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

by Warren Littlefield, Former NBC President of Entertainment

  As luck would have it, my contract was expiring just as we were hitting our stride. Clinton and Gore had delivered on their promises, and the economic recovery looked as if it would last. Jack Welch and Bob Wright had every incentive to make me happy and keep the team together. They left the details to Don Ohlmeyer, who invited me to dinner to discuss my new deal.

  We met at the Morton’s in West Hollywood, an industry power spot. I approached the dinner as a negotiation of sorts. After all, Don would be my advocate with management in New York, and I wanted him to urge them to stretch to make it work for me. I’d composed a list of creative goals and financial benchmarks I felt I’d been responsible for achieving.

  The dinner didn’t go well. Don had a few vodkas. He listened to what I had to say, but it was clear he thought he was a far larger part of our success than I did. I believed I was the quarterback of a team that was currently kicking ass and he was the coach on the sidelines. Since my contract was expiring, I felt I needed to state my case, not just cheerlead for the team.

  The next morning Don’s assistant asked him how the dinner went, and Don said, “The young man certainly has a high opinion of himself.” With that, the negotiations were handed off to Bob Wright and NBC’s longtime head of human resources, Ed Scanlon. My attorney, Skip Brittenham, took my side.

  Unlike with the earlier “take it or leave it” offers, we were finally in a position to negotiate. We proposed three streams of compensation: an annual salary, performance-based bonuses, and GE stock. Ed Scanlon agreed, so the real question would be the amounts. It was NBC’s and GE’s belief that the best compensation they could pay would take the form of GE stock and options. It built company loyalty and wasn’t an instant drain of cash. We agreed to a base annual salary, bonuses for ratings achievements in the November, February, and May sweeps along with the full-season ratings standings in prime time and late night, and finally a package of stock and stock options.

  In all of the discussions, the length of the deal was always three years. But on a visit to Burbank, Bob Wright asked to see me and said, “I understand we have a done deal, but I need to change it to five years. That’s what Jack and the board want.” I thought about that for a moment. Freedom or a guarantee? I took the five years.

  I couldn’t have predicted the windfall I’d enjoy, thanks to NBC’s continued ratings triumphs, and the ballooning value of GE stock in the nineties made that component more valuable than all the others. Thank you, Jack Welch!

  Not bad for a kid who put himself through college driving a truck for J. Rosenblum & Sons, purveyors of fine foods in Paterson, New Jersey.

  With our success everybody wanted his or her show to air on Thursday night, a problem usually tended to by our scheduling genius, Preston Beckman.

  Preston Beckman: Kauffman, Bright, and Crane created Friends. Then Jesse and Veronica’s Closet. Two real gems. They heard, erroneously, that we were moving their shows out of protected time periods. They called me and asked if I would come up and see them. I go.

  Marta says, “We hear you’re moving our shows. That troubles us.”

  I said, “When I come to work, I only have two goals. I have to put food on my table and the tables of everybody at NBC, and I have to make sure we can all send our kids to college. That’s all I care about. I have a feeling you can send your kids to college, your grandchildren to college, your great-grandchildren to college, and the whole state of Idaho to college. I don’t care about you.” And I walked out.

  I have virtually no friends in the business.

  Dan Harrison: Preston said to me on my first day at NBC, “I want you to go in the bathroom, look in the mirror, and say one hundred times, ‘Get the fuck out of my office.’ If you smile when you say it, you need to start again.”

  Mike Mandelker: Preston always looked at the schedule in the aggregate way rather than as component parts. He was a genius at making his ideas mine.

  Dan Harrison: Preston was a real strategist. It’s very easy for the creative executives to believe so much in the show they’re working on that they don’t see the bigger picture of how the network is going to do. Preston was always the honest broker.

  Preston Beckman: I gave Warren and Don jigsaw puzzles one Christmas and told them, once you’ve put 999 pieces together, call me, and I’ll tell you how to move a few. That’s what scheduling was like.

