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There
at the
creation: Fred Silverman
He invented NBC's 'must-see' scheduling strategy
By Kevin Downey
It was a May day in 1981 when Fred Silverman left
his office in New York’s Rockefeller Center. He would not return, not
that day or ever again. Silverman had been president and CEO of NBC for three
years. He left that day very much a failure, and he would have
been hard-pressed to find many who disagreed.
NBC was in the tank, the No. 3 network behind ABC and CBS, and the board
of RCA, which then owned the network, was scouting for his replacement.
Silverman, the man Time magazine just three years earlier had touted on
its cover as “TV’s Master Showman,” was jumping before he got pushed.
But what Silverman left behind was one of modern television’s great
legacies, what would become known as Must See TV, the programming dynasty
that was NBC's Thursday night. Through Silverman’s successors, Grant
Tinker, Brandon Tartikoff, Warren Littlefield and Garth Ancier, NBC would
rise to dominate network television for two decades, as no network had
ever done before, and it would do so against the rise of cable and the
internet and video games. If there was a golden age of television, it was
roughly the two decades ending the century, from 1984 to 2004, and NBC was
network television at its best and most innovative.
That reign only ended this past season. Just why it ended is a tangled
story that would take a book to tell. But the quick version is that of a
legacy misspent. Must See TV was allowed to whither through neglect. Quite
simply, NBC had been so successful for so long that it had forgotten how
it had gotten there. Caution had stepped in where imagination and
risk-taking had driven programming decisions. The good people had left,
frustrated by meddling from the corporate suits above. The network’s
competitors, foremost CBS under Les Moonves, had begun to look a lot like
NBC when it still had its groove.
For Silverman, who after NBC went on to launch a string of hit series as
an independent producer, including “Matlock” and “Diagnosis Murder,”
the NBC of 2005 has come to look an awful lot like the struggling network
he was hired to bail out almost three decades ago, in 1978.
The irony, of course, is that the network this past broadcast
season was again in last place, but this time at No. 4 for the first time
ever in the advertiser-coveted 18-49 demographic. On top was Fox, which
didn’t exist when Silverman ran NBC, followed close behind by CBS then
ABC.
For media people, and those working in television, the
thinking behind Must See TV can only seem obvious. It’s simply the way
television is done. But it was not always the case.
At its simplest, the idea behind Must See TV means owning a night of the
week, Thursday for NBC. The idea is to dominate that night with a block of
programming, such that people tune in at 8 and stay until the late news,
without changing the channel. In time, with that one night in place, the
network moves to build a second night, using the first to promote that
night’s shows. Then from there it moves on to a third night, and then a
fourth, and so on.
But this strategy was not common to network television in its early years.
Silverman first used and perfected it at CBS, where he rose to head programming
in the early '70s, at a time when it was the top network.
CBS’s night was Saturday. In 1973 the lineup was: “All in the
Family,” “M.A.S.H.,” “Mary Tyler Moore,” “Bob Newhart” and
“Carol Burnett.”
Then, in 1975, Silverman took over as top programmer at ABC, lured away by
the challenge of turning around the perennial No. 3 network. He made
Tuesday night ABC’s night to shine, and that network quickly passed CBS
to become No. 1. ABC’s Tuesday lineup in 1977 was "Happy Days,” “Laverne
& Shirley,” “Three’s Company,” “Soap” and the drama “Family.”
Silverman was refining the concept at NBC when he left that
May day in
1981, with Thursday its must see night. That year NBC’s Thursday lineup
was “Harper Valley,” “Lewis & Clark,” “Diff’rent Strokes,”
“Gimme a Break,” and at 10, “Hill Street Blues.” The
four-sitcom/one-drama block would stay in place on NBC’s schedule until
“The Apprentice” debuted in 2004.
At NBC, Silverman chose Thursday because it seemed the most logical night
for the network to revamp, with the promise of making it that much more
competitive. Only later, much later, did Thursday night become hugely
attractive to advertisers, especially movie studios, for promoting movies
the following weekend. And as NBC’s ratings went on to soar on that night, it
became even more valuable, and at one point accounted for an estimated 40
percent of NBC’s primetime revenue.
Significantly, Thursday’s decline in ratings this past season
goes a long way to explain the network’s sharp decline in sales this
upfront from $2.8 billion to $2 billion in the space of just one year.
But back to NBC in 1978. Silverman, after just three years at ABC, had
been hired away by NBC to pull that network out of its nosedive. It was a
daunting challenge, for sure. Silverman faced the prospect of competing
against himself, in effect, pitting a suffering network against two he
could take credit for making No. 1.
NBC since the mid-50s had trailed CBS, only once narrowly
beating its rival,
until it was displaced by ABC, but
it was not through its artful programming as it was a lack of competition
and a general lack of programming sophistication at all three networks.
Media people are inclined to think of television as a mature
industry but in many ways network television is younger than its years.
Thirty years ago, ABC wasn’t really a full-fledged network, with its
affiliate network still under construction. Programming strategies were
comparatively primitive. Primetime was filled with variety shows,
something left over from radio, and westerns and cop dramas. There was
little thinking about synergies among shows on particular nights, or
putting schedules together that would flow smoothly from one to the next,
targeting one demographic to ensure they would sit down and stay seated
for the night. The legacy of radio was still pervasive; as a true mass
medium, you programmed for everyone. You presumed that the entire family
was sitting before the TV set. There was one demographic: the American
viewer. The
variety show was the archetype in this regard, singer followed by juggler
followed by sword swallower followed by a tap dancing duo. Somewhere in
that mishmash there was something to amuse everyone.
NBC’s programming seemed even more of a crazy quilt. NBC
had essentially one top-30 show through most of the 1970s, “Little House
on the Prairie.” Silverman was shocked to learn that a previous programming chief
had disliked series, so he didn’t order many of them. But specials and
movies? He couldn’t get enough so he larded up the schedule
with them. Three months into the job, Silverman cobbled together a lineup
out of eight hours of movies and an hour variety show he had inherited.
Combined, they counted for nearly half of NBC’s primetime schedule.
Silverman had figured turning NBC around would take
three to five years, but that was before he saw the work that needed to be
done. The RCA board had a quicker turnaround in mind, and they were not
happy when after three years under Silverman NBC was still No. 3. In early
1981 Silverman lost an ally when Edgar Griffiths, RCA’s
chairman, was pushed into retirement. In a few months, Silverman too would
be gone, having decided to abandon the struggle in the face of a hostile
board.
But by then Must See TV had taken modest roots.
It did so in
“Hill Street Blues,” a gritty cop series inspired by movie “Fort
Apache, the Bronx” and created by Steven Bochco. “Hill
Street Blues” was never a huge ratings hit but was a frequent Emmy
winner, bringing credibility to the network. Silverman had also
green-lighted “Cheers,” which ran for 11 seasons on Thursdays.
Thursday night was on its
way. “The Cosby Show” debuted in September 1984, instantly catapulting NBC
to No. 1 on Thursdays, a position it wouldn’t lose for the next 20
years. NBC not coincidentally was No. 1 in ad revenue
most of those years. Other shows that populated the Must See TV lineup in those
years: “Frasier,” “L.A. Law,” “Seinfeld” and “Friends.”
But no less important, Silverman left a legacy of talent.
They were executives he had nurtured, such as Tartikoff,
who with Silverman’s replacement, Tinker, took the Must See TV foundation and built it into a 20-year institution. The last to leave was
Ancier, in 2000.
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July 18, 2005
©
2005
Media Life
- Kevin Downey
is a staff writer for Media Life.
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