Desperate Networks - 06 edition

Bill Carter reports on the television industry for theNew York Timesand has written about television for almost 30 years. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame and a native of Brooklyn New York he currently resides in New Jersey with his wife and children.

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 20042005 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 yearsSurvivor CSI American Idol The Apprenticehad 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 prime-time shows was so important to every net-work's bottom line. At the upfront so called because clients purchased commercial time in network showsbeforethe 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 withand autographed bythe 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 comedy8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughtersomething awful seemed to happen like the shocking sudden death of that show's star John Ritter. ABC had the feeland maybe the smellof 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 hims

Praise for Bill Carter's ''The Late Shift'': ''Bill Carter has written a detailed and remarkably gripping account . . . unfailingly balanced thoroughly researched filled with scoops and fresh insight. It takes us deep into the bizarre high-stakes world of broadcasting . . . . A powerful story and ultimately a sad one filled with casualties as well as winners.'' --''New York Times Book Review ''''Bill Carter's book goes behind the scenes to spin a tale of ambition and intrigue worthy of if not Shakespeare then at least the mighty Carson-Art Players at their ditsy Elizabethan best.'' --''Boston Globe ''''In his fascinating new book Carter Yspins? a tale of passion ambition in-fighting and runaway ego worthy of Shakespeare.'' --''Los Angeles Times ''''Page after remarkably well-reported page of why Johnny retired how Leno ended up with the job and who shafted Dave. If you crave this sort of inside-the-halls-of-media-power story Carter gives you every last detail.'' --''New York ''magazine ''Bill Carter draws a script from the turbulent world of late-night talk shows as theatrical and cautionary as any prime-time melodrama . . . YHe? unearths juicy nuggets each related with the sure suspense evoking hand of a thriller novelist . . . . 'A.''' --''Entertainment Weekly ''''The quest to take Johnny's place is chronicled in fascinating depth and detail by Bill Carter . . . . His story is both authoritative and definitive--a vivid behind-the-scenes blow-by-blow account.'' --''New York Times'' ''Carter's book is a definitive account of how Leno won the battle for ''Tonight'' then lost the ratings war after Letterman moved to CBS . . . . Anyone who wants toknow how the TV industry works at its highest level will find a wealth of information.'' --''Philadelphia Inquirer''