  Warren: The big difference for us was that in the nineties, we had the opportunity to develop and produce shows people actually wanted to watch. In that era, NBC comedies that would have led in the ratings at one of the other networks were down the bench for us. We were that stacked with talent.

  Two such shows that spring to mind immediately are 3rd Rock from the Sun, with John Lithgow, and Just Shoot Me!, created by Steve Levitan, whose current show, Modern Family, is a runaway hit for ABC.

  Karey Burke: 3rd Rock was an ABC pilot that Jimmy Burrows had directed. It was from Bonnie and Terry Turner, who’d run SNL for years [and produced by Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner]. It was a broad idea about aliens in Ohio. It wasn’t seen as an NBC show—bigger, broader, set in Ohio, physical comedy. ABC failed to put 3rd Rock on the fall schedule, and the Turners called us, and we screened the pilot.

  Marcy Carsey: I had been very clear to ABC. I spoke very slowly, and I told the absolute truth. I said, “I know how you guys feel about this show. Maybe it won’t work, but we have more faith in it than you do. I’d like to take it somewhere else, so if you could release it to us, we’ll bring you something better mid-season.” How much clearer could I be?

  Warren: The fix was in. I told Marcy I’d buy 3rd Rock if she could get ABC to pass.

  Marcy Carsey: They decided they’d release it the day after NBC announced its schedule. They thought they were accomplishing everything. Then NBC picked it up at mid-season. ABC was furious. “NBC is picking this up!? What!?”

  I said, “I told you I wanted to sell it somewhere else,” and they said, “But we didn’t think you could.”

  Warren: I picked it up officially an hour after they passed.

  John Lithgow: I had hosted Saturday Night Live three times in the eighties. The second and third of those three times, Bonnie and Terry were on the writing staff, and we became really good friends. I saw that they did The Brady Bunch, Tommy Boy, and Wayne’s World. They had a booming movie career after seven years on SNL, but I talked to them not at all during those years.

  My agent called, and he said that Bonnie and Terry wanted to have lunch with me. I thought this was just a social engagement, and they didn’t know how to reach me, so I said, “Sure! I would love to see Bonnie and Terry. I love those two!” So we made a date, and I went to the Four Seasons thinking I was just having lunch with Bonnie and Terry to catch up—that’s how stupid I am. I was shown to the table, and there was Bonnie and Terry and Caryn Mandabach, Tom Werner and Marcy Carsey, and David Tochterman—all of them. And I thought, “This is not a fun lunch with my old friends. This is a pitch, goddamn it!”

  It was Terry’s job to pitch the show to me. He had given a tremendous amount of thought to his first sentence, and he said, “Well, it’s about a family of four aliens.” In my mind, there was this neon light that went off. “Noooooooo!” I thought, “How am I going to say no quickly, politely, and get this meal over with?”

  Warren: As unlikely as it might have seemed at that moment, John Lithgow was soon won over to the idea of playing the alien Dick Solomon on a network sitcom.

  John Lithgow: There were two things that completely sold me. One was the fact that on a dime, the four actors could sing Cole Porter like Manhattan Transfer. If required, they could sing. They also pitched the episode of the professor that everyone loathes who dies of a heart attack, and Dick finds himself in the position of having to deliver a eulogy. Bonnie recited, by heart, the eulogy that she had written for this occasion.

  John Mahoney played the character. Dick Solomon is at such a loss because he doesn’t know what he is going to say, because ev
erybody hated this man; Dick even hated him. But he gives this speech in which he says, “There comes a time, there comes a moment when all things pass from matter into light.” And it was so beautiful. Bonnie just spoke it off the top of her head, verbatim. That was the speech that I spoke two years later, when we finally shot that episode.

  Those two things—that and the fact that I looked around the table and thought, “These are the best people I’ve ever met in this business.” I loved Tom and Marcy; it was the first time I’d ever met them. I thought, “Jesus, what am I waiting for here?” I don’t know whether it was their calculation, but my most recent jobs had been Raising Cain, Cliffhanger, Ricochet. I was slowly turning into this kind of John Malkovich, this strange movie heavy. This was beginning to bother me.

