Minimum Headroom

There is a popular story in the television business about a psychologist in Pasadena who wanted to replicate that business in his laboratory.

He installed a bridge in each of two cages of white rats. In one, he fed the rats a small amount of food whenever they jumped over the bridge. In the other, he rewarded their jumps with a much larger amount of a much richer food.

Then the psychologist stopped feeding both groups. The first group of rats promptly stopped jumping over the bridge and tried other activities. The second group, which had been given the lavish rewards, kept jumping in exactly the same way until they passed out from exhaustion. Then they were revived and jumped until they died.

It's important to remember the story of the psychologist and his rats when one thinks about the television business and, especially, to consider the concept of rich feeding when one thinks about just why television is so incredibly repetitive and derivative. That psychologist could testify. (continued on page 157)Minimum Headroom(continued from page 124)

The TV business, like the auto-parts business, the rubber-goods business, the pet-food business and the investment-banking business, runs on money; and determinations of success and failure within that business are based on counting money. That's point one: The TV business is all about how much money the people who are in it can make, preferably fast.

Point two is that the television business, like very few others, takes in a huge amount of money for a very few people.

To wit: A writer of a network-sitcom script, a document of about 40 very widely spaced pages, gets about $45,000, counting reruns and story money. A successful staff writer and supervising producer on a hit sitcom such as Cheers can and does make close to $500,000 per year if he gets six scripts on the air. A writer of an hour-long continuing drama such as Falcon Crest, if he can get a producer credit thrown in, can and does make well over $500,000 per year. In both cases, this is for a year that, in any meaningful sense, lasts about nine months.

This is just the beginning, the peon level of TV wages. If a TV writer is hot, a studio will sign him up to write pilots for series. If the studio really wants the writer, it can and will pay him (or her) $500,000 to write one hourlong pilot script.

If a sitcom writer is sizzling, like Michael Leeson, who co-wrote the pilot of The Cosby Show, he can get close to $1,000,000 for one 40-page script.

If the sitcom hits and stays on the air for three years, by which time it can be syndicated, and if one person both wrote the pilot and has producing credit, his share of the take can be $10,000,000. As I am writing this, Tom Patchett is rumored to have been offered more than $10,000,000 for his share of the proceeds from ALF, for which he wrote, coproduced and directed the pilot and was executive producer for the first season's shows.

Norman Lear, who started out with a typewriter and a chair and a table and turned them into All in the Family, The Jeffersons and One Day at a Time, among others, recently sold the company he and a partner owned for close to half a billion dollars. One of Lear's top executives, who got producing credits on many of the maestro's comedies, was bought out of his credits--and he had never written a show or directed an episode--for $30,000,000.

Aaron (Love Boat) Spelling, who also made Charlie's Angels and other hits, recently took his production company public. He made $127,000,000 in profit from the sale of stock, retained control of the company and drew a 1986 salary of $26,000,000 (far more than Lee Iacocca's widely publicized $20,500,000).

The bonanza to end all bonanzas came to former ABC executives Tom Werner and Marcy Carsey. They left the network about seven years ago to form their own TV production company. One of their first ventures was The Cosby Show. It has been by far the most successful television show--and maybe the most successful communications enterprise--in history. It will earn, at a minimum, one billion dollars in syndication before the end of the century.

This sum, after costs to Viacom, the show's distributor, and residuals, will be split solely among Carsey, Werner and Bill Cosby. If the split is anywhere near even, all three will soon be on the Forbes 400-richest list, along with Rockefeller grandchildren, only richer.

That's just at the level of suppliers to the networks. At the network level--the buyer level, as it's called here--the money is even more staggering. Broadcasting revenues for network television now approach ten billion dollars. In a good year, profits from the three broadcast networks can exceed one and a half billion dollars.

The feed stock that determines whether or not a network is making that kind of money is the public's appetite for its shows. A single rating point (the number of households watching television at any given moment divided by 100) is worth as much as $50,000,000 in ad revenue.

