Review
"To detail the exuberant 1990s’ events in the Peacock Network’s ascendancy (with such shows as Frasier, Friends, Seinfeld, Will & Grace, and ER) Littlefield and novelist Pearson interviewed more than 50 actors, writers, producers, agents and executives...Littlefield unleashed a ‘financial geyser’ at NBC, and these revelatory glances of those glory days make this one of the more agreeably diverting books published when it comes to the television industry.”
--Publishers Weekly
"Littlefield's compulsively readable saga, Top of the Rock, is a great tale of folly."
--Dick Donahue for PW
"A arousing and attention holding oral history of shows like Seinfeld that specified an era."
--New York Daily News
“A chronicle of the last golden age of network television, [Top of the Rock] is the literary equivalent of a former NBC Thursday night lineup…Littlefield is the extreme Must See insider. The mini-histories are a blast…full of fresh detail.”
--The Hollywood Reporter
"The former president of amusement at NBC chronicles his tenure with the peacock with a little support from his friends, including Jerry Seinfeld, Kelsey Grammar, Sean Hayes, and a few assorted suits who helped him schedule and nuture a good deal of of the most unforgettable shows on the tube, including Cheers, Friends, and Seinfeld. And as pleasantly occupied as audiences were by those programs, the real show was happening behind the scenes, where larger-than-life egos clashed over details huge and small. Readers fascinated in the history of the network or plainly wanting to listen the dish, as well as others fascinated in breaking into the TV biz, will find much to get enjoyment from in this charming reliving of Littlefield's glory days."
--Booklist
"With entertaning insider's perspective, Littlefield transports readers back to a seemingly magical time when half the country would watch the same show."
--Kirkus
About the AuthorWARREN LITTLEFIELD is the former NBC president of entertainment. Previous to that, he was the NBC comedy executive who produced such hit shows as The Cosby Show and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. He presently runs his own television production company.
T. R. PEARSON is the author of fourteen novels, including A Short History of a Small Place, and Warwolf. This is his fifth nonfiction book.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.1
Where Everybody Knows Your Name
Warren: I arrived at NBC in December 1979, hired by Brandon Tartikoff to work in the comedy department. I was manager of comedy development, the junior fellow member of the department. Brandon was a newly minted vice president of development at the network, which was mired in last place. I was twenty-seven years old, and even though I had watched a lot of it, I knew next to not one thing when it comes to network television. Brandon, my boss, was all of thirty.
In what was just a three-way race for audience (there’d be no Fox Broadcasting until 1987), NBC was jokingly derided as number four. CBS had ten comedies on it is schedule, including M*A*S*H, WKRP in Cincinnati, The Jeffersons, Alice, and One Day at a Time. ABC could brag fourteen sitcoms, among them Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, Barney Miller, Soap, Taxi, and Three’s Company. At NBC, we had Diff’rent Strokes and Hello, Larry.
In terms of standard viewership, CBS led the way with when it comes to sixteen million households. ABC was a close second with fifteen million. NBC lagged well behind at twelve million. For the 1980 season, Little House on the Prairie was our top-rated show at sixteenth. We placed only four shows in the top thirty. There was nowhere to go but up.
Worse still, NBC’s head of programming at the time was a man named Paul Klein. He had a background in audience exploration and had come up with the system of LOP, which stood for Least Objectionable Programming (I’m not kidding). The object was to piss off as few viewers as possible. The network product line was for the most part geared toward big events, so we became the Big Event network.
A TV critic once asked Paul Klein, “How do you know when you’ve got a huge event?”
Klein said, “We sit around a table, and people throw out ideas, and somebody says, ‘That’s a big event,’ and that’s when we know.”
It was an insane form of programming, highpriced and not in the least bit habit--forming. NBC had basically abandoned weekly series as the spine of the network. As a remedy, the legendary Fred Silverman had been brought over from ABC to turn things around. Fred didn’t waste a lot of time in making Brandon the new head of the amusement division. I hoped that would likewise be good for me.
By then, Fred had already enjoyed noteworthy success at the other two networks. A Time magazine cover piece on Silverman had called him “The Man with the Golden Gut.” NBC was in desperate need of a programming miracle, so possibly a golden gut would do.
My basi encounter with Fred was pretty alarming for me. It took place in a group discussion room on the second floor at NBC in Burbank. We were meeting to review the current development slate. Fred wasn’t very happy. In fact, he was screaming that it was inconceivable to turn NBC around if deals couldn’t be made faster.
Fred shifted in his chair, looked at me, and shrieked, “Why haven’t you closed any of those deals yet!?”
I experienced major shrinkage and couldn’t get any words out.
Finally my boss jumped in and said, “Fred, this is Warren. He’s the new guy in comedy development.”
“Oh,” Fred said. “Where the fuck is the business affairs guy?”
My only words to the legendary Fred Silverman that day were “Don’t know. Not me.”
We were so desperate for quality programming that we had to wave a series commitment at Les and Glen Charles and Jimmy Burrows. The trio had never formulated a show, but they had worked on more than a few iconic programs: The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Phyllis, The Bob Newhart Show, and Taxi. We guaranteed them thirteen sequences on the air just to lure them to pitch us. Nobody wanted to be on NBC. To get Jimmy and the Charles brothers, we knew we’d have to overpromise and overpay, and, boy, did we.
