Chapter One
“Beautiful Girls”
On a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Manhattan in mid-May 2005, few
people in the great city had reason to be as buoyant, as
self-satisfied, as downright gleeful as the reserved, handsome,
impeccably dressed fifty-four-year-old man sitting in a prominent
aisle seat in the orchestra section of Avery Fisher Hall in Lincoln
Center.
For Robert A. Iger, this was a day of real triumph, not merely
because ABC, the network he had been associated with for virtually
his entire career, all the way back to 1977, had emerged from a
seemingly endless dark night of failure and financial loss to
sudden, spectacular success, but also because he had survived one of
the most precarious apprenticeships in media history. He had finally
been designated as the successor to Michael Eisner, chairman of the
Walt Disney Company.
That appointment had come just two months earlier, and it was due in
no small measure to the startling turnaround at ABC during the
just-completed 2004-2005 television season. Iger, once the top
programmer at ABC himself, had presided, in his capacity as the
number-two Disney executive, over nearly ten years of flops. The
network seemed to be allergic to hit television shows. A batch of
the biggest hits in recent years-Survivor, CSI, American Idol, The
Apprentice-had all turned up first at ABC, only to have the network
recoil in rejection.
Much of the blame for those mind-blowing misreads had been laid at
the feet of Iger and Eisner, in constant stories of how their
crippling control over the network’s decision making had undermined
the efforts of the network’s creative executives to find the shows
ABC needed so badly. Iger dismissed the stories as inaccurate, but
certainly they had some effect on his increasingly challenged
aspirations to succeed Eisner. If he could not fix ABC in years of
trying, why would anyone think he could master the more complex
issues facing the Disney Company?
Nor had the 2004 season begun with any great expectations. Just one
year earlier, in April, there had been yet another multi-executive
pile-up at ABC, as Iger axed both of the managers running the
entertainment division and installed a new boss less than a month
before the upfront. Nobody ever did something like that in April,
because the upfront, an annual sales presentation of the new
selections of network primetime shows, was so important to every
network’s bottom line.
At the upfront, so called because clients purchased commercial time
in network shows before the season commenced, the big advertising
clients in New York piled into some elegant midtown hall, watched as
the network trotted out clips of the new series it had picked up,
and then attended a loud, crowded, lavish after-party where many of
the young ad buyers lined up at booths to get their photos taken
with-and autographed by-the new “stars.” For ABC in recent years,
that had meant more Ernie Hudson than Tim Allen. Even when ABC did
seem to build a successful show with a real star, like the comedy 8
Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter, something awful seemed
to happen, like the shocking sudden death of that show’s star, John
Ritter. ABC had the feel-and maybe the smell-of the chronically
snakebitten.
Iger’s appointment of Stephen McPherson that April, accompanied by
the announcement that he would create a new, improved ABC schedule
from the pieces left behind by people who had just been ashcanned,
seemed like an engraved invitation to every rattler, cobra, and asp
in Hollywood to come and dine again on the carcass of ABC.
This time the snakes went hungry. Now, a year later, no one in
Lincoln Center, with the possible exception of McPherson himself,
had benefited more from what ABC had wrought in the preceding twelve
months than Bob Iger.
As the upfront presentation began, the trim, ruddy-faced McPherson
walked out on stage, exuding a stony confidence. Thanks to the
turnaround, McPherson had amassed, as a top Hollywood agent, Rick
Rosen of Endeavor, put it, “more political capital than anyone else
in this business.”
McPherson had several people to thank for that success- including
Iger, of course, for putting him in the job-but surely no one more
than the man waiting behind a decorated screen at the center of the
stage. Behind that screen, the man who had turned television on its head
waited, psyching himself up for the performance of his lifetime.
Marc Cherry could not help thinking of the significance of the
moment, about how far he had come-all the way from forgotten,
ignored, and broke to the toast of network television. Decked out in
white tie and tails, Cherry was to be the centerpiece of this day of
celebration for ABC.
ABC was so downtrodden a year earlier that its late-night star,
Jimmy Kimmel, had brought down the house with a joke about how each
of the networks could be identified as a familiar type from high
school. ABC was “the fat kid who eats paste”-that same ABC now had
what the advertisers craved: the hottest of the hot shows.
Out on stage, McPherson was working quickly through his early
material to get to his major announcement: “Ladies and gentlemen,
please welcome my friend Marc Cherry!”
