The New York Times’s Bill Carter

October 2006

The New York Times reporter Bill Carter has been writing about the television industry for nearly 30 years. In his latest book, Desperate Networks, he provides an inside look at the Darwinian world of American network television, where showmanship, perseverance and sheer luck are determining factors in what ends up airing on the small screen.

WS: From reading your book, one has the impression that there is a lot of luck involved in picking a show.

CARTER: Degrees of luck. It’s a remarkable thing that a lot of these shows almost always have to go through some challenge. Even the shows that are hugely popular, like American Idol, get turned down repeatedly. The shows that work are the shows that are different. They don’t look like something else; they are a completely new approach to something and there is always resistance to those kinds of shows. And it seems like until a show finds a champion, at some level, it will always have to run up against this opposition.

WS: Do you think ABC was just lucky having Lost, Desperate Housewives and Grey’s Anatomy in one season?

CARTER: I don’t know of another year that I can think of when three enormous hits came out of the same development season. That’s quite rare and obviously partly fed by the fact that ABC was struggling and didn’t have much working at all. It really had not had a drama success in ten years prior to that. So there wasn’t any reason to expect they would have even one, but to have three is quite extraordinary. But I think it wasn’t totally an accident, because they had a strategy to do things that were different and new and they had to create some shows that specifically appealed to women. They felt that women were being so underserved by all the police procedural shows that are so popular on the other networks. And certainly Desperate Housewives and Grey’s Anatomy fit beautifully into that strategy.

WS: Unfortunately, the people responsible for that strategy were let go.

CARTER: That’s right. The executives who made the final decisions to greenlight those shows were out the door, and now the shows are on the air and are a big success, and it’s to the benefit of the executives who came in after them. It’s one of the crazy things about that business.

WS: We’ve heard of several creators being quite vocal about having problems with ABC during the Michael Eisner days.

CARTER: Yes, they had a very top-heavy management structure when Eisner was there. He always thought of himself not just as a corporate guy, but also as a creative guy, and he did have a somewhat good track record for that. It just got to the point where it hamstrung the organization a bit, because all the major decisions had to be made by the top guy. That makes the people under you a lot more unwilling to stick their necks out. Ultimately, at every network there is a top executive who greenlights the show. But I think it’s probably better that it’s not the top corporate official of the whole company. That makes the chain of command so dense and so heavy it really impedes the creativity.

WS: It seems that jobs and shows are less safe today than they used to be, ten to 15 years ago.

CARTER: There is not much patience right now. Ten or 15 years ago, networks basically made money even when they weren’t all that successful. Now if you are behind and if you don’t have great shows, you are going to really suffer. And the media marketplace is just too crowded. The pressure to find hits is intense, and that’s why there is an enormous amount of pressure at NBC, which has got to turn around this year, or there will probably be very harsh judgment on the executives who developed the shows. And I think ABC is in the same position because they missed last year totally. They didn’t capitalize on what they had two years earlier, so there’s a lot of scrutiny on them.

WS: Is there a more efficient way of producing TV dramas?

CARTER: Of course there is. Look at the cable networks. They are making shows for much less money, and some of them are very well received by the audience. You have to look at those costs. A lot of it is built into the Hollywood system. You have an agent and he represents this star. And he wants this star in a show. Now the agent takes a package fee on the show. Pretty soon, instead of having a $1.5-million-per-episode show, you have a $2.5-million-per-episode show. You probably can do it for the $1.5 million. You just have to get rid of the extraneous costs. All the people in the system have to agree: if we all take 10 percent less we can continue to make money on this, just not as much. I think it will come to that eventually, but there is an awful lot built in to the Hollywood system that works against you when you try to do that. I know Jeff Zucker [the CEO of the NBC Universal Television Group] tried when he first got to Hollywood. He looked at the costs and said, “This is nuts, why are we paying these fees?” And Hollywood resisted him. It is a tough club to get into, and they do protect themselves. But I think when the business is really challenged you have to make some accommodations.

WS: What do you think of the impact of HBO’s original series on the networks?

CARTER: HBO does get away with a lot, it can do much more than the networks in terms of content. But they have developed some really outstanding shows and the networks pay attention to that. Those shows get a lot of buzz, and clearly that has spilled over to other cable networks. FX has created very high quality programs.

It’s not the old era of television when really schlocky shows could succeed on a network. The networks have got to put on good product. If they put on real junk, it goes out the door pretty quickly. ABC put on a bunch of reality shows this summer that were really bad, and were rejected within about two weeks.

WS: What do you think of the new batch of dramas this season?

CARTER: This fall is going to be very problematic for the networks that have committed to serialized shows. If you don’t start with the plot at the beginning of a serialized show, it’s very difficult to join it in midcourse. They have to come out of the gate strong. How many of these shows does the audience want to commit to? They love 24, they love Lost, and the audience will be there every time they are on the air. But are they going to want six, seven or eight of them? That’s a lot of time for people to give up.

