced “Friends” and “ER” as well as “Suddenly Susan.” Paramount, from which came “Wings” and “Cheers,” continued to own one of our biggest weapons in “Frasier.” Although we were beginning to produce and own some of our programming, our philosophy was still to put the best schedule together regardless of ownership. In case of a tie, the nod might go to our own studio, but we were far from where things are today.

When you don’t own your own programming (and even when you do), there comes a point where you need to renegotiate the license fee that you pay for the right to air two or three runs of an episode. Back then repeats, especially for comedies, still generated ratings, so over two runs you could be profitable with an episode for most shows. The studio is willing to operate at a loss for a show hoping that the big payoff comes when the show goes into syndication.

“Seinfeld” (Castle Rock/Sony), “Friends” (WB) and “Frasier” (Paramount) have all been extremely profitable for their studios and creators. NBC never saw a penny beyond advertising. Plus, oftentimes late in the run of a successful show, the network may pay full cost of production per episode. That’s why ownership has become more important.

Something that enters into negotiations when it’s license fee renewal time is offering to pick up another show from the studio and/or creators of your hit show. “Veronica’s Closet” was a Warner Brothers comedy created by Marta Kauffman and David Crane, the creative forces behind “Friends.” It starred Kirstie Alley as a businesswoman whose personal life was not in the best of shape.

Looking back at it, if we tried to put this on today, we would have been rightfully skewered. Putting that aside, it was yet another female-led workplace comedy — at a time when NBC had several on the air already — but to appease our creators and WB, not only did we order the series, but we also committed to put it behind “Seinfeld,” where it stayed for the entire season. I don’t remember if there was a two-year commitment to the time period, but “Veronica’s Closet” remained there for a second season.

I remember going to the table read for the “VC” pilot. I arrived late, and although there was a seat for me in the front, I always preferred to sit in the back of the room because people were always looking at my reactions (like it mattered what I thought). This was before I wore a mask. Anyway, when I got to the room, I realized that I had left my glasses in my car (I was nearsighted back then), so I spent the table read squinting and trying to figure out who was in the cast. When I got back to the office my boss Warren Littlefield called to tell me that Peter Roth (head of WB TV) and the producers were upset because I was making faces like I thought it was a terrible show (it was). I explained what happened. Warren of course believed me, but he asked that I call Peter Roth and make nice.

“Veronica’s Closet” would be the first of several time period commitments, but we had a bigger issue on the horizon. Festivus 1997, I got the call from Warren Littlefield that I was dreading. “Well, we’re gonna have a big May sweep,” he said. That was code for “Seinfeld” would not be returning.

You can never be totally prepared for the end of one of your dominant shows, but when Warren Littlefield called me on Festivus 1997 to tell me Jerry Seinfeld was not returning for another season, I think we were as prepared as we could be.

The whole point of building an 18-comedy schedule was to give us as many options as possible for regrouping without our most dominant comedy and the No. 1 show on television in 18-49 viewers. We still had “Friends” and “Frasier” and, of course, “ER.” In “Just Shoot Me,” “3rd Rock from the Sun” and “NewsRadio” we had comedies that we felt were ready to take an anchor position on the schedule. We still had another season of “Mad About You.”

When Warren called me with the “Seinfeld” news I was at home taking a nap. My brain was scheduling 24/7, so I immediately told him what we should do.

“Let’s move ‘Friends’ to the ‘Seinfeld’ slot, move ‘Just Shoot Me’ to the hammock slot between ‘Friends’ and ‘Seinfeld’ in the new year and slide it to 8 p.m. in the fall. Done!”

Warren agreed. Don Ohlmeyer (who sadly passed this week) called me a while after I heard the news. Rather than discussing what to do, Don said the three of us should ponder it over the holidays and regroup in January.

At this point, only a few people knew of Jerry’s decision. This was in the early days of the internet as a news source. The New York Times had a website, and late in the evening on Christmas Day, Bill Carter, then chief TV writer for the paper, broke the story that Jerry had called it quits. Around 11:30 Christmas night, the Masked Wife and I were hanging around the kitchen counter, preparing for a trip the next day to Palm Springs, when the house phone rang. I just assumed someone had died.

Instead it was Joe Adalian, who was writing for the New York Post at that time. It was 2:30 in the morning back east, and Joe had been awoken by his editor who saw Carter’s NYT post. Joe asked me to confirm, which I told him I could not do without talking to Pat Schultz, our press person. I called Pat first thing the next morning. By then the cat was out of the bag, and there went a restful couple of days in Palm Springs.

SCHEDULING MUST-SEE-TV PART 7

As NBC was entering the 1996-97 season we were at the top of our game. Must-See TV was a cultural phenomenon and we had built a schedule that could continue to crank out the hits. Little did we know that there were dark clouds on the horizon.

Winter was coming to MSTV.

The 1996-97 season was, for me as a scheduler, pretty much a perfect wave.

The Must-See TV schedule was in place, and we were making hundreds of millions in profit. There was stability in management; several of us had worked together for a number of years. There was trust by Warren Littlefield, Don Ohlmeyer and Bob Wright that there was a core group of executives whose only goal was to keep NBC the No. 1 network in the 18-49 demographic. We had a strategy, we executed it, and we did it with a lot of showmanship by our marketing team, led by John Miller and Vince Manze.

At the center of our strategy was comedy. We started and ended the season with 16 comedies on the schedule. We abandoned Saturday night comedies but had two-hour blocks Tuesday through Thursday. There were two comedies each on Sunday and Monday, so we had a comedy presence on five consecutive nights.

The block of “Unsolved Mysteries,” “Dateline” and “Homicide” was in its third consecutive season on Friday, and we put together a night of edgy new dramas on Saturday in “Dark Skies,” “The Pretender” and “Profiler.”

If you remember, this adventure began with my realization when I started my job as scheduler that time period commitments were preventing us from putting the best schedule on the air. When we moved “Frasier” to Tuesday, we were finally commitment-free, and that started the successful run that we were on entering the 1996-97 season. I felt that we were in a position to get the best comedies because we had so many successful anchors on our schedule.

I told Warren (and I was serious) that when studios and agents drove on to the NBC lot in Burbank, there should be a big sign for them to see with our 8 and 9 p.m. Tuesday/Thursday comedies and a space behind each of them that said “Your show here.” There was really no other network that could make that claim. With seven returning comedies as anchors, that gave us seven at-bats to launch more successes.