  I almost got the role of Hannibal Lecter, and when I didn’t, I rattled off all these penny-dreadful villains. I was beginning to feel, “This is what I’m known for, and it’s not entirely what I want to be known for. People have now forgotten about Terms of Endearment and Garp.”

  So I got up from the table that day, and I said, “If I do end up doing this, I just have to tell you, you will have gotten me at exactly the right moment.” Because it was true; it was the perfect thing for me to do right then.

  Karey Burke: We stole 3rd Rock, and then it was uh-oh. We weren’t sure it was an NBC show.

  Marcy Carsey: We had to shoot that pilot twice. We screwed it up, and we added Jane Curtin.

  John Lithgow: I loved the process of putting together the cast and plotting the series. It was so much fun. Those historic moments when Kristen Johnston came in, and French Stewart came in, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt came in. In the case of Joey and French, that was when those characters came to life. In the case of Kristen, we already knew what the character was; we just couldn’t find the person for it. Then bam! There she was. It was uncanny and great.

  What people loved was the scene on the rooftop at the end of the episode. We only did that about a third of the time, but everyone thought we did it every time. It was so emblematic—where we simply talk wistfully. I remember Bonnie so wanted to have James Taylor’s music—whatever the song was, about outer space and stars; I’m a pop music illiterate. But James was an acquaintance of mine, and they deputized me to find him and get his permission. I did, and we got it as the closing music of the first episode. I hope he’s glad that he said yes.

  Preston Beckman: It was a strange show. I thought it was an A or an F, and I didn’t know which.

  John Lithgow: Taking the role of Dick Solomon was like being handed a magic wand. It was just extraordinary. So much fun. I honestly think I’ll live ten years longer than I would have, just from the pure rocket fuel of laughter. It’s such a fun thing to do. I hadn’t realized how, when it’s right, there’s nothing like a sitcom.

  Warren: Just Shoot Me! was a show I was always in like with but never truly loved, no secret from its creator, Steve Levitan.

  Steve Levitan: The show wasn’t beloved at all. We’d shot six episodes, and we heard from the network, “We think three or four of them are airable.”

  We were the little show that could. The show was a breech birth, and at every turn the show had to fight for everything it got. We were only the third or fourth most important comedy at NBC. The bench was so deep that we were the utility player.

  I think we were in thirteen or fourteen spots in seven years.

  Warren: We were looking at a competitive matchup where ABC had put a comedy starring Arsenio Hall on Wednesday night at 9:30. I didn’t know if Steve had created a hit show, but I knew it was better than Arsenio Hall. We had a chance to succeed.

  Steve Levitan: A week or so away from Just Shoot Me!’s premiere, and you couldn’t go anywhere without seeing Arsenio. Every billboard. On buses. Everywhere. Nothing for us.

  Then the show debuted, and we beat Arsenio. No advertising, nothing, and we beat him. Warren called. “Steve! Steve!” They smelled blood in the water and were going full bore.

  Warren: We suddenly knew we had a sophisticated, adult hit. Preston and I patted ourselves on the back. “How smart are we?” Jack Welch called and said all the young GE execs loved it. Just Shoot Me! premiered in 1997 and died an inglorious death at the hands of Jeff Zucker in 2003.

  Steve Levitan: Jeff Zucker killed us in the end. I think he cost us two years. We were scheduled on Wednesdays at 8:30 for the new season, and a week and a half out they put us in a different spot. It was listed in TV Guide, everywhere, and nobody knew when it was on. You couldn’t TiVo it. Nothing. We got the numbers, and they were really down. Of course. Zucker’s response was, “I guess Just Shoot Me! isn’t as strong as we thought it was.”

  I defended the show to the press. How could you expect the show to do better under these circumstances? Jeff lashed out at me. Never one to miss a good fight, I lashed out at him. The crowning indignity was the series finale. They burned it off in the summer.

