Jeff Zucker Faces Life Without Friends On the trail of the next hit sitcom with the NBC whiz kid in pilot season.
By Marc Gunther

(FORTUNE Magazine) – Comedy after breakfast. Comedy after lunch. Comedy before dinner. Comedy tonight. This is the life of Jeff Zucker, the 38-year-old president of NBC Entertainment, during pilot season, a few frenzied weeks of high hopes and crushed dreams when all the television networks look for new programs to put on in the fall.

It's 9 A.M. on a Thursday in mid-April on a production stage in Hollywood. Several dozen NBC programmers, led by Zucker, pick over a generous spread of bagels, smoked salmon, muffins, and granola. They are here for a table reading of a comedy pilot called Happy Family, which stars John Larroquette and Christine Baranski. A pilot is a prototype of a TV series. A table reading is what it sounds like: The performers sit on one side of a long table and read the script. NBC executives, lined up on the other side, listen carefully and jot notes.

Happy Family is about the parents of adult children who can't grow up. "We're trying to hit the boomerang issue, kids coming back home," Zucker explains. He would like to like this show. In truth he'd like to like every show he sees during pilot season. That's because NBC badly needs a hit comedy. Friends, television's top-rated sitcom, will end its ten-year run next season. Frasier has run out of steam. Not since Will & Grace went on the air in 1998 has NBC developed a breakout sitcom. The other networks have done only marginally better. Trying to be funny can be heartbreaking.

This is a story about how a rational executive--Jeff Zucker, former editor of the Harvard Crimson and NBC News producer, who once planned to go to law school--working for a rational corporation--General Electric, maker of appliances, jet engines, and medical instruments, as well as the owner of NBC--tries to find a hit sitcom, a task that is not subject to rational analysis. At stake is big money, and more. NBC is by far the most successful of the broadcast networks--it will generate more than $700 million in profits from prime time alone during the current TV season--but it needs new hits to remain dominant. A single hit can generate more than $100 million in annual profits. If it lasts for three or four seasons, it can bring in far more when reruns are sold to cable channels or TV stations. Bragging rights, too, matter in the glare of prime time: NBC has been the No. 1 network among its target audience of 18- to 49-year-old adults for seven of the past eight seasons, but a resurgent Fox is closing in.

NBC is not only the most visible of GE's businesses but also the most perplexing. The television and cable unit, which had revenues of $7.1 billion and operating profits of $1.7 billion in 2002, is growing faster than GE as a whole. But the vagaries of programming frustrate even veterans like Bob Wright, who has run NBC since 1986 and is now vice chairman of GE as well. "Watching shows come alive is the greatest fun in the business," Wright says. "It's also the greatest disappointment, because so many don't work." So what does the Six Sigma gang at GE want this spring from Zucker? "We'd like four Cosbys, a Home Improvement, and a Cheers," jokes Wright. At least he seems to be joking.

Zucker likes being the man on the spot. "I thrive on that pressure," he says. "I love it." A rising star at NBC, Zucker is smart and self-confident, a hard-charging and decisive leader who is not prone to reflection or doubt. He is, in other words, cut from the GE cloth, so it's no wonder that his fans include former CEO Jack Welch, current CEO Jeff Immelt, and Wright. "Jeff is a wonderful talent," Wright says. Certainly his career so far has been charmed. He got his start in sports, became the executive producer of NBC's Today at age 26, won the support of Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric and Matt Lauer, and ran the operation very successfully for eight years before going to Hollywood at the end of 2000. He was so confident that he could solve the puzzles of prime time that he left his wife and two children behind in New York, presumably to await his triumphant return. That script could play out as planned: Zucker is said to be the leading candidate to take over NBC when Wright, 60, chooses to step aside. The hitch is that Zucker has yet to prove that the talents that served him so well in morning news translate to the sitcom-and-drama biz. The brash young executive needs a hit or two, both to keep NBC on top and to keep his career trajectory on track.

