Top of the Rock: Inside the Rise and Fall of Must See TV

by Warren Littlefield, Former NBC President of Entertainment

  Warren: It really wasn’t much of a contest in the end. Chicago Hope spent half a season in the 10:00 slot on Thursday night, opposite ER, before CBS shifted the show to Monday. ER dominated the competition at 10:00 and regularly delivered over a 40 share.

  Preston Beckman: CBS always used New Year’s Day to launch shows. I said, “Why don’t we repeat the ER pilot on that day.” Mandy Patinkin came up to see Ohlmeyer, he was so pissed about it.

  Dan Harrison: It would take a hundred ad spots on the USA Network to reach the number of discrete eyeballs you could get with one spot on ER.

  Warren: We were paying about $3 million per episode for that 40 share. We were charging a fortune for the advertising spots and making hundreds of millions of dollars on the show. ER never lost money. We’d already made a billion dollars before the renegotiation began. For ten years in a row it was television’s highest-rated drama in the coveted adults eighteen to forty-nine. I didn’t want to be a dick, but just once I did say to Bob Wright, “I bet you don’t miss Diane Sawyer anymore.”

  John Agoglia: I was expecting a bloodbath with the renegotiation for ER. I think we were paying $3.5 to $4 million per episode. I put in $8 million for the negotiation. People told me I was crazy. I think it ended up at $12 million per episode. Bob Wright went nuts.

  Harold Brook: For the ER negotiations, we went in at a high number. They were stunned, but we’d decided not to nickel-and-dime them. We came in at $8.5 million and closed at $10 million. It took about four days to strike the deal. Warner Bros. had a deficit on this show—$50 mil—and they wanted it back in one check.

  Warren: We didn’t own ER. We just rented it. After the first four years, we rented it for a lot more.

  Harold Brook: In two weeks after we closed the deal, Warner’s announced that they’d sold the repeats to Turner, and they were going to run it on Thursday nights. Not at 10:00, but on Thursday night. That was the angriest I’d ever seen Don Ohlmeyer. We hired outside counsel and sent an ugly litigation letter. Don said, “We’re not buying anything from Warner Bros. anymore.” That lasted two weeks.

  John Landgraf: After the renegotiation Don Ohlmeyer said to me, “I’m paying $13 million an episode for ER. They’re going to take all of my notes, and you’ve got to make it happen.” And I’m thinking, “Right. I’m going to tell John Wells he’s got to take Don’s notes. He’s got a show with a 40 share.”

  Noah Wyle: Every time a contract renegotiation would come up, I’d look around and say, “I don’t think there’s any better writing or directing around,” so I’d sign back up.

  Anthony Edwards: We had to pay strict attention to the details. We couldn’t afford to get sloppy about the technical stuff. We had all these doctors and nurses on the set, and everywhere we went, people said they liked the show because it was real. The tone had to be real too.

  If we weren’t going to stop, the camera couldn’t stop. I actually directed an episode with a twenty-two-minute scene. One shot.

  Noah Wyle: I suddenly flashed on the “Love’s Labor Lost” episode. It was one of the most amazing hours of television I’d ever seen. I think it was the only Emmy we ever received for writing. I was doing a play in Hollywood at the same time, and I got mononucleosis. We were shooting the show that night, and I had a fever of 104 degrees, and I was hallucinating. I didn’t think I was going to make it.

  I turned to Dr. Joe Sachs, our medical tech, and I said, “Joe, I don’t think I’m going to make it.” Joe said, “I don’t have anything for you.” He looked around the set and said, “I guess I could take one of these IVs and give it to you.” There were IVs all over the set. He squeezes a bag of saline into me. When we were shooting, I’d put it in my pocket. I remember thinking that wasn’t odd. It was something we’d all consider doing.

  I was twenty-two or twenty-three and working eighteen hours a day. Going home seemed like it wasn’t on the table.

