by Warren Littlefield, Former NBC President of Entertainment
Jason Alexander: The thing that has shocked me since we’ve gone off the air are the places where I have to assume I’m a face in the crowd, and I’m not. I thought there was no way in the marketplace in Budapest in the middle of the World Cup that anybody is going to know I’m alive. Nope.
Walking into Ramallah as an American Jew and having Palestinians running out of their homes and their shops yelling, “George, George!” There’s no explanation for it.
Jerry Seinfeld: Somebody just asked me about the show yesterday, asked me how many viewers we had. I told them seventy-five million, and they couldn’t believe it. Outside of the Super Bowl, you can’t come near that today.
There’s never a control group for any of these experiments. We did what we did, and it’s pretty cool for me to think that I got one of the last big rides on the television rocket where you could literally control the dialogue of the country.
Sean Hayes: There was this guy, this Warren Littlefield, who took us through this huge success at NBC, and then suddenly he was gone, and I had to ask, “Why did Dad just leave? Where did he go?”
Warren: A few months before my firing, I had an ugly run-in with Don Ohlmeyer. Don held a daily strategy meeting in his office, a kind of huddle focused mostly on advertising and promotion. It always started at 2:30. One day my colleague Karey Burke and I were on the panel at the Hollywood Radio and Television Society luncheon in Beverly Hills, and I called Don’s assistant, Sandi, to remind her where we were and tell her we probably couldn’t make it back in time for the start of the meeting. She said, “Fine. I’ll tell Don.” She called back a few minutes later with this message: “Don says if you’re not here, the door will be locked and you can’t come in.”
I asked her, “What the hell does that mean?” She couldn’t say. I told her to tell Don we’d be there when we got there, and if the meeting was still going on, we’d join it.
A few minutes passed. Another call from Sandi. “Don says if you don’t make this meeting, don’t bother coming back.” This was how my wars with Don usually started. Every conversation would escalate until we got to the “don’t bother coming back” part.
Of course, Karey and I came back, well after 2:30. The meeting was still going, and we joined it. Once it had broken up, I asked Karey to stay behind, and I cornered Don and said, “You big fucking bully. What the fuck is your problem? How dare you! We didn’t go for a round of golf. We didn’t go to the video arcade. We were representing this company. Karey Burke was asked to sit up onstage along with me as a senior development executive and a spokesperson for NBC. We should celebrate that. What the fuck is your problem?”
Don didn’t say anything. “Apologize,” I told him. Don mumbled something. “Just say you’re sorry.”
“I didn’t mean to …,” Don said. That was about as much of an apology as anyone could ever expect from Don.
“Okay, fine,” I told him. “Good-bye,” and Karey and I were out the door. Yes, it was childish and petty and just the sort of thing that was growing all too frequent between us.
Jack Welch: Somebody had to leave, and we weren’t going to fire Ohlmeyer. The thinking was that Warren was a dry hole. Ohlmeyer’s personality and charisma made us a bigger force in Hollywood, in our view, so we weren’t going to get rid of him and be left with Warren. Then we still wouldn’t be getting hits and wouldn’t have any presence.
Warren: I have to think Don convinced Jack and Bob it was time for me to go. The success Don and I had enjoyed at NBC had made our relationship more contentious rather than less so. I’d come to feel I no longer had to listen to everything Don had to say, and Don seemed to believe he was more responsible for NBC’s turnaround than I was. It was a clash of egos and measuring dicks.
Our last big battle was over the show that would become The West Wing. Following ER’s phenomenal success, CAA approached me with a proposition to make a multi-series commitment to John Wells. John had distinguished himself on ER as a remarkable show runner and all-purpose talent, and it seemed perfectly sensible for us to secure his services on any and all future projects. John was a hot commodity, and I knew if we didn’t lock him in, our competition would steal him away.