This morning the Happy Family table reading goes well. Everyone laughs when Larroquette and Baranski discover their 20-year-old son, clad in his underwear, pursuing an affair with a neighbor. As the reading ends to robust applause, Zucker is enthusiastic: "We're really, really, really pleased," he says. "The cast is wonderful." Not all the cast, it turns out. After the actors leave the room, Zucker and his NBC colleagues deliver their notes. They don't like one actress. She will be fired. They want a scene rewritten. What's more, while Larroquette is a well-regarded pro, his last sitcom flopped, and he hasn't had a hit since Night Court left the air in 1992. There are no sure things in television. And details matter--that is why Zucker pores over scripts, goes to casting sessions, rewrites bits of dialogue. Prime-time programming isn't a business in which you can set stretch goals, sit back, and wait for your team to deliver.

Similar scenes will play out several times each day over the next few weeks. Each pilot gets a table reading, a run-through during which the actors move about the sets with scripts in hand, and a taping before a studio audience. At each step, NBC delivers notes and the producers make changes. The network research department tests the pilots with TV viewers. (That process is notoriously unreliable: The pathbreaking shows All in the Family and Hill Street Blues flopped with test audiences.) Zucker and his colleagues will select the new shows in early May, just in time for the most important day of the year for NBC, when it presents its fall lineup to advertisers at the Metropolitan Opera House. Fanfare abounds, and why not? Media buyers will spend between $2.5 billion and $3 billion based on what they see.

The pilot process is hurried, inefficient, and undeniably poignant. This one began last fall when NBC executives heard well over 200 pitches for comedy shows from agents, writers, and producers. Zucker's team ordered 54 scripts. Discarding most, they commissioned 15 pilots. Of those, no more than three or four will make the schedule, and with luck, one or two will stick. The others will become this fall's Inside Schwartz or Emeril--shows scorned by critics and spurned by audiences.

None of this comes cheap. Scripts are written and rewritten. Elaborate sets are built. Brand-name stars are courted--Tom Selleck, Whoopi Goldberg, and Heather Locklear have pilots in the works at NBC. A half-hour pilot typically requires a crew of more than 100 people and a budget of $1.6 million to $2 million. Altogether, NBC will spend $40 million to $50 million on development this year. No one has come up with a better way of making hits. "One success pays for everything and more," notes Zucker.

But success is the exception. NBC introduced ten comedies in the past two seasons and just one, a medical show called Scrubs that airs in the protected time period after Friends, has shown staying power. "Will it survive on its own? We don't know yet," Zucker says. Just how it is that so much effort and money--and the best brainpower money can buy--produces so little in the way of tangible assets remains one of the mysteries of pop culture.

Here are some ideas that did not make the cut to become pilots at NBC: The Beast, a dramedy set in a veterinary clinic. Not the Bradys, a multiracial Brady Bunch. Town Slut, a sitcom about a divorced woman with three kids and a reputation.

Here's one that did: Spellbound, about a twentysomething male witch who, defying his witch parents, falls in love with a mortal, a workaholic law student and aspiring politician. Bewitched it is not. Laughs are scarce at an early-afternoon run-through. Afterward the NBC people share notes; they want the male lead to show more swagger. Kill his line about how he has "a scary amount of hair products for a straight guy," they say. But tinkering won't save this show. It feels like 1970s television.

Later Zucker muses about why creating a popular sitcom is hard. "There are so many being done, by all the networks and by cable, that the talent is being stretched thin, both on the writing level and on the acting level," he says. Writers and producers no longer apprentice for years before trying to create their own shows. The process is also rushed. NBC will shoot all 15 pilots over a few weeks, and each has just eight days to go from script to taping. The calendar is compressed by the need to have everything ready to present to media buyers. It's nothing like the years of painstaking R&D that GE can devote to its jet engines or medical devices.

Yet the performance standards for comedies are nearly as exacting. Viewers reared on Cosby and Seinfeld come to the TV set with high expectations--and itchy fingers on the remote. They've seen it all. "The form has been around a long time," says Zucker. Some network executives, although not Zucker, worry that the shopworn format, with its canned laughter and joke-a-minute dialogue, has lost its appeal, particularly with young viewers. Indeed, for all the effort that NBC has devoted to finding a new comedy in the past three seasons, the most popular program that Zucker has come up with is Fear Factor, a gross-out reality show. On a recent episode, contestants gulped a blended drink of nightcrawlers, red worms, and cockroaches.