Back in 1995-96 we premiered “3rd Rock from the Sun,” which we picked up after ABC passed on it. That same season ABC premiered “The Jeff Foxworthy Show.” Although NBC was a young adult, urban, upscale network, I realized that we were ignoring a large segment of our country. A comedian like Jeff Foxworthy might be what we needed to reach new segments of the audience. ABC premiered the family comedy in the fall to pretty impressive ratings, but they kept jerking it around the schedule. Wherever they put it, “Foxworthy” did just fine.

I would bring “The Jeff Foxworthy Show” up at our 2:30 meetings, mostly to point out how dumb ABC was in how they were treating a show I felt could be a real asset to a network whose sweet spot was middle-America family comedies. Little did I know that Don Ohlmeyer was listening carefully to what I was saying.

In May 1996, after we had finished screening the pilots and the night before we were about to start the scheduling meetings, I received a late-night call from Don.

“We got it,” was all he said.

“Got what?” I responded.

“I got Foxworthy for you.”

There was dead silence on my side. Let’s just say Don made it very clear that this was all on me, and I better figure out what we were going to do with the show. We scheduled it on Monday night with a comedy called “Mr. Rhodes,” about a teacher in a private school. The hour replaced “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air” and “In the House,” which starred LL Cool J. Needless to say, that was quite a jolt to our traditional Monday comedy audience.

We stuck with the shows for the season, but neither made it to a second year. It taught me the lesson that your audience is expecting certain product from you, and you will get slapped back in line when you stray from that.

It was fun to hear that ABC totally freaked when they heard we had stolen another show from them. We did it to them again in ’96-’97 with “The Naked Truth” starring Tea Leoni. That one had a bit more success for NBC, running two seasons.

ABC tried to retaliate by taking “Something So Right,” which started the season as our Tuesday 8:30 comedy. After NBC canceled it, ABC brought it on in the spring of ’98. It did not go well.

As the 1996-97 season progressed, I started to think about one more move that would take the schedule to the next level. That’s next.

The 1996-97 season was a year where we were trying to build as many comedy assets as we could. There were two primary drivers. First, we knew that “Seinfeld” was, if not on the decline ratings-wise, a show that was aging and was being run by rather ephemeral people. We figured we should get ready for the moment when Jerry would tell Warren Littlefield that it was time to move on.

The second driver was my growing sense that it was time to cut back on two movie nights and replace one of them with two comedies and “Dateline.” We would need more comedy anchors to do that.

I had been thinking for a while about replacing a movie night. This all coincided with the implementation of Six Sigma thinking at GE, our parent company. I’m not going to be so bold as to say that I took Six Sigma principles, which were simply a data-driven approach to solving problems, as my guiding light here, but it turned out that’s what I was doing.

As I said earlier in this saga, movies served the purpose of covering hours that series could not handle successfully. I started to realize that it was no longer a cost-efficient way to handle failure on the schedule. Newsmagazines could now do that for us in a far more cost-efficient manner, and our focus on comedies (with half in protected time periods) was far more attractive to advertisers. During the 1995-96 season, I asked my colleagues in other divisions to quietly form a task force to look at eliminating a movie night. I made my bosses aware of the project.

As an experiment, I put series on a Sunday night during the season. It was a four-comedy block with an original “Law & Order” at 10 p.m. I’m pretty sure two of the comedies were original, including a “Frasier” episode. The demo ratings for the experiment were slightly higher than the Sunday movie average, but the concentration of 18-49 viewers was significantly better.

As the ’95-’96 season was coming to a close, we showed the results of our analysis to Don Ohlmeyer and Warren Littlefield. We proved that we could make a significant improvement to the bottom line by eliminating the Monday movie and replacing it with two comedies and a “Dateline.” One thing, though: For the move to work, we needed to make the decision a season early so our movie group would not go out and order product that would not be needed for the following season. That meant we had to inform our head of movies and minis that we were making the move so as to limit movie orders for the ’97-’98 season. Those pitches would start in October 1996.

Without going into all the details, I was told not to inform the movie group, so as far as I was concerned we would have two movie nights in ’97-’98. That didn’t stop us from looking for more comedies to at least service the 16 slots already on the schedule.

“Suddenly Susan” was put behind “Seinfeld” in fall 1996 and was the first of what would be several female-skewing comedies tried out that season. “Susan” replaced “Caroline in the City,” which, after one season, was moved to Tuesday behind “Frasier.”

We wanted to get as many at-bats in to find more hits, so in mid-season we took “SS” off for six weeks to make room for the ABC castoff “The Naked Truth,” as well as another female appeal comedy, “Fired Up.” Both occupied the Thursday 9:30 slot. “Suddenly Susan” came back at 8:30, hammocked between “Friends” and “Seinfeld.”

“Susan” was a Warner Bros. comedy, and their TV head at the time, Tony Jonas, was quite upset as to how we were treating the show. I reassured Tony that Susan would come back at the same ratings level in spite of the pre-emptions. He was certain I was wrong. We made a bet, and fortunately I was right. As a result, I have autographed scripts of both “Friends” and “ER.” I was pretty confident we had a winning structure here.

Next, “The Pretender” and “Just Shoot Me.” The ones that almost got away.

Sometimes you just flat out get it wrong. If you’re lucky, you swallow your pride, accept your stupidity and hold on to a show before it’s not too late. That was true of two of our shows that premiered during the 1996-97 season.

I don’t know if I have talked about “The Pretender” on TV by the Numbers, but I’m sure I mentioned it on my blog, Revenge of the Masked Scheduler. Sometime during the 1995-96 season, a script for the show came to us unsolicited. Warren Littlefield passed it around for several of us to read, and we were excited to make a pilot. “The Pretender” was about Jarod, a genius raised with others in The Centre. He could transform himself into anything and he escapes The Centre. While he is being pursued by a member of The Centre, Jarod assumes various identities and helps people. It was a bit “Fugitive” and a bit “Quantum Leap.” The final version wasn’t as dark as the original script, but we were looking forward to seeing it.

We had two development/current teams back then, and before we would begin screenings I would ask each team leader if there was a pilot that they did not wish us to screen because it was a total miss. We were going to test them all but didn’t have to screen them. The leader of the team that developed “The Pretender” suggested we not screen it. I was disappointed but respected the decision.