  Eriq La Salle: There was a time when Noah’s character was dealing with an addiction—this might have been season six or so—and so I say, “I’m going to put you into rehab,” and there’s a point where he hits me. The way we approached the work—this was symbolic of how we approached all the work—was “How do I help you sell your punch?” You’re getting ready to punch me, and this isn’t about me being cool. That was our attitude: How do we make each other look good?

  Noah Wyle: I remember John Wells calling me and telling me I would be stabbed by a psychotic patient. It would be a near-fatal injury, and I’d be left with debilitating pain and have to self-medicate in order to regulate. He said he wanted to show that the face of addiction was every face, any face. “If it can be you,” he told me, “it can be anybody.”

  I don’t think I’d ever seen a slight, peripheral character move closer to the core as a series went on.

  Anthony Edwards: George and I came up with the idea of doing the live episode. It came out of doing oners, long shots. It was like acting in a play. If you screwed up at the end of a oner, you really caught it. George is a big TV history buff, and we talked about doing the show as a play, as a live show.

  I don’t know if the execution was as good as the idea. I don’t know that the show looked that different from what it normally did.

  We had five days to rehearse. We all had theater backgrounds. I have a picture I love, taken about four minutes before we went live. We were on the couch in the doctors’ lounge, and we were laughing. Thinking, “All we’d have to do is walk out that door, and what would they do?” Such power.

  Warren: Don thought we were nuts. “You better not destroy this series.” Once again I put my faith in John Wells but with Don’s words ringing in my ears I was also right there in the director’s booth for both live shows.

  Eriq La Salle: It was such an ensemble thing. It was such a team effort. Just like the theater. You’re running around backstage, and then you come off nice and easy and say your last line, and then you bolt over here. “Hey, man, yeah, been there, done that, and loved it and still love it.” But again, it was that unit, that team, relying on each other. I knew where Noah was; I knew where George was. I knew we could do the no-look passes. They knew if they needed me over there, I’d be there, and they could do the alley-oop.

  Anthony Edwards: Very little went wrong. I think we dropped a tray or something, but that happened all the time anyway.

  Noah Wyle: The only advantage network television still has is the ability to command a very large audience on a given night at a given time. That was never lost on us. For forty-eight minutes a week we had the opportunity to tell half the country anything we wanted. We could give them soap opera, or we could give them an episode like “Love’s Labor Lost.” It caused pregnant women all over America to call their ob-gyns the next morning to ask, “What is preeclampsia and do I have it?” We enriched, we informed, and we entertained at the same time. You just don’t see that anymore.

  Eriq La Salle: We accomplished the most amazing things, we did it as a team, we did it as a group. We are a part of a proud history, and to be included in that group is obviously one of the greatest achievements of my professional life and personal life. We’re a part of history.

  Anthony Edwards: It was a phenomenal time. And the show stays. Nothing goes away now, good and bad. Everything just lives on. People loved the experience they had on Thursday night. My wife wouldn’t let me near her between ten and eleven.

  Noah Wyle: I walked on the show at twenty-two, and after the final episode I walked off at thirty-seven. It was very much like stepping off a fast-moving freight train and saying, “Where am I now?” I got on a train fifteen years ago, and now I’m stepping off a different person in a different land.

  Anthony Edwards: The number of angry, older women in my neighborhood who have told me, “How dare you leave the show!”

  “But I wanted to be with my kids.”

  “We don’t care about your kids. We want our Thursday night at ten o’clock, and we want you on it.”

  Noah W
yle: Two weeks ago I had an audition at Warner Bros. for a Clint Eastwood movie. I’m looking at my directions, and it says, “Gate 3.” It was a parking structure. I go up and park at the top, come down, and go through the metal detector, and the guard won’t let me in without my photo ID. I’ve left my wallet in my car. I tell her, “I used to work here on a show called ER.” She says, “I’ll call my supervisor.” I finally get in. I go by stage 11, and the doors are open. It’s empty. You’d never know we were there.

  Warren: I would like to be able to say that the phrase “Must See TV” was the product of hard work and assiduous calculation. Not remotely the case.

  The “Night of Bests” began in the eighties on Thursday with Cosby at 8:00, Cheers at 9:00, and Hill Street Blues at 10:00. We felt we had the potential to get that Thursday magic back.