"We're broadcasters," says Zucker. "We run the gamut."

Although Zucker has an Ivy League pedigree, his television education came at Today, a program that mixes the serious and silly. He had a knack for sensing what was hot, whether it was hard news during the Lewinsky scandal or live outdoor concerts in Rockefeller Center. He also learned the value of promotion and stunts, creating a contest for viewers called "Where in the World is Matt Lauer?" In prime time, too, he has used gimmickry to good effect; it was his idea, for example, to "supersize" Friends, extending some episodes past the half-hour so that by the time viewers changed channels, they would have missed the start of competing shows.

From the start, Zucker impressed people with his tenacity. "He's like a dog," says a friend, who means it as a compliment. He relished the morning-show competition. He also worked through two bouts of colon cancer, scheduling chemotherapy treatments for Friday afternoons so he could be back at the office on Mondays. From that he learned not to sweat the small stuff, he says: "If somebody wants to be mad at me, or upset at a decision, it doesn't bother me."

Whether all those skills will translate to prime time remains to be seen. Certainly his relentlessness served NBC well when he persuaded Warner Bros. and the cast of Friends to agree to a tenth season. "Jeff was instrumental, even invaluable, in getting the deal done," says Peter Roth, head of TV production at Warner. NBC will pay $10 million per episode for Friends, a record for a sitcom. Critics say Zucker overpaid. "We'll make money on the show," he replies.

Securing another year of Friends buys NBC time to develop new comedies and all but assures the network big ratings next year as fans savor the final episodes. "We will win next season," Zucker declares. Looking beyond Friends, FORTUNE has learned that NBC, Warner, and the Friends producers have begun informal talks about a spinoff, most likely built around the character of Joey, played by Matt LeBlanc. Neither Zucker nor Peter Roth would comment. But Zucker is preparing for a world without Friends. He made a deal with DreamWorks Television to develop the first computer-generated animation series for TV, a comedy called Father of the Pride, about the animals that perform in Siegfried and Roy's Las Vegas extravaganza. "These are the people who brought you Shrek," Zucker says. "They can't fail." He is either naive or trying to sell me--remember, there are no sure things in television.

As the day ends, Zucker and his development team go to a run-through of a family comedy called Stuck in the Middle. This one stars Annie Potts and Timothy Busfield as middle-class parents of three children. It's amusing but feels familiar: There's a precocious little kid, a rebellious teenager, a slightly goofy dad. It would mark a departure for NBC, which targets young adults and so has almost no kids on its air. NBC doesn't just want funny shows, it wants funny shows that appeal to viewers 18 to 49, which, for unknown reasons, seems to rule out shows with old people or kids.

"I'm pleasantly surprised," Zucker tells the producers when the run-through ends. "It's funny." The question is, Is this an NBC show? And can the writers take it to the next level by the time the pilot is taped in a few days?

Zucker isn't counting on any one show for the fall. He is excited by Coupling, a sexy and daring ensemble show that originated on the BBC. He likes Come to Papa, which stars a standup comedian named Tom Papa, who opens for Jerry Seinfeld. A show called Once Around the Park, starring Heather Locklear as a divorced mother, looks good; she has been in four hits spanning two decades, from T.J. Hooker to Dynasty, Melrose Place, and Spin City. "Certain people are television stars," says Zucker. (That's what people said about Bill Cosby until his last, disappointing sitcom.)

Zucker has the optimism of a born salesman. It is easy to forget that all but a few of the shows we are talking about will never make it onto the air, and that most of the rest will soon be gone and forgotten. Never mind. When an upbeat Zucker takes his place at center stage of the Metropolitan Opera House on May 12 to introduce the lineup to advertisers, every show will sound like a hit. Call it the magic of television.

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