That’s a pitch meeting I’ll never forget. Over breakfast, Brandon Tartikoff, Michael Zinberg, and I original got wind of what would become Cheers.
Jim Burrows: Cheers was pitched as a Miller Lite commercial. Those commercials with the jocks, Marv Throneberry and all that. We had an athletic leading man. Sam Malone, originally, was a wide receiver. That’s how we pitched it. NBC made a deal for us--two for one. They had to put one on the air. We had to write two. The pitch wasn’t too difficult. Since the three of us had run Taxi for with regards to three years, we knew what we were doing, and NBC knew it. It’s not like today, where they hire kids who’ve never run a show, based on one script.
Bob Broder: Grant Tinker had hired the Charles brothers at MTM, and they’d worked their way up to executive makers on the final year of the basi Newhart show. Jimmy Burrows was a conductor who hadn’t directed television but had been the stage manager in New York for a very not successful musical, Holly Golightly, with Mary Tyler Moore and Richard Chamberlain. It had closed very quickly. Out of that, Jimmy developed a kinship with Mary and Grant, and he begged for an apprenticeship to come out and work with the MTM company.
At the time, I was representing Jay Sandrich, who was Jimmy Burrows before Jimmy Burrows became Jimmy Burrows. Jay Sandrich was the top multi-camera conductor at the time, in 1970. He did the pilot for The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and he went on to do Cosby and The Golden Girls.
Grant Tinker asked Jay Sandrich to consultant Jimmy. Jimmy asked me, “Would you represent me? I recognise Jay Sandrich can’t do all the work he’s being offered. Maybe you could get me a couple of gigs.” I’ve been Jimmy’s agent since 1972 or ’73. While Jay was a star, Burrows is by any metric a supernova. He has now directed the pilots for over fifty--six series that have gone on air. Not failed pilots, broken pilots--on-air series. Fifty-six of them.
Jim Burrows: Since I come from a stage background, in comedy I kind of recognise what’s funny. The primary show I ever watched out here was The Mary Tyler Moore Show. It had four of the most powerful writers in television working on it--Jim Brooks, Allan Burns, Ed. Weinberger, and Stan Daniels. Powerhouses. The conductor was Jay Sandrich, who mentored me. I used to see Jay go after the writers, and Jay would say what he thought. He’d do that to protect his actors.
Writers want you to do the script, but now and then what works in the writers’ room doesn’t work on the stage. Jay would say, “I’ll do it your way, but I’m not sure it’s the right way. Let’s show you what we may do.” That empowers the actors to feel like a more spectacular percentage of the originative process.
Bob Broder: When you watch Jimmy shoot a show, he’s fascinating. He’s never watching. He’s listening. He’ll walk up and down behind the cameras, and all of a sudden he’ll kick a camera dolly to change the angle. He has a quad split in his head. He knows what each camera is seeing.
Jim Burrows: The guys we pitched Cheers to knew a lot more in regards to television than the guys we pitch to today. We got to pitch to guys who got it. We talked in regards to a bar but not a romance. We might have noted Tracy/Hepburn. I don’t remember. So some pitches underneath the bridge.
Bob Broder: I believe Abe Burrows, Jimmy’s father, wrote on a radio show called Duffy’s Tavern. The beauty of having set the show in a bar meant when the door opened, the story started, and any story could walk in that door. It wasn’t like doing a family comedy where you had to figure out how you were going to service your six characters. Some pretty strange humans came in that door.
Warren: I do not forget Jim Burrows and the Charles brothers told us the only show on television with adult relationships was Three’s Company. “That’s fine,” they said, “but that shouldn’t be the only one. There is so much more territory to cover.” Charles/Burrows/Charles had a pedigree, and we, at NBC, didn’t have one at the time. We had no sense of who we were as a network, and we were desperate for a hit show.
Bob Broder: Our offices were over a restaurant called Scandia. It was the dining spot in L.A. in the late seventies. The only vantage we had as an agency was “Come to lunch; we’ll eat at Scandia.” I called Irwin Moss, who was doing business affairs at NBC. I said, “Let’s get lunch, and we’ll talk about the deal.” We do the deal over lunch on the back of an envelope. Series commitment. My collaborator and I had been in business a minute and a half. Good news: we had a series commitment. Bad news: it was NBC.
Warren: Being the smart agent that he is, Bob took the NBC offer and shopped it to Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner who were at ABC and were working with the team on Taxi, but ABC passed. It was too rich of a deal.
Bob Broder: I go to Paramount and say, “I have a series commitment.” They want it, and we negotiate a deal. One of the better deals ever made in television. We set precedents there it took them thirty years to get rid of.
John Pike: We made the deal without having any conception of what the idea was. We genuinely didn’t know. We went into business with Charles/Burrows/Charles. Typically, that’s what I did when I ran Paramount Television. We let them make what they love, and we were there to provide support. We’d run interference with the network. I may recall over the run of Cheers that there was never an adversarial moment where it came to the important talent of that show.
The Cheers kinship with Paramount was distinguishable in the network world at that time. There was a pure partnership--Paramount TV and Charles/Burrows/Charles Productions. C/B/C didn’t need Paramount. Everybody wanted to be in business with them. They had a series commitment from NBC. Paramount had a outstanding distribution arm. We ...
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