One of the first projects John Wells brought to us was in partnership with Aaron Sorkin and was based on Aaron’s experiences as a White House intern in the press corps. Aaron knew the ins and outs of the West Wing of the White House intimately, and his pitch was compelling. I was well aware that network television’s track record for political drama was deplorable, but Sorkin’s pitch hooked me, and John Wells was supervising, so I said, “Yes!”
The script they delivered was every bit as electrifying as the pitch. Though I struggled with the decision, given the history of such shows, I eventually told Don I thought we should make the pilot. I believed John Wells more than deserved the benefit of the doubt and that the Sorkin script was damn good. This was very much in keeping with my philosophy of trusting the talent. John Wells, in particular, had more than earned that trust.
John Wells: Don thought West Wing was elitist or something. This is the same Don who’d once told me he thought ER was great but it wouldn’t last. I don’t know if he actually believed it or just said it. When I kind of took the paramedics off ER and wrote Third Watch, I remember Don telling me, “This is the kind of show you want, kid.”
Warren: Harold had the deal closed, everything was ready but Don was adamantly against moving forward, and this time he dug in his heels. Despite all my efforts, there was no budging him. Don and I had always fought, but somehow business had gotten done, shows had been made. This was different. This was a stalemate.
I think our mutual success had exhausted us a little, and Don—as I would soon learn—had come to believe our relationship was too contentious to continue to be productive. To Don’s way of thinking, it was time for me to go. So the Ohlmeyer/Littlefield thing ended, fittingly enough, with a battle and a snarl.
Bob Wright: It seemed like the play was ending. Don was a handful, no question. We all enjoyed a lot of success during that period, and it was like the band was breaking up.
Warren: I called Don at home one night in October 1998 and said I was hearing rumblings—what was going on? He said, “Maybe there should be a statute of limitations on these jobs. I think you should talk to Bob.”
Wow. That’s what you get after twenty years at a company? After delivering billions in profits? Statute of limitations?
Bob Wright called from New York the next morning to fire me over the phone. I left my position as president of entertainment and my twenty-year career with NBC within weeks of the airing of the final Seinfeld summer repeats. I had been announced as entertainment president the same month the first episode of Seinfeld aired. There are worse bookends.
When I was running NBC Entertainment, the shows that made our schedule were my choices, and I didn’t ask approval of anyone. I brought many voices into the process. I listened, but then I made the call. Maybe Don allowed me that because it was my ass on the line, and he’s a pretty shrewd guy. Maybe he believed that we had a pretty good track record, and I had earned the right to do what I believed was best for the schedule.
For a long time, that’s how we functioned. There wasn’t chaos. There wasn’t resentment. There weren’t decisions that were made in the moment. Rather, our motto was “this is our long-term strategy, this is what we believe in,” and patience was rewarded. The audience was sending us really positive signals. We believed they deserved something in return.
At the height of the Must See era, NBC was generating over $1 billion in annual profit for GE. During my last three seasons NBC sold an industry record $6.5 billion in prime-time advertising, $2 billion more than our closest competitor. On Thursday night in the 1997–98 season we beat our combined competition by margins of 60 percent (Nielsen Media Research). This was the essence of being at the top of the Rock. We had climbed a mountain and delivered award-winning high-quality entertainment that America embraced a
nd our competition coveted. A generation of television watchers were weaned on Must See TV, including my two most passionate fans, my kids.
The network was valued in the recent Comcast deal at $0 and was estimated to run at a $600 million annual loss. The reversal has been remarkable. In the nineties we produced little short of a financial geyser at NBC, and many of our Must See shows have gone on to realize staggering revenues.
Friends, owned by Warner Bros. Television, has generated over $5 billion in revenue worldwide and for all ten years of its run was a top-ten-rated series. Seinfeld, distributed by Sony and owned by Warner Bros. Television, has worldwide revenues that exceed $4 billion, and the show still generates over $40 million a year in domestic syndication advertising sales. Three billion dollars in revenues for ER, and for ten of its fifteen years it was a top-ten-rated series. Two billion dollars for Frasier. About $1 billion apiece for NBC’s Will & Grace and Sony’s Mad About You.