  John Miller: We had a few pieces. This was the end of the L.A. Law time. ER had not yet come on. Seinfeld was birthed by Cheers but was struggling. We had Mad About You sitting over between Thursday and Saturday. Wings was still on the network, had been sort of the offshoot of Cheers. We had little pockets of strength.

  Don Ohlmeyer said he wanted to label our night of appointment television on Thursday. “You guys figure out what you want to call it.” That first lineup was Mad About You, Wings, Seinfeld, and Madman of the People, L.A. Law at 10:00. That was the fall of 1993.

  We wanted to come up with a name for this night because we wanted to package it. There was a guy who worked for us then named Dan Holm. He suggested, “How about Must See TV. It rhymes.”

  We said, “Okay. Let’s go with Must See TV.”

  You’d think it was focus grouped or researched. Nope. Must See TV. That was it.

  John Agoglia: Must See TV was an era of incredible teamwork and understanding. Of course, we were insufferable at the affiliate meetings because we’re paying the affiliates to carry product that made them money.

  Bob Wright would take someone to dinner and puff them up and say how much money we were making from their show, which was like a stake in my heart. I could feel it.

  Warren: My philosophy as president of entertainment at NBC was simple. I knew I didn’t have all the answers, so I kept my office door open, and my colleagues were always welcome with their suggestions and their ideas. In the end, it probably helped that Don Ohlmeyer drove us together with his explosive personality, but as a longtime exec at the network I’d grown to appreciate the value of opinions other than my own.

  Karey Burke: Warren never created an air of “no, this won’t work” or “I know better.” There was openness to everything. An openness to every kind of idea. Conventional wisdom was out the door. It was energizing and very attractive to creators. 3rd Rock from the Sun—that was crazy, and ER was daring.

  Harold Brook: In business affairs, we’re negotiators. Everything from options and scripts, acquisition of literary material, pilots of movies. Focusing on the network, our biggest liaison was with the studios. They had to coordinate with us. Warren and his group would make decisions of what they wanted to do. Then we’d get the deal memo and negotiate the deal. Paper it.

  It wasn’t straightforward negotiation for me. That was the easy part. You met in the middle, and the parameters were pretty well set. In the nineties, the personalities made it different for me. I was in the yard with a lot of kids, and everybody wanted something. I had to figure out how to do that. We had a great group of people, except for a couple of odd ones.

  We had contact with every department in the entertainment division. Financial, creative, promotion—we did deals for series, movies, late night—we really covered the group. We were very into making deals, not figuring out roadblocks. And it’s a thankless job.

  I could go to Warren and say, “This is going to be ugly. Trust us. We’ll make the deal.” When we had that, it was always smooth.

  Karey Burke: The culture of the place attracted people. People knew we’d back their shot. It may not work, but we’d back it. That wasn’t alchemy. It was leadership.

  Steve McPherson: The Must See TV era was a special time. I think collectively we all felt NBC was a collegial, passionate place. People worked together and partied together. We felt like we were on the cutting edge of TV. It was a work hard/play hard environment, and it was really fun.

  Warren: And really profitable. Looking at ad sales figures, I could see in black and white the vast differential between what was charged for a spot on Thursday versus what we would get on Saturday. At the height of Must See madness, a thirty-second spot on Seinfeld sold for $800,000 while ER commanded $550,000 for thirty seconds.

  My question was simple: Why not create more advertising time on Thursday? Why did a Thursday comedy have to be the same running time as a Saturday one? Why not adjust and follow the dollars?

  By the time Seinfeld went off the air in 1998, the episodes were at least a minute shorter than they’d been early in the run of the series (remember, $800,000 for each thirty-second spot). I could rarely have a conversation with Jerry Seinfeld or Larry David in those final few years without them telling me, “Stop making the show shorter!”

  Mike Mandelker: We had properties on Thursday night. It became like folklore that you couldn’t release a movie successfully unless you had an ad on Cheers or, later, Seinfeld. It probably wasn’t true, but I didn’t want a movie to open successfully unless it had been advertised on our Thursday night.

