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:
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.
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