The morning we were setting the schedule, Eric Cardinal, our head of research, called to let me know that “The Pretender” was one of the highest-testing pilots in NBC history, comparable to “ER.” We quickly retested it to similar results and put it on the Saturday schedule along with two other thrillers, “Dark Skies” and “Profiler.”

“The Pretender” had a successful run — four seasons on NBC, plus two follow-up movies on TNT. I worked with the GE nerds to develop all sorts of models, and one of them cited “The Pretender” as the strongest show on the schedule needing minimal lead-in support. It was a show that could work anywhere.

The other one that almost got away was “Just Shoot Me,” a solid workplace comedy from Steve Levitan, who came from “Frasier” and went on to co-create “Modern Family.” I remember going to the pilot table read and being impressed by the professionalism of the cast. “JSM” didn’t make the fall schedule in 1996 but we ordered six episodes for midseason. They quietly went about making them.

What did make the fall schedule was “Men Behaving Badly,” which followed “NewsRadio” on our new Wednesday night comedy block. “Men” was based on a British comedy, and it was from Carsey/Werner of “Cosby”/”Roseanne” renown. It starred Rob Schneider and was a raunchfest — not a good one. Let’s just say Warren Littlefield and I had different opinions as to whether to put the show on in the fall. I did not win the argument.

“Men” got off to a shaky start and, rather than just killing it, there was an effort to retool it. The showrunner assigned the task was Steve Levitan, who had finished producing his “Just Shoot Me” order. In December, we shut “Men Behaving Badly” down for retooling and needed a show for Wednesday. Compounding all this was ABC’s “Arsenio,” which was Arsenio Hall’s attempt at a sitcom. We all thought it was going to be a hit. “Arsenio” was premiering in March.

We decided to rejigger our fledging Wednesday schedule and move “NewsRadio” to 8, away from “Arsenio,” which ABC had slotted at 9 (it ended up airing at 9:30 after “The Drew Carey Show”). I suggested “Just Shoot Me” as the 9 p.m. sacrificial lamb. The show did not have many fans in the building, and Warren suggested that he and I, along with marketing dudes Vince Manze and John Miller, all watch it over the Christmas holidays.

We got on a call toward the end of December, and I said I thought that four of the six episodes of “JSM” were pretty good. The response from the others was that was four more than they liked. Well, we had no choice, so “Just Shoot Me” was the sacrificial lamb … which not only beat “Arsenio,” but also went on to have a successful, seven-season run on the network. “JSM” played a small role in the decision of what to do when “Seinfeld” went away.

That May I introduced myself to Steve Levitan at our upfronts. As was usually the case, although I sort of liked the show, other execs fingered me as the guy who was keeping the show off the air and hated it. Comes with the territory.

Steve retaliated, and in the second season did an episode called “My Dinner with Woody” where Maya, the female lead, has dinner with a deranged person who thinks he is Woody Allen. My name was used for the character.

SCHEDULING MUST-SEE-TV PART 6

My role with Neal Shapiro was to give him some sense of where the “Dateline” hours were positioned on the schedule, what demographics we were delivering with the lead-in entertainment shows and what sorts of stories would be most promotable to that audience. Working in concert, Neal and I helped make “Dateline” one of the most successful newsmagazine brands in the ’90s.

Each “Dateline” had its own personality, and internally, we actually gave them different names. For example, the Friday “Dateline” was the transition show between “Unsolved Mysteries” and “Homicide,” and we would call it “Law & Dateline,” focusing on courtroom and crime stories. Tuesday’s show inherited a large young female audience, so we anointed it “Touched by a Dateline” and did softer, more emotional, heartwarming stories. When we added it to Sunday at 7 p.m., we were driving more of a male audience from sports, so that was “When Dateline Attacks,” a nod to my soon-to-be best buddies Mike Darnell and Bruce Nash. We would do hard-edged, video-driven stories there.

In addition to all the “Datelines,” we had two solid movie nights on Sunday and Monday. These nights consisted of made-for-TV movies and miniseries under the guidance of Lindy DeKoven and her group, as well as theatricals, which I would buy along with our head of business affairs and my friend, the late John Agoglia.

As I said before, the business was transitioning from movies to newsmagazines as the preferred relief for scripted shows, and we eventually got up to five “Datelines” while eliminating a movie night, but I’ll save that for later in the saga.

Next time, I’ll talk about how Lindy and I would map out the movie strategy and the night I broke the law.

With “Dateline” filling up from three to five hours of our Must-See TV schedule, we looked to our movie group, led by Lindy DeKoven, to provide us with four hours of movies and miniseries each week. We augmented that with theatricals, which the late John Agoglia (our head of business affairs) and I would buy.

Back then you could still get a rating for a theatrical, and we would generally buy packages from a studio. There would be one or two “A” blockbusters, and the art was to cherry-pick the “B” movies to fill out the package. I probably enjoyed acquiring and scheduling theatricals more than anything else, and I’ll try to talk about that at some later point, but I wanted to give you some idea about how we came up with our movie schedule each season.

Sometime at the beginning of the new season, I would sit down with Lindy and go over the number of made-for-TV movies and miniseries she and her group would need to deliver for the following season. We were always a year ahead. We needed to be because the movie group would start ordering movies for the next season by October. Miniseries would often be ordered even earlier. After figuring out how many theatricals we were going to schedule, we would determine how many made-fors I needed from Lindy.

I would assume a miniseries each sweeps period and decide which theatricals were sweeps-worthy. Lindy then knew the number of sweeps-level movies she needed and how many other movies would fill out the year. In order to guarantee some level of success with these “B” made-fors we would develop some franchises, especially in the mystery area. We would do a couple of Perry Masons and also featured Louis Gossett Jr. in a series. We also had a franchise called “Moment of Truth” movies that adhered to a formula of a TV actress who had been out of the spotlight for a while and a young actress who played her daughter and was in jeopardy. These movies clicked with the viewer, and I even put one or two in a sweep.

We relied a lot on research to select and schedule the movies. Made-fors were generally very female skewing, and we did an analysis of the core group of viewers (women 35-54) and which movies appealed to the fringes (55+ and 18-34). Our goal was to attract the younger end of the movie audience, and we found a sleazy formula that featured a stable of young TV actresses. These movies became known as the Lifetime movies, since Lifetime wound up buying them all and adding to the sleaze over the years.