  We started off selling four minutes per thirty-minute show. By the time we were done, we had five minutes. Everybody was lined up. We had twenty-two to twenty-four original episodes of these shows, and that’s why NBC was the first network to hit $2 billion in the upfronts.

  Bob Wright: Thursday night during Must See TV basically carried the entire network. That night was driving as much income as each of the other networks was making together. It allowed the network to develop sports and do other things we would have been constrained on at the time. We got back into football thanks to Thursday night.

  We did close to $3 billion one year during upfronts, and the next guy was $1.8 billion. When you get on a roll like that, the advertisers are right with you. They don’t want to be left out.

  Warren: With the tremendous profits flowing from Must See TV into the network and into NBC’s owned and operated stations, Bob Wright was able to solidify his vision for the future of NBC. Bob aggressively pursued the acquisition of cable channels with their dual-revenue streams (ad sales and subscription fees), a move that would keep NBC in profits even as the struggling entertainment division slid all the way from the top spot to fourth place after the Must See TV years.

  Mike Mandelker: If we’d had three nights of Thursday programming, I’m not sure we’d have gotten three times the revenue. Maybe twice the revenue. We got our pricing because of supply and demand. Change the supply, you change the demand.

  Warren: I like to think the freewheeling atmosphere contributed to our success in the nineties. I do know that our openness to shows like Seinfeld and Mad About You did serve to make NBC a beacon for everyone who wanted to work in TV comedy. When Thursday night took off, the creative community watched our shows along with everybody else. Even when agents would tell their clients, “They have a full stable at NBC. They don’t need you over there,” they’d hear back, “Yeah, but they get us.”

  The quality of our Must See shows became our greatest sales tool to the creative community. Better still, we’d begun to promote our shows in a way no other network had attempted at the time. We produced the network rather than just the shows.

  John Miller: Producing the network was a year in the making, and then we had a year on the air by ourselves doing this. We took the credits—and we had a unit make what we called promotainment. Not pure promos, but talking about our shows, the stars, where they’d come from. It was to keep people engaged.

  Warren: We invited over one hundred artists to create their versions of the NBC peacock. A lot of credit for reimagining what NBC looked like on air should go to Jef
f Rowe, a guy who never went to college, had a background in radio, and whom I hired because he just impressed me. He bounced around a number of different departments, and then fortunately John Miller said, “I’ll take him.” That’s where Jeff started to flourish. Under John Miller and Vince Manze’s guidance, Jeff helped hatch a new vision of what we’d look like on air.

  John Miller: We said, “You have to end with the correct peacock. How you get there, we don’t care.” I was the peacock police. My idea was let the journey be the magic and end with the logo.

  Then I had to go to the guilds and tell them their credits wouldn’t be full frame but off to the side. Not crawling over action, off to the side so the show could continue. Research indicated that we would cut down on our audience loss—from 25 percent to 5 percent.

  We could usually keep audience through the first minute because of how we flowed the shows. Some shows that shouldn’t have made it probably did because of the way we produced the network. If a network has a persona throughout the day, it has a brand equity, and advertisers know what they’re getting.

  Warren: Producing the network cost us $1 million because we had to reshoot all of the credits, but everybody at NBC understood that the changes would make us the network rather than a network. Nobody was more tuned in to what we were up to than the creative community, which gave us the best shot at the best shows.

  With Thursday night performing like a weekly rocket ship, I had good reason to exhale and enjoy what we had accomplished. Despite the many predictions that I couldn’t fill Brandon’s shoes, under my guidance NBC had surged to dominance in the coveted adults eighteen-to-forty-nine category in the 1995–96 season. On Thursday night we were beating the combined competition (ABC, CBS, and Fox) by 36 percent and had improved the night 58 percent from our 1992–93 collapse (Nielsen Media Research). Better still, our programs held particular appeal for upscale urban households with college educations. Our advertisers were proud to watch our shows and patronize them. These weren’t just popular programs. They were Emmy Award–winning, and our advertising spots were going at premium prices.