If you watch one of these serialized shows, even when you miss one [episode] in the middle, you’re not going to go back for that repeat. You’ve seen the whole plot all year [and] you don’t want to go back to that one section of the plot. The repeats of Lost during the summer performed abysmally—almost invisible ratings. That’s why I think running only these serialized shows is not economically smart, because the networks are not going to get a second play out of them. They get a lot of plays out of CSI and Law & Order.

WS: Is this the golden age of U.S. drama?

CARTER: Yes, when you consider all the stuff that is on HBO and FX and TNT and all these other channels. Certainly drama is clearly the genre that has broken through and that people are really committed to, and by the way, I think is genuinely good. Most of these shows are very well done, and at the same time, strangely, people have turned away from comedy, at least the old traditional form of comedy. The audience has gravitated to the dramatic form.

WS: Do you think the pendulum will swing the other way and comedy will become popular again?

CARTER: You can’t write off comedy because, obviously, if a show makes somebody laugh, it’s going to work. I just think it’s harder to do. There are different forms of comedy. There is very slapstick comedy; there’s more sophisticated comedy; and there’s family comedy. It’s very stratified and it seems it’s harder to find the kind of show that will appeal to everybody. I happen to think that the NBC version of The Office is a very funny show. It has become really funny and sophisticated and well done, and it’s getting more and more attention, but it’s not breaking through as a hit. Although it’s doing better and young people—especially young men—really love it, it’s not translating all across the spectrum.

When the networks try to be really broad, with a comedy like According to Jim on ABC, it completely alienates the audience that wants the sophisticated comedy, which has become extremely difficult to execute. If somebody came up with Seinfeld again, I think it would be a big hit, but that is a tall order.

WS: What will the networks be like in five years?

CARTER: In five years, they will still have the kind of core schedule that they’ve always had, because that is the base they work off. But you are going to see them exploiting their programming in every conceivable way they can, because they are really nearing the end of the formal advertising model. The advertising model is very challenged because it’s easy to avoid the commercials now, much easier than it used to be. I think that the process of embedding commercials in programs risks alienating viewers as well. There is only so much of that you can do before people say, “I don’t want to watch this guy deliberately drinking a can of Coke.”

WS: Do you think it’s a good investment to put money into a network?

CARTER: I think the people who have networks recognize that they have multiple streams of revenue available to them now, because they tend to own all the product. That makes a huge difference. If you own these programs, you can then exploit them across so many platforms, and you can make money that way. You have to recognize, if you have a network, that you’ve got to continue to be creative in your distribution. If you are creative in your distribution and you have the right people picking the programs, then I think you can still be successful. God knows, I don’t think anyone at FOX regrets having American Idol on the air!

WS: What should the networks do to create a receptive environment for creators, especially the unknown ones?

CARTER: The obvious thing to say to the networks is, keep your door open; just be willing to listen. But you know what? There are so many people who think they have good ideas that the networks would be deluged if they took everybody in. What a network has to do is put enough faith in the people [who make the programming decisions]—that they are going to be flexible, that they are going to have some degree of openness to new ideas, and not just go by the book. What I would say if I was running a network is, if [a programming executive] walks into the room thinking, “That doesn’t fit what we do,” or “That’s not what the people want right now,” you are going to always miss the next new thing. You can’t ever have that attitude. You can never say, “Oh, nobody watches shows like that.” As soon as you say that, you are going to be wrong. Somebody is going to react and watch the show like that, and I really think if you have rules, you are going to fail. You can’t have rules. You’ve got to be flexible.

WS: What do you think people like CBS Corporation’s president and CEO, Les Moonves, and NBC Universal’s Jeff Zucker have in common?

CARTER: The main thing is incredibly intense competitiveness. They are super-competitive. If they sat down to play tiddlywinks, they’d play ferociously. You really do have to have the creativity and gut instinct to be a showman. That’s a hard talent to have. Being an actor was a very key part in Les’s background. I think it gave him an interesting sense of how it worked from that side. And Jeff was a television producer. He’s one of the few guys running a big network that could literally get a show on the air by himself. So I think you need those skills. But I also think you’ve just got to be really smart, really flexible, and probably it takes a very big ego, because you are going to have to stick yourself out in front of the public a lot. And you are going to take a lot of slings and arrows and you better be able to take it.

WS: What are your general observations having covered the industry as long as you have?

CARTER: What I have found, when I go to speaking engagements, is that television has been a tremendous connective tissue in the culture. For a long time, I could describe a character as an Eddie Haskell type. Anyone my age would know what that was because they had all watched Leave It to Beaver. And you can still do that now, you can say, He’s like a Kramer, and everybody would know what that means because they have seen Seinfeld. But that’s becoming more difficult to do as time goes on. You realize there is not as much connective tissue out there because there is so much available and the audience is very, very stratified. Steve Carell may be well-known because of his movies, but the other actors in The Office could probably sit in a coffee shop in Manhattan and not be bothered much. That is one of the things that have changed, and it’s a bad thing, in a way, because, even though it’s great to have choice, it’s also interesting that we don’t have as much shared experience.