Among my favorites were:

“She Fought Alone” — Tiffani Thiessen
“She Said No” — Candace Cameron
“The Babysitter’s Seduction” — Keri Russell
“On the Edge of Innocence” — Kellie Martin (Lindy’s favorite actress to wit)
“Death of a Cheerleader” — Kellie Martin and Tori Spelling, and speaking of Tori, maybe our most infamous title:
“Mother, May I Sleep with Danger?”

We would appeal to the “older” part of the movie audience with one of our strongest franchises: Danielle Steel. Those movies were gold, and as I recalled for you, helped bring down a Jennifer Aniston series on CBS and keep her on “Friends.”

Next time we’ll continue to go through the movie strategy, and I promise to finally tell the tale of “The Beast” and my Jeer in TV Guide.

With movie nights on Sunday and Monday, it was ideal for NBC to feature miniseries during sweeps periods. We would generally air one per sweep, and unlike the more conventional made-for-TV movie, miniseries events tried to reach the broadest audience, including men.

There were three broad categories of miniseries that increased the chances of success, and since they were expensive to produce, we gravitated toward these three buckets.

Probably the most successful were the big historical events. I would call them the “Cliff Notes” miniseries since it was a way to “learn” history in an entertaining way. Tasty spinach, so to speak. Biblical miniseries were also included here. A related group was the biographical miniseries. We did several based on the lives of musicians such as The Judds (“Naomi & Wynonna: Love Can Build a Bridge”) and “The Temptations.” I scheduled the Judds mini against a Stephen King miniseries on ABC, and we more than held our own.

I fondly remember “The Temptations” because it led out of a reality show that I developed along with my friend Bruce Nash. Mike Darnell was having success with these exposés about magicians’ secrets, so I pitched Bruce the idea of doing the same thing for professional wrestling. Back in the mid-’90s there was still the “kayfabe” illusion that wrestling was not fixed. We shot it at the Olympic Auditorium in L.A. and I met Harley Race, one of the all-time greats. It didn’t do all that well, but it was a memory for me.

The next bucket was the true crime minis or the subgenre of a story based on a real event, like the successful “Switched at Birth” (not to be confused with the current Freeform show). Affiliates loved this form because it was easy to tie into their local news, and the movies were pre-sold.

The genre that I think we enjoyed the most was the sci-fi/fantasy mini-series. Our marketing gang, under the guidance of Vince Manze and John Miller, would crank out theatrical-level promos for these events. Since Lindy DeKoven and I would plan these minis out far in advance, we generally had the movie in house in plenty of time to come up with a marketing plan.

Every once in a while, we would catch a break. We did a miniseries based on “Gulliver’s Travels” starring Ted Danson. As part of the campaign we shrink-wrapped busses in major cities with artwork for “Gulliver’s.” About a week before the movie was to air we were at a 2:30 meeting in Don Ohlmeyer’s office. Don had his TVs on, and suddenly there was a hostage situation on a bus in downtown L.A., and for about an hour we watched the shrink-wrapped artwork for “Gulliver’s Travels” on all the stations in Los Angeles. Fortunately, it all ended well.

My most memorable miniseries story involved “The Beast,” based on Peter Benchley’s novel. This was the centerpiece of our May 1996 sweep. We started the movie on Mother’s Day. A good scheduling rule back then was, after a day with the family, guys wanted to kick back with something for them, and what would be better than a yarn about a giant octopus?

Back in 1996 NBC had the network rights to the NBA, and we aired a first-round playoff game in late afternoon on the Sunday “The Beast” was going to premiere. I was at a birthday party for a friend of my son. We were in the Santa Monica Mountains with limited cell service, and this was before smartphones. After several attempts, I finally reached Lindy to wish her good luck and innocently asked her what the score of the NBA game was. She told me, and then I asked what period they were in. I figured out that the game would not be over by 8 p.m. on the East Coast.

I grabbed my son, who was not happy about leaving early, and drove home to hunt down our head of operations, John DeWald. He agreed that we were going long, and we had to decide whether to slide the schedule or join the 8 p.m. show in progress. Joining the 8 p.m. show (“Mad About You”) in progress could cost us advertising money if we could not get all the commercials in. Save the money or start “The Beast” on time? I tried everyone — Warren Littlefield, Don Ohlmeyer and John Miller — to consult, and none were reachable. It was Mother’s Day pre-smartphones but the scheduler was on call 24/7.

I was watching the game and decided it would be over around 10 minutes after the hour and Sports was informed to get off ASAP. I told John to slide the schedule. I would take responsibility. I got off the phone with John and panicked. When viewers tune in at 9 o’clock for “The Beast” and see an episode of “NewsRadio” (our 8:30 comedy), will they tune out?

I called John back and told him to run a crawl at the bottom of “NewsRadio” that said “Don’t touch that dial, THE BEAST IS COMING THE BEAST IS COMING” and make “The Beast” in large green letters. I told John to run it every minute until the movie came on (which was around 9:10). I had the NBC East Coast feed at home, and there is nothing more surreal than giving that order and within a minute seeing a crawl across the screen.

“The Beast” was a huge success. Must-See TV was at the pinnacle of success. We had nine of the top 10 shows for the week, with “The Beast” at No. 2 behind only ER. I put the cover of the Wednesday, May 1 Hollywood Reporter with the network rankings for the week on my @maskedscheduler Twitter feed.

The next morning, I came to work and Don Ohlmeyer called me up to his office. He thanked me for handling the situation — then told me I had broken the law and that crawls were only to be used for news bulletins or emergencies. He also told me that if that ever happened again to do the same thing.

The cherry on the top of all this was TV Guide gave us a jeer for the shameless promotion of “The Beast” and for the crawl. We took it as a badge of honor.

The third part of our movie strategy was the strategic use of theatricals. More about that next time.

In addition to made-for-TV movies and miniseries, the fun part of scheduling movies was buying and programming theatricals. Here are some stories I originally told on my blog, Revenge of the Masked Scheduler.