  My wife once asked my daughter, “What are some bad words in our house?” She said, “Jeff Zucker.”

  Warren: Out of all the shows of the Must See era, I probably feel the warmest connection to Will & Grace because it featured a relationship I had often seen in life but never on TV. I had floated the idea for a similar show with Brandon Tartikoff in the eighties, when I was vice president of comedy—gay guy, straight girl, best friends. As I recall, he said, “Get the fuck out of here.” But in all fairness to Brandon, attitudes had changed by the time the writers Max Mutchnick and David Kohan came into my office to pitch a large ensemble comedy with a straight couple as the primary focus and a Will & Grace couple off on the periphery.

  David Nevins: My Best Friend’s Wedding was doing very well along about then, and we were more interested in the Will and Grace characters than the rest of them. Mad About You was six years old, so we already had that show.

  Jim Burrows: Warren is responsible for Will & Grace. The boys had written a script with three couples in it, and Warren picked out the Will and Grace couple. He wanted a show about them.

  David Nevins: Max and David resisted us. They didn’t believe a network would put a show on with a gay lead. Eventually, they said, “Okay, but we don’t believe you. We’ll write a great script, but you’ll never put it on the air.”

  Max Mutchnick: I felt as a viewer as much as a writer I understood what Thursday night on NBC was all about.

  David Kohan: We were working on The Single Guy, and we felt like we got the sensibility of that show, and we’d write our drafts based on that. Glenn Padnick, the president of Castle Rock at the time, took notice of us because of those drafts.

  A comic named Anthony Clark had made a splash at one of the festivals—at Montreal or Aspen. Anthony and Max were friends from college, and Anthony came to us and said he’d be signing a deal sometime soon, and he asked if we would write him a script. Max and I wrote a script and put it in a drawer, and then Glenn Padnick called us in. He said he’d signed Anthony Clark, and he said he understood we’d written a script for him.

  He read it, and he said, “I don’t like it. I don’t like the idea. But I like the way you’ve written him.”

  Max Mutchnick: Glenn said he was having success with writers who had relationships with the leads of shows, meaning Seinfeld.

  David Kohan: We were still officially pisseurs at this point. We’d not crossed the pisseur Rubicon yet. We ended up doing a completely different idea about a guy who brought his sister to college and fell in love with a grad student there. Glenn liked it and brought it to NBC as Boston Common. We were eager to do it, but NBC said we were too green to run the show.

  Max Mutchnick: That was our first pitch at NBC, and we were told we were too young to be doing this. And my whole issue in the elevator going down was “David, you’ve got to wear a good white shirt!” Look at him. It’s still a problem.

  David Kohan: The people who ran the show were just figureheads. They were doing it as a favor to NBC and a favor to us. NBC gave us the keys to the c
ar, and they said, “If you dent it, we’ll take it away.” They took a chance on us, and you’d never see that today. Never.

  Max Mutchnick: I remember Warren showing up on the set, and I was too young to understand what he was trying to say. He wanted more from our show, but I was too young to know what he meant.

  Anthony’s character wasn’t supposed to be on Thursday night. He wasn’t part of that rainbow.

  David Kohan: On Thursday at NBC, if you had something good, it would take off. If you had something bad, it would reveal itself.

  NBC had a legacy of taking chances on writers and producers who had a vision for what they wanted to do. We had a sense that we were being nurtured and given the latitude to do something we felt was interesting.

  Jim Burrows: “This is my Wings” has become an expression in the business for start-out shows. Boston Common was Max and David’s Wings.

  Warren: So in the spring of 1997, I canceled Boston Common, but I told Max and David and their fearless agent Scott Schwartz, who discovered them, “Don’t leave. Come join the club.” I wanted them to create and produce not just shows that we would put on NBC but product that we would also own. As thrilled as we were with the success of Friends and ER, we knew we had helped to nourish hits for Warner Bros. We didn’t own them. We had to take more shots with people whose shows we owned.