Our prime-time success drove large audiences into our owned and operated local stations’ late-night news and right into The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Again, decisions and actions that were ultimately worth billions. While not part of the Must See brand, let’s not forget over nine hundred hours of the Law & Order franchise and still counting.
Not bad for a dry hole. NBC was the most watched broadcast network for the 1995–96 season and would hold on to that crown for eight of the next nine years. After running out of quality product in 2004, the network dropped to fourth place and has stayed there since.
My replacement as president of entertainment, Scott Sassa, soon replaced Don and then brought in Garth Ancier in my old job. Garth lasted a little over a year, and then Jeff Zucker took over.
Sean Hayes: Warren Littlefield. Garth Ancier. Scott Sassa. Jeff Zucker. Kevin Reilly. What bigger red flag do you need to know something isn’t being managed correctly. Our show ran eight years, and we had five different presidents at NBC.
Jack Welch: NBC was a great asset for GE. Employees loved it, were proud of it. They felt like it was part of the family. It’s been a tough run for NBC. You look in that top ten every week, and you never see a show.
Warren: A few months after my transition, Bob Wright invited me to breakfast at the Peninsula hotel in Beverly Hills. He said he had something for me. I had begun the healing process, and Bob helped that along when he handed over several bonus checks based on year-end performance by NBC. They were still number one.
I asked Bob who was going to be making the key creative decisions at the network? Bob told me there was a system in place that would suffice. That was the moment it dawned on me that I must have done a shitty job of managing up. Every day, using NBC’s money, I had made dozens of financial and creative decisions that impacted the quality of the product we aired and our performance as a network. As smart as he was, Bob didn’t have a clue about what I really did.
Bob Wright: It’s clear in hindsight that we weren’t able to recover the way we had before. To this date, we’ve not seen the level of performance at NBC that we enjoyed.
Warren: Only after I was gone did they start to realize what we had achieved in the Must See era.
Dan Harrison: Today the average home has two hundred channels. You’re never going to aggregate up an audience like there was in the Must See TV era. It was as much of a cultural milestone and touchstone in size and scope as Frank Sinatra or Elvis or the Beatles were in the music business.
The highest-rated entertainment program in history was the M*A*S*H finale. Seventy-seven percent of American households watching television on February 28, 1983, were watching the finale of M*A*S*H. Then you get to Cosby at 50 percent shares and thirty-plus ratings. Now you’re down to American Idol, where a 20 share is massive. The shows that are hits today would have been canceled after a week in the nineties.
Steve McPherson: I do think I was lucky to be along for the ride. It was intimate and close at NBC, and people knew each other very well. Everything meshed together. It wasn’t as if the workday ever ended. Agents for drinks. Out to dinner with the studio. Notes for producers. It never stopped.
It makes me sad to see what’s happened at NBC. It’s a shame. There’s been a complete abandonment of what made NBC great. It was the brand, and now it’s just been thrown into the Comcast deal. It’s really sad, but I’m sure Jeff Zucker will get promoted over it.
Dan Harrison: Working at NBC in the Must See era was like playing for the 1927 Yankees.
Dick Wolf: Getting a commitment on NBC in the glory days was better than your birthday party when you were six, because you knew you had a shot.
I recently said to Jeff Gaspin [former president of entertainment, NBCUniversal], “I honestly don’t think you want your legacy to be two hours of fat people.” He said, “Fat people who cry.”
Harold Brook: One of the biggest things that went on during the nineties was Warren. We had this amazing confluence of people. Warren threw a Christmas party a few years ago, and he invited everybody who’d worked for him. I looked around this room, and it was amazing. People who’d gone on to bigger jobs, and it had such a good feeling about it. I went to CBS after NBC. I only lasted eighteen months. It was dreadful.
We all worked so well together. It was like kicking the tires at a hundred miles per hour, but it didn’t feel like it at the time.