“Jurassic Park”/”Schindler’s List”: While at NBC I worked closely with John (the Godfather) Agoglia to acquire theatricals. The deal that I will always remember was for “Jurassic Park.” We desperately wanted to get it, knowing that it would be a huge weapon in a sweep (it was). We were willing to overpay, as were the other networks. What sealed the deal for us was that we agreed to include “Schindler’s List” in the buy with Universal. We were also willing to accept Steven Spielberg’s conditions as to how the movie could air on broadcast television. “Jurassic Park” was a big success for us in terms of ratings and profits, but we were not sure what to do with “Schindler’s List.”

We took a gamble and aired it in a February sweep. We conformed to all the stipulations, and our sales peeps went out looking for a single sponsor for the movie. Of course, we went to our parent company, GE, who passed. Then Ford stepped up. They were so supportive that they did not take advantage of the opportunity to insert a commercial during the intermission. We were all nervous as to whether the movie would get a rating, but we were proud to have acquired the movie and to have aired it in a respectful way.

We woke up on Monday morning to surprisingly large ratings. I called up my good friend in sales, Mike Mandelker, to thank him for all that he had done to make the showing a success. He was in a foul mood because he had just gotten off the phone with Bob Wright, the head of NBC. Rather than congratulating Mike, he wanted to know why we hadn’t approached GE about sponsoring the now high-rated movie.

Being involved in airing “Schindler’s List” on a broadcast network is still one of the most satisfying moments of my career, and it also reinforced one of the golden rules of television: No good deed goes unpunished.

“Kindergarten Cop”: Early in my scheduling career at NBC, we bought two movie packages from Universal, where all the films bypassed cable and went directly to the network. Both packages featured a few “blockbusters,” and then we needed to cherry-pick a bunch of movies to round out the buy. The fun was finding the gems among the rest of the litter.

One package included “Kindergarten Cop,” and part of my job was to decide how many times I would air it. We would then spread the cost of the movie over the runs. I think I said that I could run “KCOP” six or seven times. It was another home run in a sweep, and I ran the sprockets off of it. I started getting angry calls from affiliate GMs who begged me not to run it again, but I ignored them and starting making bets with some of them as to what the rating would be for the sixth or seventh run. I made a lot of money on that movie.

“Tremors”: This one was a gem among the runts in the Universal package, and “Tremors” wound up as one of the top 5 movies of the season in 18-49s. No one believed the ratings the morning after it aired, but those were the days when counterprogramming really mattered. I put it against two very female-skewing movies.

“Fried Green Tomatoes”: Another hidden gem, which I aired in a May sweep. This movie was a textbook example of how research can help in scheduling the network. We did concept tests on all our movies (including theatricals), and “FGT” had an amazingly high interest and intent-to-view score. We also did competitive research putting “FGT” against potential movies on the other two nets, and it did surprisingly well. I took a gamble and put it in a sweep. I got one of my “Don’t come in to the office tomorrow if this doesn’t work” speeches from Don Ohlmeyer, but there was just too much positive research on this movie.

“Fried Green Tomatoes” popped, and we repeated it against the American Music Awards on a Monday night, and I think we beat them. I sent a plate of fried green tomatoes to my counterpart in scheduling at ABC to rub it in. I WAS a real d**k back then (some would say I still am). Speaking of being a d**k …

“Backdraft” was another movie that was part of the Universal package and helped us big time in a sweep. I believe we had three runs of the movie, and I was down to my final run. Here’s how I used it: One day Lindy DeKoven, our head of movies and miniseries, called me to say FOX had just scheduled an off-night episode of “Beverly Hills, 90210” right up against the world premiere of a Monday made-for-TV movie which starred “90210” star Tiffani Theissen.

Lindy told me the star and the producers were ballistic and I had to do something. I explained there really wasn’t much I could do, but to appease her I called Doug Binzak, who was doing the scheduling at FOX at the time. I explained the situation and asked him why he wanted to offend a star on his network. Doug said there was nothing that he could do about it. I told him that I would need to retaliate because I had a crazed executive on my hands.

That summer FOX premiered an original scripted series about firefighters. I put my final run of “Backdraft” up against it and killed their series. Doug called and asked if we were even.

“Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”: The way we generally figured out a license fee for a theatrical was by its box office gross. Back then, a network would generally pay 15 percent of box office for X number of runs. Sometimes there would be a cap. I was out our local art theater and I saw a trailer for “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” This was when I was at FOX, and we were in the process of buying a movie from Sony. They gave us a list of features and asked us to buy one more movie.

I told our head of business affairs that I had seen a trailer for “Crouching Tiger” (it had not come out yet) and it might be worth a shot. I felt it was a sleeper. We threw it into the package. The movie came out and wound up grossing over $120 million. We suddenly had a movie with an outrageous license fee. We were screwed and only aired it once.

“The Fugitive”: At some point the networks started pre-buying movies, i.e. making deals for a movie even before we saw the box office. The first movie we pre-bought at NBC was “The Fugitive.” After we made the deal, we started to panic.  We had paid a large license fee in order to take it off the market. We went out on our own dime and bought the rights to air the final three episodes of the television series. Fortunately, “The Fugitive” opened and we gave Warner Bros. all this free publicity.

Pre-buying is a game of chicken between the movie studio and the network. We wanted to pre-buy the 1998 “Godzilla” from Sony and made a generous offer. Sony turned it down and said that they were happy to wait until the movie opened. Well, “Godzilla” bombed. Suddenly Sony claimed that they had accepted our offer. We held them up for more runs for the same price and we demanded additional runs of “A Few Good Men” and “Men in Black 2” (two movies that we had bought in an earlier package).

“Richie Rich,” “Beethoven,” “Jurassic Park,” “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation”: Our sales department loved when we aired theatricals over Thanksgiving weekend, and I would have fun putting together packages of movies to air Thursday-Sunday. One year I pitched Vince Manze (our promo guy) the idea of doing promos for the Thanksgiving movies where the children of NBC employees took over the network and demanded that we air these four movies. Vince liked the idea, and we made it into a big party, inviting our co-workers to bring their kids to the Burbank lot for the shoot. My daughter and son were in the promo (my daughter actually had a speaking part).

One problem: We had just renovated the executive conference room, and we pretty much destroyed it during the shoot. It took the whole weekend to get it looking like new again, and I thought for sure I was going to get fired.

