Tuned Out

Looking for a sure-fire success: network executives almost passed on Survivor . (Photo Jeffrey R. Staab/Global Television/CBS)

Desperate Networks Bill Carter
384 Pages
Doubleday
$35.95

“The best kept secret about show business,” former Hollywood screenwriter Ken Finkleman likes to tell the press, “is that the stories of how deals are made are more interesting than the shows themselves.”

Bill Carter, the TV industry beat writer for the New York Times, proved Finkleman’s point with his last book, The Late Shift. Imagine a game of musical chairs involving the Marx and Menendez brothers and you have Carter’s 1994 bestseller, the story of how David Letterman and Jay Leno — along with a pack of cash-hungry managers, agents and executives — fought over the vacated throne of late night TV king Johnny Carson.

Carter’s new book is more ambitious if slightly less gory. Desperate Networks explains how, in the age of cable TV, America’s big four networks (CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox) managed to hang onto $20 billion US of annual advertising revenue by killing off much of what was considered traditional programming, replacing the sitcom with high concept, populist serials and reality dramas. To wit: in 1995, 10 sitcoms, led by Seinfeld and Home Improvement, made the U.S. Nielsen top 20 ratings. After Survivor conquered prime time in 2000, the sitcom fell into irreversible decline; not a single comedy series remained in the top 20 by the end of 2005.

Perhaps because The Late Shift became a bestseller, generating a spiky, brightly comic HBO movie, Hollywood insiders flatter Carter with their best water cooler material in Desperate Networks. Apparently, when Debra Messing — Grace on the comedy, Will & Grace — held out for more money a few years back, NBC advised her they were toying with a novel opening for the new season: Will would open a door and shout, “Hi Grace, did you change your hair?” and actress Minnie Driver would be standing there. Messing reported for work the next day.

But the book’s best piece of insider gossip is Carter’s contention that network programming executives — TV’s hit-men — are congenitally incapable of developing the must-see shows that keep network television alive: “No matter how much they spent on script development, or which stars they signed to multimillion-dollar deals … hits arrived on a network’s executive’s doorstep by blind, stupid luck. Network executives simply had to be ready to … shower a [new series] with loving attention when a hit stumbled down the street and rang their doorbell. Most often, they weren’t.”

Courtesy Random House Canada.

An unobtrusive, thoughtful observer, Carter’s great service is penetrating Hollywood’s creative culture and providing fresh insight into why TV’s big four are so often incapable of creating audience-friendly material. Carter theorizes that Hollywood studios are populated by overconfident type-A personalities prone to regimented groupthink. As such, they are simply not suited for recognizing material that viewers might find engaging. To prove his point, Carter offers up the story of how Survivor came to be the biggest show on television. 

An only child born in East London, Mark Burnett graduated from the famed British Parachute Regiment before moving to Hollywood and working as a nanny. In the mid-1990s, Burnett came up with the concept for Eco-Challenge, a cross-country race set in hardscrabble locales that he successfully sold to MTV and ESPN. In 1999, he pitched the majors on the U.S. broadcast rights to an European television competition that pits exiled strangers against each other in exotic settings — think Lord of the Flies with a million dollar grand prize! Nobody was interested, except Ghen Maynard, a young CBS program executive.

A Harvard psychology graduate, Maynard saw Survivor as perfect for U.S. audiences. Conquering the wilderness and get-rich-quick schemes were American ideals. And anyone who had been cut from a school team would identify with characters being voted off the island. Still, the junior executive — Maynard didn’t even have his own office — realized it would be pointless selling Survivor at in-house programming sessions. He’d adapted the “unresponsive bystanders theory” from a college psych course to explain why network meetings were so unproductive. He reasoned that just as a single passing stranger is more willing than a scrambling horde to help out someone lying half-dead on the street, it’s easier to sell a new idea to one executive than to a group of them.

Maynard conspired to get Burnett a meeting with Les Moonves, then CBS President of Entertainment. Burnett demonstrated how Survivor might captivate America, ending the presentation with mock-up covers of Time and Newsweek featuring the series. Although entertained by the pitch, Moonves passed, remarking, “Ghen, it’s a cable show.” Maynard and Burnett persevered, returning with the promise they could pre-finance the show with advertisers. “Look, if you guys can figure out a way to pay for this, go play in your sandbox,” Moonves laughed.

A year later, Survivor was the biggest phenomenon in modern TV history, drawing more than 50 million U.S. viewers to its first season finale. And, yes, the show made the covers of both Time and Newsweek.

That the idea for Survivor came from a lowly source is no surprise to Carter, who writes, “like something out of Dickens, success in network television usually depended on the stirring rise of the orphaned, the rejected, and the abandoned.” And his book contains a hit-by-hit account of how today’s most popular and successful shows were the product of lonely outsiders who fought like spawning salmon to get their vision on air.

In Desperate Networks’ most compelling chapter, Carter tells the story of Marc Cherry, a former Golden Girls writer who had been out of work for years. He was broke and living off his mom when he decided to forget about the big four networks and just write the best story he could, hoping whatever he produced might interest HBO. Seated at his computer, Cherry was visited by the vision of a humming housewife going about her chores. Suddenly, without warning, she puts a gun to her head. Other women, all variations of Cherry’s flamboyant mother, came to him in a flood, fleshing out what became the surrealistic suburban tale, Desperate Housewives.

Desperately seeking a hit: Eva Longoria, Nicollette Sheridan, Felicity Huffman, Teri Hatcher and Marcia Cross in Desperate Housewives. (Photo CTV/ABC)

HBO, then Fox, CBS, NBC, Showtime and Lifetime all passed on the pilot. Cherry was massively in debt, yet when he got a last-chance meeting with ABC and was told, “We like the pilot, but we would like to change the title. How about The Secret Lives of Housewives?” his response was, “Change the title and I walk.”

Actually, an outsider did make a significant contribution to what would become 2004’s breakout TV hit. An agent suggested that Cherry pitch the series as a soap, not a comedy. Cherry saw the wisdom of the suggestion at once. A melodrama would allow him to dig deeper into the characters.

In fact, most of the series that would hit it big in the new millennium turned out to be outsized melodramas that played upon the public’s secret dreams and fears. Simon Cowell tells Carter that he knew American Idol wouldn’t work as a music show; it had to be a weekly soap opera, with Cowell himself as the sneering villain. Donald “You’re Fired!” Trump would play a similar cavalier potentate on the hit The Apprentice.

Carter makes no judgement on modern television; he never tells us whether the death of the sitcom is a good or bad thing, or if reality shows are an improvement. He’s a reporter, not a critic. But, at a time when the big U.S. networks have undertaken serious renovations, abandoning traditional programming in hopes of maintaining their share of a splintering marketplace, a good TV industry analyst is arguably more valuable than thoughtful reviewer. In writing one of the few essential books on modern television, a work that belongs on the same shelf as his own The Late Shift and Ken Auletta’s Three Blind Mice, Carter provides countless indelible images of an industry in perpetual panic, incapable of producing its own success stories and desperately alert for signs of fresh hits. In one memorable scene, he describes a roomful of industry suits waiting in a hotel lobby for the Nielsen ratings to arrive, “Blackberries at the ready, like gunfighters at a shootout.”

Desperate Networks also leaves the reader with the unmistakable impression that prime time TV shows have come to mirror the strange scramble to get a series onto the airwaves. Like the fearless hopefuls on American Idol, or the political schemers on Survivor, today’s breakthrough TV creators are desperate outsiders risking ridicule and punishment in the hopes of becoming Hollywood stars.

Stephen Cole writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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