“We’re insane if we stay on the same track,” says NBC Entertainment President Kevin Reilly. “That’s the definition of insanity – to keep making the same mistakes and doing things the same way.”
It’s July and Reilly is speaking to an assemblage of ravenous television critics. He’s already taken his share of lumps, comparing the 2004-05 season – a run of months that began with the optimism of the Athens Olympics and ended in fourth place – to a colonic and a kick in the nether-regions.
“We had enormous, history-making hits going away,” Reilly says, recalling the departure of “Friends” and “Frasier.” “We needed to reseed them. It didn’t happen and now we are where we are. I can tell you it’s like a weird monkey off the back, in a way.”
A sitcom (or even a drama) about that weird monkey would have done better than anything NBC tried to program last fall. Until “Medium” arrived at midseason, the network’s entire new roster was looking like a loss and the 2005-06 season features fresh or transplanted programs on nearly every night, including three new dramas, one new comedy and a pair of new reality offerings.
Taking a page from the playbook that worked so well for ABC last fall, NBC intends to concentrate much of its promotional weight on just a few of the new shows, focusing resources on the Jerry Bruckheimer Pentagon drama “E-Ring,” the alien-undersea-manatees drama “Fathom” and, most of all, the Jason Lee single-camera comedy “My Name Is Earl.” Despite the network’s difficulties with quirky, aesthetically challenging sitcoms, Reilly says that testing indicates across-the-board interest in “Earl.”
“We saw a very broad demographic, where you had 18-year-old men saying “I love this show, and I would leave Comedy Central to come watch this show’ and 35-year-old women going “Oh, he’s adorable, and I like him and I’m going to watch that,”‘ Reilly explains.
Of course, Reilly is realistic. You don’t fall from first to fourth among young viewers and then expect to bounce back to first in a single season. And you particularly don’t plan to make that move by mining ground similar to the critically adored and audience ignored “Scrubs” and “The Office.” In that spirit, NBC has already lined up a number of midseason shows that could be ready by January, or which may not hit the air until after the Winter Olympics. Critics have already held their noses at the comedy “Thick and Thin,” but new dramas “Windfall” and “The Book of Daniel” look challenging and different.
“I feel a desire to say, “You know what: We’re in the advertising business. We need to sell the ads. We need to comply with the FCC. But you know what? Let’s reach for the creativity. Let’s try to find that high ground again, of what it means for NBC now, in 2005-06,”‘ says Reilly. “And if it means that we’re struggling a little bit in the short run of some advertising concerns, so be it.”
He continues, building steam, “We’ve got to get back. We got to get popping again.”
Comments are no longer available on this story