SCHEDULING MUST-SEE-TV PART 5

It was time to take “Friends” to the next level and give it the even stronger hammock of the slot between our two biggest shows, “Seinfeld” and “ER.” We decided to make the move later in the new year. We cut the order short for “Madman of the People,” the Seinfeld lead-out, and in March 1995 moved “Friends” behind “Seinfeld.” To no one’s surprise, we improved the time period performance and at 8:30, inserted what would be the first in a long line of mediocre comedies in the 8:30 and 9:30 slots on our Must-See TV nights. “Hope and Gloria,” welcome to the party.

The full Must-See TV strategy was in place was we entered the 1995-96 season. The house was built, and now all we need to do was rearrange the furniture. The driver of the strategy was comedies. We started the prior season with 12 comedies on the schedule and increased that to 16 in the fall of ’95.

Twenty years ago, scheduling still mattered a lot, so the game was to pair up a new comedy with something established. Six new comedies (seven if you count “Hope and Gloria,” which premiered in March 1995) were in the 8:30 or 9:30 satellite slots, paired up with established successes. We had comedies on five of the seven nights, and three nights — Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday — had a four-comedy block.

Comedies were sales-friendly and repeatable, and given the half-hour format, we were able to launch more potentially successful comedies in the adjacent half-hour. Sold as the Must-See TV brand, the whole was greater than the sum of its parts.

This was especially true of our Thursday comedy block and “ER” at 10 p.m. Thursday night was the most attractive to advertisers, especially automakers and movies, and the CPMs we charged on the night were the highest in the business. Thursday night was also the first night of the crucial (back then) sweeps periods (November, February and May), and we dubbed our Thursday schedule the “greasy pole.” We would start the sweep with a dominant lead, and the other networks would then try to catch up — only to be faced with another Thursday night ratings onslaught.

We moved “Friends” to 8 p.m. on Thursday, and given that it was only in its second season, the license fee (NBC did not own it, Warner Bros. did) was reasonable. We put two new comedies in the satellite slots — “The Single Guy” and “Caroline in the City” — and with “Seinfeld” as the tentpole, it was the most profitable night on television.

We parlayed the enormous young adult appeal of Thursday night into creating the most profitable night in NBC’s history up to that point. In January 1995 ABC had the Super Bowl and attempted to launch a new drama after the post-game. “Extreme,” some sort of rescue show, premiered after the game and lasted two months of Thursday night. The morning after the game, at our daily 2:30 meeting, I went into one of my rants about how putting something new after the Super Bowl just showed more people that it sucked quicker than premiering it on its regular night. Very few series premiered and succeeded after the game, and if they did, it was as much that they were put in a solid time period (a la “The Wonder Years”) and would have succeeded regardless.

As an alternative to premiering a new series, I suggested that we go to the “Seinfeld” gang and offer them the post-Super Bowl slot for the 1996 game on NBC — and that we announce it in the upfront and make a killing. We would ask them to do a one-hour episode. Everyone thought it was a good idea. Warren Littlefield went to see Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, who immediately shot down it down.

Honestly, we were not surprised. That same season we came up with a theme for Thursday night “Blackout Thursday.” All the Thursday comedies were in New York City, and we pitched a night where a city power failure was factored into the stories of all the shows. The other three comedies bought in, but “Seinfeld” passed. We still marketed the night that way, but Jerry and Larry just did their thing.

After being shot down by “Seinfeld,” we went to “Friends,” who embraced the idea. I think they were thrilled that we had so much faith in a freshman comedy to offer them the slot, and they delivered with an All-Star hour. “The One After the Super Bowl” featured Julia Roberts, Brooke Shields, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Marcel the monkey, and the rating and the money we generated for the game, the postgame (which held on to all the 18-49s waiting for “Friends”) and the episode made it the most profitable night in NBC’s history.

The strategy of protecting new comedies by putting them behind established shows resulted in five freshmen shows returning for another season. In addition to “The Single Guy” and “Caroline in the City,” “NewsRadio” (hammocked between “Wings” and “Frasier” on Tuesdays) returned for the 1996-97 season. Two midseason shows, “Boston Common” and “3rd Rock from the Sun” were also renewed.

We also had some family comedies on Sunday night from 7-8 p.m., and “Brother Love” featuring the Lawrence brothers (remember them?) also got a second season pickup.

More about those shows … after the break.

The 1995-96 primetime season was when those of us at the Peacock network were starting to have some fun. As the scheduler, I felt I had built as close as I could come to my vision of a dream schedule. My mantra in programming was “Reduce the cost of failure and invest in success,” and I believed our schedule accomplished that.

First, and most importantly, it was sales-friendly with 16 comedies and several quality dramas. Virtually every comedy at 8:30 or 9:30 led out of an established comedy. Lead-ins still mattered back then, so the probability of any of these satellite shows tanking was pretty slim.

Second, there were an additional seven hours of the schedule that were pretty much failure-proof. We had two movie nights that were a combination of made-for-TV movies, theatricals (which I would purchase along with our head of business affairs, John Agoglia) and event miniseries from our movie and miniseries empress, Lindy DeKoven. In addition to the movie nights we had three hours of “Dateline” on the schedule (Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday).

We had established programming at 10 p.m. across the schedule, so our affiliated stations had strong ratings leading into their local news.

The sales-friendly nature of the schedule meant I had the support of our sales department in keeping it going and making the moves that would make NBC quite profitable through the rest of the ’90s.

We had a vision for our comedies — young adult singles living in New York — and that seemed to be resonating with the audience. We were delivering a young (18-49), urban, upscale, college-educated audience, and the biggest shows were on the night most valued by advertisers — Thursday.

I thought a lot about why “Friends” resonated the way it did. Of course, a big part of the show’s success was the casting and the writing, but there are a lot of shows that hit those two targets and don’t break out. “Friends” found the secret sauce. For me, why “Friends” exploded was this (please don’t share, thanx): You either wanted to become them, were them, or remembered being them. In my opinion, “Friends” hit every demo target. I think that’s what to this day, young people keep discovering the show.

Our goal was to replicate that formula, especially on Thursday night, and that’s why “The Single Guy” and “Caroline in the City” were given the primo satellite slots. For whatever reason, I can’t remember, Warren Littlefield and I decided that we did not want to know the testing data when we were in pilot season in May 1995. We violated our own policy when it came to “Caroline in the City.” We were convinced that this was going to be our highest-testing pilot, and the Saturday before scheduling meetings, we begged Eric Cardinal, our head of research, to share the results. We were relieved to discover that we were right.

