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.
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