The screen parted in the middle and Cherry walked out with a flair
that both reveled in and defied his own self-described “Stubby Kaye”
look: round-faced, balding, roly-poly. The white tie and tails got a
few laughs. Well, why shouldn’t this be a grand moment for this guy,
the writer who could not get an interview, never mind a job, and who
now had created Desperate Housewives, the biggest new scripted
television show in years?
Cherry played it up. “Well, I don’t know about you guys, but I had
the nicest year,” he said, soaking in the laughter. He called it an
amazing time for his cast, his studio, and “especially my network.”
Then he turned to an unseen orchestra leader. “Hit it!” he
commanded, turning his shoulder to the back of the stage as music
came up and a montage of shots from the first season of Desperate
Housewives played on video screens above him.
A couple of other guys in tuxes appeared, handing Cherry a top hat
and cane. With complete aplomb, he began to belt out “Beautiful
Girls,” the Sondheim song from Follies, in a tenor voice so pure and
powerful that many in the audience looked immediately for signs of
lip-synching-but saw only a trained musical-theater singer fully in
his element.
Cherry sang:
“Hats off, here they come, those beautiful girls … That’s what
you’ve been waiting for.”
Cherry’s face loomed huge on the video screens as the camera caught
him in close-up.
“See them in their glory-
Diamonds and pearls, dazzling jewels by the score….”
Iger, beaming in his tightly controlled way, had to remember how
Cherry had called to congratulate him the day the Disney
appointment was announced. Bob, surely recognizing what Desperate
Housewives had meant to the moribund network that had been
undermining his career ambitions, told Cherry, “Well, thank you for
your part in it.”
As Cherry sang, a full chorus line of guys with top hats and canes
filed out and joined him.
“This is what beauty can be.
Beauty celestial, the best you’ll agree …
All for you, these beautiful girls!”
And with another flourish Cherry swept his arm back and said,
“Ladies and gentlemen, straight from Wisteria Lane, the Desperate
Housewives!”
Now the chorus escorted out a lineup of truly beautiful girls- women
really, a group of six actresses, mostly in their forties, who had
captured the country’s imagination from their first week on the air
eight months earlier. Out they walked in floor-length gowns and faux
jewels, a couple waving snow-white boas: Marcia Cross, the show’s
uptight Bree, in a coppery-gold gown with a cleavage-baring cutout;
Eva Longoria, the Hispanic sexpot, Gabrielle, in a bejeweled
strapless silver number, her long diamond string earrings stretching
so far one literally rested in her cleavage.
The fourth in the parade was without boa or jewels, but the
flashing smile and elegantly curled brown tresses signaled the
central stardom of Teri Hatcher, the emotionally vulnerable Susan
of the series, in a striking beaded white V-neck gown. The reception
from the audience reinforced the point: Hatcher, the lead in an
earlier, now almost forgotten ABC series, Lois & Clark, was a
megawatt star again after descending so far into has-been land that
she found herself, only a few months before her Housewives audition,
far more desperate in her real life than anything Marc Cherry’s
scripts had dished up for her.
“This is what drives men insane,
Here from our cheery, Wisteria Lane …”
One day earlier, Monday, at a venue famed for the art of
high-kicking, Radio City Music Hall, Jeff Zucker, NBC’s increasingly
embattled entertainment leader, had been forced to put on a dance of
his own. NBC, the network that had dominated ratings and profits
over much of the previous two decades, had accomplished a fall of
Icarus-like proportions, crashing all the way from first place to
fourth (and dead last) in the span of one September-to-May
television season. And the only credible message Zucker could
deliver that day was along the lines of: Yeah, we blew it.
That afternoon, NBC hoped to package its programs skillfully enough
to convince advertisers that the network’s aging series and new
unknowns were still worth near the same level of investment as the
year before. The preceding May, NBC had managed to maintain command
of the market with close to $3 billion in upfront sales.
NBC had achieved that feat even though its last truly “must-see”
comedy, Friends, was gone, replaced by a spin-off, Joey, starring one
holdover Friends cast member, Matt LeBlanc. A year later, Joey, completing a season
in which it had shed millions of viewers in a
yearlong megamolt, was somehow still being offered up as the
net-work’s replacement for Friends leading off Thursday night.
There were beautiful girls at the NBC upfront show as well, but they
weren’t singing and dancing. From a set made up to look like the
anchor desk from the “Weekend Update” segment on Saturday Night
Live, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler flayed their network for its woeful
performance.