Over on Tuesday we went 50/50. “The Pursuit of Happiness,” which initially aired at 9:30 after “Frasier,” didn’t cut it. I think it was too serious and too adult for the comedies that our audience was looking for. On the other hand, “NewsRadio” hit that absurdist sweet spot and would become an important player for us. I remember going to the table read for the pilot. It was pretty funny, but there was a feeling that we could punch up the comedy if we replaced the handyman at the radio station with someone funnier. So, Joe Rogan replaced a guy named Ray Romano, and the rest is history. The butterfly effect in action.

I the spring of 1996 we added two comedies to the schedule for a tryout. “Boston Common” replaced “The Single Guy” for a short run and was renewed for the 1996-97 season. On Tuesday, we added “3rd Rock from the Sun” to Tuesday at 8:30. We “stole” “3rd Rock” from ABC after they passed on it. To be honest I was not a fan, but the Masked Daughter loved it when I brought it home for the family to screen.

It opened to some lofty ratings, and my 10-year-old would taunt me about how she knew more about hits than I did. We flipped “3rd Rock” into the leadoff spot on Tuesday to test its strength as a lead-in show. It did not disappoint. This enabled us to once again move “Wings” as we were about to expand our comedy presence for the ’96-’97 season.

We were having fun and ended the 1995-96 season as the No. 1 network in adults 18-49. We were commitment-free and had built a strong framework for success. Next time I’ll talk a bit more about movies and “Dateline” — and how I received a Jeer from TV Guide.

I want to take a little break from the building of the Must-See TV schedule to talk a bit about the two formats that helped us fill out 22 hours — newsmagazines and movies.

As successful as NBC was in the mid-’90s, it was impossible for anyone to schedule 22 hours of successful original scripted series. You had to rely on other formats to fill out parts of your schedule. Over the course of my scheduling career, there were three types of shows that played the role of giving your scripted series relief. I saw it evolve from movies to newsmagazines to reality shows (especially reality competitions). In the 1995-96 season, our first No. 1 finish of the Must-See TV era, I had two nights of movies (Sunday and Monday) and three hours of “Dateline” (Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday), which covered seven of the 22 hours.

The scheduler is generally the point person between the news division and the entertainment group. Early in my tenure as head of scheduling, I became the unofficial program exec on “I-Witness Video,” which was an early shock video hour produced by our news division. I continued to play that role as we developed the “Dateline” brand. After the executive producer of “Dateline” was fired for blowing up a GM truck, he was replaced by Neal Shapiro, who is currently CEO and president of public television station WNET in New York City. Andy Lack was president of NBC News, and Neal and Andy were important allies over the MSTV era.

SCHEDULING MUST-SEE-TV PART 4

Back in the mid-1990s, when scheduling moves really mattered to the bottom line of a broadcast network, two of my guiding principles were:

·       There are three moves to the scheduling game — your move, the other guy’s move and your response to that move. There is not a fourth.

·       Let the other guy do the dirty work for you. Don’t overthink a scheduling move; let your competition do that.

When we moved “Frasier” and “Wings” to Tuesday to establish a second night of Must-See TV for the 1994-95 season, we knew we would be going onto ABC’s successful turf and that we were putting a show that we had a lot of faith in against one of their heavy hitters in “Roseanne.” We had done our homework, and based on feedback from the upfront, we knew there would be a financial upside from this move.

As an aside, we were making another “bold” move on Thursday at 10 p.m. by putting our new medical drama “ER” against CBS’ “Chicago Hope.” “CH” was also a freshman medical drama, but it was created David E. Kelley, and CBS had announced the pickup and time period far in advance. CBS acted like it was their time period and we were the encroachers. More on this down the road.

When I got the call from Don Ohlmeyer that Ted Harbert at ABC was “threatening” to make the move of “Home Improvement” from Wednesday to Tuesday to take on “Frasier,” he told me, “The fun’s over. Let’s put ‘Frasier’ back on Thursday.” My response to Don was that ABC seemed more worried about this move than we were, and that this will result in diminished ratings for both of their big tentpole shows. I also told Don that if they moved “Home Improvement,” ABC would make the Tuesday face-off the story of the new season, which means a boatload of free publicity.

As always, Don (in accordance with the GE culture) was willing to give me all the rope I needed to hang myself and asked me to work with Eric Cardinal, our West Coast research head, to do more competitive analysis of the move. We found that “Home Improvement” would win a head-to-head contest with “Frasier,” but that our comedy would more than hold its own in the time period. When you factor in the gross ratings improvement for us on Tuesday/Thursday and the increase in sales, this looked like a big win for us in spite of the ABC move. In addition, we calculated that ABC would take a gross ratings hit on their two big comedy nights if they made the move.

When we didn’t react to Harbert’s initial threat, Ted kept calling over the summer, telling Ohlmeyer they had hired consultants to look into this and that they all agreed that ABC should make the move. I kept reassuring Don we were doing the right thing, and in success we had set ourselves up for long-term profitability. ABC waited until late in the summer to announce the flip, figuring that we would react. We did nothing.

Paramount, which owned both “Frasier” and “Wings,” was apoplectic, and put pressure on us to unscramble the egg. I ran into Kelsey Grammer at some affiliate function after ABC made the change. I introduced myself and told him that he should see this as a sign of the faith that we had in the series. I also explained that, if the move works, it significantly increased the value of “Frasier” in syndication. It was no longer the show that followed “Seinfeld” but the show that opened up another Must-See TV night for NBC. I told him if Paramount couldn’t figure that out, I would personally write the syndication presentation for them. What an a–hole I was back then.

Sure enough, this Tuesday confrontation became the talk of the fall. We had bet the ranch on this move. We also believed that on Thursday at 10, we had the stronger medical drama in “ER.” The 1994-95 season was going to be really interesting.

The face-off between “Frasier” and “Home Improvement” was the talk of the summer, and the free publicity was amazing. We purposely kept “Frasier” on Thursday night throughout the summer and waited for premiere week to move it head-to-head against “HI.”

It wasn’t quite The Battle of the Bastards, but we were about to go to war with ABC at 9 p.m. on Tuesday, and for the overall claim as the No. 1 network in the 18-49 demographic, which was the currency of the business.