If a network's ratings move up, its revenues also advance; and if its revenues advance, then, barring a catastrophe of mismanagement--which definitely can happen--the network's profits rise. If they rise, the stock of the parent company rises. In other words, if there are a few hit shows on a network, and that network moves from third to first place (as happened to NBC), the value of the shares of the company on the stock exchange can rise by literally billions of dollars--all from putting on something that the audience likes, and maybe chuckles at, slightly more than the other shows that are on at that hour.

In other words, the stakes for success in the television business are immense and are immensely large for individuals and extraordinarily closely linked to the success or failure of the efforts of a few human beings who write shows, produce shows and choose shows for the networks.

Now, you might think that the effect of all that money chasing the "creative" talent in Hollywood, the writers and producers, would be to make them sprout little buds and petals and bloom into a million myriad forms of unique television-show life, making "a thousand flowers blossom," to use the words of Chairman Mao. You might think that, but then you would be wrong, and that's just the problem.

The effect of all that money on television creation and production is exactly the same as the effect dazzling halogen headlights on a BMW have on a little deer on a mountain road: The sums of money involved in Hollywood are literally paralyzing. The amount of money for buyers and sellers, for network execs and writers in tasseled loafers, for producers in Cabriolets and institutional analysts in Manhattan cubbyholes--that amount of money riding on "creative" decisions is literally and precisely terrifying and overwhelming.

Here is how the situation works in theory, by a political analogy: The crush of money pouring in from television makes the little world of television-show creation and production into a sort of totalitarian state where mind control is practiced. The threat that enforces the mind control is not a one-way ticket to Siberia or imprisonment in a psychiatric hospital. The threat is that if you do not follow the party line, you will not get to be rich.

Here is how it works down on the ground, right around the studios and the network offices on Radford Avenue and on Alameda Boulevard and in Century City:

Joe Blowmovitz, head of nighttime comedy at The Network, gets a call from programing chief Grant Robertson saying that their show Trust Me is getting killed at nine p.m. on Thursdays by the shows on the other networks at that hour.

"What we need," says Robertson, "is something wildly new and excitingly different to draw away the viewers who are not wholeheartedly committed to the other networks."

Joe Blowmovitz goes back to his office and thinks. He knows that it's near "pilot season," when pilots--that is, proposals for pilots--will start pouring in from all of the production houses, ranging from Warner Bros. and Fox to companies you have never heard of. He determines that he will make a big effort to find something wildly, overwhelmingly new and different. In the meantime, he will set up a series of lunches with major suppliers to tell them that The Network is looking for something good at nine p.m. on Thursdays that has to be wildly new and excitingly different.

The suppliers all gather up their writers and tell them to start thinking Thursdays at nine p.m., new and wildly exciting and different.

After a few days or weeks, the suppliers all send their ideas and their pilot scripts to Joe Blowmovitz. Now--surprise, surprise--those pilot scripts will all arrive at The Network with little notes from the producers saying that the scripts in question are all stunningly new and excitingly different. But, upon a halfway decent reading, what the network exec will see is that each one is a slightly reworked version of The Odd Couple, with teenagers, or The Mary Tyler Moore Show, only set in an Air Force radar station, or I Love Lucy, only with two sisters instead of a husband and wife, or The Cosby Show, only with a black woman and her mother raising the family instead of a black husband and wife. None of the shows that the suppliers send over will be a real look at life, like Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, or a wacky, unpredictable show aimed at a smart audience, like Monty Python's Flying Circus. Every show will be very close to a half dozen basic templates that have succeeded in the recent past.

Why? Money. The suppliers will powwow after their lunches with Joe Blowmovitz and will toss around ideas. Then, either consciously and directly or otherwise, the suppliers will say, "You know, if this hits on Thursdays at nine p.m., we have a $200,000,000 vehicle on our hands. If this goes into syndication, we're going to be able to look Aaron Spelling in the eye and not blink. The Network is really looking to attract a big audience, and The Network has liked shows like All in the Family and The Jeffersons in the past. So why should we take any chances? Let's go right down the center of the bowling alley ourselves and give The Network the kind of show they won't have any trouble with. If we go too far out on a limb, they're going to go with someone who didn't."