“Buy NBC,” Fey urged the advertisers. “Because out of over a hundred
TV channels, we’re number four-and that’s pretty good.” Poehler came
back with “We’d like to promise you that this year things will be
better-but we can’t.”
And Fey praised the clarity of NBC’s new high-definition
technology, saying, “The picture is so clear that last week during
Joey you could actually see Matt LeBlanc’s panic.”
NBC was unaccustomed to this kind of humiliation, but in truth it
had been a long time coming-six years at least, marked by a
succession of executive shakeups and seemingly intractable friction
between the network’s West Coast entertainment planners and its East
Coast corporate leadership. The resulting primetime schedules,
which aimed to sustain the tradition of Seinfeld and Friends, had flamed
out, with nothing but ashes left of entries like Stark Raving
Mad, Cursed, Inside Schwartz, Coupling, and, most recently, an
expensive animated comedy, Father of the Pride.
Zucker was back on the stage in Radio City a year after promising
greatness for Joey and Father of the Pride. He was still a package
of energy, ambition, and cockiness in a compact frame. He was the
utterly New York professional, in a perfectly tailored suit and
close-shaved-but not skinned-bald pate. Zucker had lost much in the
ratings in the past year but none of his stage presence.
“We totally get it,” Zucker told the advertisers. “We did not have
the season we told you we’d have.”
Still, it was left to Kevin Reilly, Zucker’s handpicked choice to
take over the entertainment operation in Burbank, California, to
absorb the most lashes from the ritual self-flagellation, starring
in a video in which he was depicted as slowly going mad over the
performance of the previous fall’s entries, like Hawaii, LAX, and,
yes, Father of the Pride.
Though all those shows had been put in the pipeline with Reilly
running the development staff, Zucker had been in overall charge of
NBC Entertainment, a fact not lost on his growing legion of critics.
Zucker, just now hitting forty, had been the most conspicuous boy
wonder in recent network annals. He had risen like an ICBM in the
corporate ranks at NBC, largely on the strength of his brilliant
record producing the network’s most important (because it makes the
most money) program, Today.
Now fingers were being pointed at Zucker-some from competitors, but
others from at least nominally nonpartisan Hollywood studio and
agency executives-for milking old NBC hits like ER and Law & Order
of every drop of ratings juice left in them, and for being too
clever by more than half in forestalling the day of reckoning with
program stunts and gimmicks.
Ted Harbert, who worked under Zucker as the head of NBC’s studio,
credited Jeff for his “showman’s sense” but said, “Where he wasn’t
facile was in script development. He could make up for a lot with
sheer aggressiveness and scheduling, promoting and marketing-and
that stuff counts. You can get ratings points out of that. But you
have to have the source material. And in the end you’ve got to be
able to guide your development people.”
Script development became the almost universal knock on Zucker.
“Zuck is very smart and a very good news producer,” one prominent
NBC prime-time series producer said. “But clearly, script
development is not his forte.”
Zucker had made few real friends during his sojourn in Los Angeles,
mostly because he never embraced the Hollywood life or the Hollywood
game. He had made his share of enemies, though, mainly with his
aggressive personality and his special talent for soaking up all the
attention in every room, especially those with reporters in them.
Preston Beckman, the primetime scheduler for the Fox network, who
had held the same job at NBC during the glory years of the nineties,
before leaving with some bitterness just before Zucker arrived, was
blunt in his assessment of Zucker’s performance at NBC
Entertainment.
“He was taking credit for what other people had done,” Beckman said.
“You listen to him and it’s like: What the fuck have you done? There
was arrogance; there was haughtiness. He was dismantling what we had
built at NBC and making it seem like he invented it all.”
Some of the animus, especially from the Fox network, was
attributable to competitive jealousy over NBC’s long run at the
top. Zucker, with his abundant morning-show skills in packaging
multiple elements to best advantage, had moved NBC’s existing
primetime pieces around like a manic choreographer. He was always
pushing every angle to build audiences, like the time he
commissioned an NBC special to capitalize on the sudden fascination
with Michael Jackson, telling the press it would be an hour all
about “Michael Jackson’s face.” Zucker said, “Michael Jackson is the
ultimate traffic accident. People can’t take their eyes off him.”
The only trouble was that the comment ticked off members of the
Jackson entourage and made compiling the special much harder.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Desperate Networks
by Bill Carter
Copyright © 2006 by Bill Carter.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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