Bob Broder: The allegiance, the belief in talent, kept people like Jimmy Burrows hanging around to work with them. Today at NBC, they have no belief in talent, no relationship with the creative community, and they have too many people doing the job.
John Wells: The hubris that came after Warren leaving and the way NBC is run still exists to this day. I was at the Olympics, and I got stuck in a car with Bob and Suzanne Wright. Suzanne was a big fan of ER, and I saw a moment from Bob. He steeled up—like he ran the network and knew how it should work. I remember thinking, “He has no idea how this works, but I think he thinks he does.”
Max Mutchnick: We were the last Must See show because we were part of a generation that got the last bit of a company and a president of a network who cared about writing. No one loved writing and actors after Warren.
David Kohan: We were at a meeting recently for a show we were doing with the brass of a network. By far the most dominant voice was the sales guy, who I’ve never met and probably will never see again. And he was giving us notes about what would work and what wouldn’t. And this company shall remain CBS. Les Moonves [president and CEO of CBS] wasn’t even talking. And I remember walking out of that meeting saying, “Why are we listening to that guy?”
Lisa Kudrow: I have been trying to produce shows and ran away from the network because it wasn’t possible to do something different. Because if it’s different, it has to stay on the air so people learn what it is. Seinfeld. Friends. It was a little easier to get what it was, and Warren also gave the shows the best chance possible. It’s really hard to do something different that’s going to last a long time, something that’s based on those little moments of character.
Paul Reiser: If you hire people you like and trust your instincts—I like this talent, this package, these people; go do it—then you’re much more likely to have a success.
Steve Levitan: After Warren left, I don’t think the people in charge were interested in having quite as much fun. Everything seemed so grand at that time. We talked about that NBC brand all the time. That brand represented smart, sophisticated, urban comedy. It stood for quality. NBC was my first stop with a pitch, my first choice going in.
Jason Alexander: What’s fascinating to me is it feels like the lesson of Seinfeld wasn’t learned. On my subsequent shows, the network and studio executives micromanaged those projects, micromanaged them into failure. With Jerry and Larry, people looked at this singular take on life and knew there was no negotiating with them. You either decided to trust them or decided you couldn’t. That lesson doesn’t seem to have been learned.
Warren: TV historians may find other events to mark the death of Mus
t See TV, but it was a January morning in 2004 when I called Preston Beckman at Fox, my former consigliere and scheduling guru, and said, “It’s over.” NBC had just announced that Donald Trump’s Apprentice would be their new Thursday night program at 9:00. Must See TV didn’t end with a whimper. It ended with The Donald barking, “You’re FIRED!”
Bob Broder: Thursday night, the best night of television on television, and you put The Apprentice on? You just piss it away? There’s no question that the world has changed, that media has changed, that digital is making everybody insecure as we try to figure it out. But some of the basic principles of programming and scheduling don’t evaporate or dissipate because of those changes. You almost have to work harder to make sure you have content in a place where the audience is going to come to see it. After twenty years of being number one on Thursday, that legacy ended with the conclusion of the ’03–’04 season.
Tom Werner: There are all sorts of ways to bring people to the television. You can do it with exploitive programs or good programs. NBC proved you could do it by producing excellent programs. Now we’ve gone from Must See TV to The Apprentice and The Biggest Loser.
John Landgraf: NBC lost sight of its perch. It owned quality television.
Warren: Bob Wright was correct in predicting that the broadcast business would change. He bet that the cable business model with dual-revenue streams (advertising and subscription fees) would be a hedge against an eventual weakening broadcast schedule. So Bob continued to invest in cable and diversify the NBC portfolio.
Dan Harrison: The broadcast networks were slow to move into cable generally, and most of the broadcast/cable networks that exist today were built by acquisition. ABC bought ESPN, and Disney bought ABC primarily because of the value of ESPN. What NBC did early and smart was launching CNBC. And then there was America’s Talking, run by Roger Ailes, and that’s what became MSNBC in a partnership with Microsoft.