Back in the mid-’90s, the Hollywood Radio and Television Society (HRTS) would kick off the broadcast season with a panel of the network presidents. I still remember when Warren Littlefield was asked about the confrontation, he was humble and said (which was the truth) that we expected “Home Improvement” to win but that we would be competitive. Ted Harbert, then head of ABC Entertainment, was a bit more arrogant about this. He was out of a job within two years.

When I came out to Burbank in 1991, I decided not to look at the ratings until I arrived at the office. This was before ratings hotlines. I would often get a call on the way in to the office from someone in research, and I would beg them not to call and read me the ratings. When I got into the office, I would print up the overnights and look at them as if I were looking at a poker hand. I remember the relief at looking at the “Frasier” overnight ratings. We didn’t win the time period, but it was clear “Frasier” would survive against “Home Improvement” and that “HI” had taken the bigger hit with this move to Tuesday. It looked vulnerable.

The even bigger relief, and pleasant surprise, was what was about to happen on Thursday night — where two medical dramas were going head-to-head at 10 p.m. The “ER” pilot, which I told you all tested through the roof, was two hours, and we had a tough decision to make. Do we pre-empt “Seinfeld” in premiere week and air the pilot from 9-11 p.m., or do we find another timeslot for the premiere? We all agreed that we would be leaving too much money on the table if “Seinfeld” were not part of our Thursday night premiere strategy. Fortunately, we had a simple solution.

At that time, we had a Monday movie night that went up against “Monday Night Football” in the fall. Our movie targeted women 18-54, and we figured that would be the demo for “ER,” so we premiered the pilot on Monday and ran the second episode on Thursday along with our comedy premieres. We were confident that if viewers showed up on Monday, they would come back Thursday for the next episode. They did. We outrated the premiere of “Chicago Hope,” but the shocker was on week two, where “ER” blew “Hope” out of the water and CBS needed to rethink keeping the show on Thursday night.

“ER” quickly established itself as a juggernaut. Next, we had to figure out how and where to repeat the pilot, which leads me to a funny story.

New Year’s Day featured the top college football bowl games (now there are a gazillion bowls). NBC would air the Orange Bowl in prime, and ABC would air the Rose Bowl in the afternoon and the Sugar Bowl in prime. Generally, one of those games was for the national championship. With two networks airing college football, CBS would wisely see that as an opportunity to premiere a midseason series against them. I remember “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman,” among others, successfully launched against the bowl games.

NBC had lost the rights to the Orange Bowl for the 1995 game. We were sitting around one day thinking about how to program the “ER” repeat. We knew CBS was going to move “Chicago Hope” away from “ER,” and I suggested that given their New Year’s Day strategy, I would not be surprised if they took the opportunity to relaunch it at 10 p.m. on Monday, which was New Year’s Day.

We pre-emptively announced we were repeating the “ER” pilot on New Year’s Day, and we did it sometime in October. We went out with a press release figuring that would give CBS pause. It turned out we were right about where “Chicago Hope” was going, and shockingly, CBS announced it would move there on New Year’s Day. It’s a free country.

Mandy Patinkin, who was starring in “CH” at the time, heard about this and called Don Ohlmeyer’s office demanding to meet with him. Don graciously agreed, and after Mandy vented, Don walked him through the chronology of events and told him that he was in the wrong president’s office and should head back over to CBS. On New Year’s Day, the “ER” repeat once again crushed “Chicago Hope,” which did remain on the CBS schedule for a few more seasons away from the big dog.

Those were the days when scheduling really mattered, and the networks would aggressively go after each other.

Not only were we celebrating the success of “ER,” but also another pleasant surprise was brewing over on Thursday. That’s the next story.

We weren’t expecting great things from the “Friends” pilot. It was not a strong-testing show, and it had two other obstacles. That May, FOX announced a comedy about a group of single twentysomethings in Chicago called “Wild Oats.” It was eerily similar to “Friends,” down to a hangout where the gang congregated.

The comparisons between the two shows occupied most of the coverage. We felt we had the better show with the stronger cast, but it didn’t matter. Paul Rudd was in the cast of “Wild Oats,” but I took solace in the fact that notorious show killer Paula Marshall was one of the leads.

The second obstacle was a bit more daunting. It turned out that Jennifer Aniston was in “second position” on “Friends.” She had also starred in a CBS series called “Muddling Through” that had yet to air, and what second position meant was that if the CBS show moved forward, she was legally committed to that show and we would need to replace her on “Friends.” Although “Muddling Through” did not make the fall schedule, the Eye net decided to air the episodes on Saturday night in the summer on 1994, prior to the premiere of “Friends.”

The morning that CBS announced that they were airing the Aniston show, we were in a Current meeting in Burbank. We knew that if these episodes got any sort of a rating, CBS may well order more just to block Aniston from boing part of the “Friends” cast. My boss Warren Littlefield looked at me and said, referring to “Muddling Through,” “Kill it!”

Although CBS put the show on Saturday night, I scheduled an original Danielle Steel movie (which always popped a rating) against the premiere and aired second-run Steel movies over the next few weeks to squash it. The strategy worked.

There was one more glitch before “Friends” got on the air. One afternoon Jamie Tarses, our top developer at the time, came into my office quite upset. Back then we were trying to do away with opening themes songs, and the “Friends” producers (Marta Kauffman, Kevin Bright and David Crane — more on them later) wanted an opening theme. Jamie played it for me and told me Don Ohlmeyer didn’t like it and was resisting even allowing an opening theme for the show. She asked if I would go up to Don’s office with her and support the song and the positioning. I thought the opening was fun and creative. Regarding the song itself, I really had no opinion, but if it was important to her and the producers, sure, I’d go into the lion’s den with her.

We caught Don in a good mood. As was usual, he asked if I would take responsibility if this turned out to be a mistake. This was the ritual between us. I said I would, and the rest is history.

Although it was given the cushy 8:30 hammock between “Mad About You” and “Seinfeld,” my Spidey senses told me that “Friends” seemed to be performing better than your average comedy given such a primo time slot. Also, the show’s rating built over the first few weeks, and the quality of the episodes kept getting better and better.

The real test came when I gave “Friends” a one-time-only at-bat behind “Frasier” on Tuesday night. If my memory serves me, we were getting close to the November sweep, and “The John Larroquette Show” needed a “hit,” which was scheduling slang for we didn’t have an original episode. I thought there was nothing to lose in seeing how “Friends” would do outside of its hammock. It performed above the level of the “Larroquette” originals.