Yesterday, When Cable Seemed So Far Away

In a television season in which a series starring Sally Field as a Supreme Court justice, “The Court,” was canceled after three episodes, former NBC President Herb Schlosser’s recollection about 1969--when Field was playing “The Flying Nun”--provides a pretty good sense of the one-way flight that television has taken.

That year, he said, NBC went through the season without making a scheduling change--not in January, when it’s become expected that networks shake up their lineups, or March, when viewers are deluged with spring series tryouts.

“Program changes were far less frequent,” Schlosser said. “It was a more leisurely pace.”

How much more leisurely? Demographic breakdowns of the previous night’s ratings, today pored over in minute detail as soon as the sun rises, weren’t available for two weeks. Programming executives, whose comings and goings provide grist not only for newspapers but also for modern TV outlets like E! Entertainment and “Access Hollywood,” seldom saw their names in print.

Instead of a frenzied schedule-setting process each May, when new series are evaluated and chosen, CBS would announce its lineup on Washington’s birthday, in February. As a courtesy, the handful of network executives who had a say in setting the schedule visited each studio to screen its prototypes, as opposed to holing up to watch in their headquarters surrounded by dozens of employees, as they have been doing this week.

Given the emphasis on nostalgia during the current rating sweeps, it was inevitable that TV executives would indulge in their own trip down memory lane. So it was that NBC, as part of 75th anniversary festivities that include a prime-time special Sunday, assembled a panel from its past and present to reminisce about the network’s history.

Before that event, held Wednesday at the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, those executives met at NBC to discuss television, then and now.

Not surprisingly, those who have left the network sounded a bit like a character from “Gigi,” expressing relief that they were no longer part of the fray.

Before the 1980s, said former NBC chairman Grant Tinker, “NBC was always a profitable second, and RCA was happy with it.... You didn’t yank programs because it was a profitable business. There wasn’t that pressure.”

The executive suite, once shrouded in mystery, has since become a fishbowl. “The media coverage now is enormous, so executives are judged more rapidly,” noted Schlosser, a senior advisor at Salomon Smith Barney in New York whose legacy includes launching “Laugh-In” and “Saturday Night Live.” “The media isn’t judging just the programming. They’re judging them.”

The television business was “much more fun,” said Tinker. “It was such a breeze to do what we did with three networks getting 90% of the audience every night. It was a no-lose.... I wouldn’t want to do what these guys do for anything.”

Of course, Tinker famously set a tone in the 1980s that put the focus on quality--sticking with shows such as “Cheers” and “Hill Street Blues,” which gradually blossomed into hits. In what might sound like heresy at a time when executives rely heavily on focus-group data, Tinker urged his proteges “not to let the research run the schedule ... and dictate what you put on.” Former NBC Entertainment President Warren Littlefield, who worked for Tinker and Brandon Tartikoff, recalled Tinker’s advising them, “First be best, then be first.”

Littlefield and Don Ohlmeyer, who was NBC’s West Coast president from 1993 to 1999 but opted to skip the anniversary event, point to the early 1990s as a seminal period for network television. As Fox became a legitimate force and cable channels rapidly proliferated, networks suddenly found themselves questioning where they fit in the TV landscape.

“What had traditionally been the strength of a network, which was the breadth and strength of what it brought to the course of a day

According to Littlefield, by the time he became president in 1990, the major networks were no longer automatically profitable and were grappling with redefining their role in a cable-wired world. “It was no longer about serving everyone.... I thought that was really a sea change,” he said.

Moreover, in recent years cable channels have exhibited the ability to launch programs that can become media sensations, from HBO’s “The Sopranos” to MTV’s “The Osbournes.”

“It puts a lot of pressure on us,” current NBC Entertainment President Jeff Zucker acknowledged. “It’s particularly intense today.... We judge programs after one airing, and everybody writes about the week-to-week falloff after the first week, so it’s no surprise that we’re getting judged on how we’re doing six months into our tenure.”

NBC Chairman Bob Wright, who has overseen the network since General Electric acquired it in 1986, maintains that broadcasting will have to become more community-based in the years ahead--offering live and local programming that isn’t available elsewhere--to combat newer technologies and the fact that the average home receives roughly 90 channels.

Yet despite those competitive forces, Robert Mulholland, an NBC president from 1976 to 1984, pointed out that doom-and-gloom predictions began during his watch and that broadcasters will continue to adapt and endure. “People have been predicting the death of the broadcast networks ever since HBO went on the air,” he said.

Listening to their predecessors discuss canceling shows with audience shares that would rank as today’s highest-rated programs--among them the original “Star Trek,” which NBC dropped in the 1960s--NBC’s current crop of executives sounded a bit wistful.

“We are ready to do a pilot called ‘The Good Old Days’ any time you’re ready,” Schlosser said.

Most agreed, however, that at least one aspect of television remains unchanged. “It’s still a hit-driven business,” Littlefield said, “and they’re still out there to be had.”