When Joe Blowmovitz and his colleagues get together to read the scripts, they are all going to be thinking, and their thoughts will be as follows: "You know, if we can just keep our jobs here at The Network for a little longer, we can eventually get to leave here and become major officials at the suppliers. That means that sooner or later, our little production company is going to get a Cosby or at least a Mork & Mindy, and if we do, we're going to be rich.

"So the last thing we, as network executives, want to do is send up to Grant Robertson any pilot that looks wacky and unusual. If we do that, Grant may well think that we're becoming too highbrow or too lowbrow on him, and next time there's a corporate reorganization, we're going to be out--before we've had a chance to latch on to a great gig with a supplier.

"Let's be smart about this. Let's send him ones that are a tiny bit new but are really fairly similar to what has already worked. And, most certainly, let's send him scripts by writers who have had hits in the past and from production companies whose heads he plays tennis with.

"That way, if he chooses one of the shows we send him and puts it into production as a pilot, if the pilot is a total stifferino, we can always say, 'Well, gee, Grant, how were we supposed to know? They did a great job on Highway to Heaven and they really went to town on Designing Women. How were we to know it wouldn't work out this time? Anyway, you liked the guy whose company made it.' In other words, like Admiral Poindexter and President Reagan, we can cover our asses enough to keep our jobs a while longer."

The reasoning has a perfectly sensible flip side, too. "If we do send up something really different, and if Grant likes it and produces it and it's a dog in the ratings, we have no excuse when Grant says it was all our fault and we hypnotized him. That'll be our asses for sure."

A similar process operates when the pilot scripts get to the desk of Grant Robertson. He reads them carefully and then he thinks about them. Like any human being, he thinks about them primarily in reference to himself. What he thinks, purely and simply, is, "Some of these shows are fine and some are dogs. Of the ones that are fine, some of them are slightly off center, even if very slightly, indeed. Others are perfectly on center, right down the middle of the bowling alley. Of that group, some of them are made by producers and writers who already have successful shows on the air and with whom The Network likes to work.

"If I choose one or two of them to produce and try out on the air, it just might work. On the other hand, if it does not work, Robert Wright or Laurence Tisch or Thomas Murphy is not going to come storming into my office and start screaming that I gambled The Network's money on a long shot and that I should be out of here, bag and baggage, by five p.m.

"If I choose something safe and sane and conservative, I can stay here as long as I want. I can accumulate major stock options. When I leave, I can go to any supplier I like, on any terms I find interesting. Eventually, one of those suppliers is going to come up with another ALF or another Facts of Life, which will be a flesh-eating monster in syndication, and I will retire rich at 55.

"If I choose something off the beaten path and it works, where's the percentage for me? I'II stay in my job just as easily by choosing something safe that flops as by choosing something off the wall that succeeds. And if that off-the-wall something fails, suddenly my name's retrovirus in this business.

"Why should I gamble The Network's stockholders' money, the nine-P.M. Thursday time slot and my own financial well-being on something different? I'II choose the route that gives me maximum plausibility in case it fails--as most TV pilots do. I'II choose the show that gives me the chance to tell Mr. Tisch or Mr. Wright or Mr. Murphy, 'Well, gee, it should have worked. It had a big production company behind it, hit writers, and even you said it reminded you of Amos 'n' Andy.'''

On and on up the ladder it goes, and the name of the game is a name that everyone in any organization from kindergarten to the National Security Council already knows. The name of the game is cover your ass. The particular variety of the game that is played in the TV business is played with $1,000,000 chips.

Just by staying at the roulette table long enough, you are virtually guaranteed to see your number come up on the wheel. You can't win if you're not at the table, said Joan Didion in Play It as It Lays. All it takes to stay at the table is to get into the tiny world of TV production and network-executive "leadership." All that's necessary to get yourself kicked out of the casino is a rep for picking oddball pilots. Staying in the game is everything in TV production, and you stay in the game by playing it safe. No showboating with intellectualoid premises, no tedious comedy shows that actually make viewers think, no adventure shows that connect with daily life, nothing to make anybody else in the casino think that you're not with the program.

There's just too goddamned much money at stake to do anything else.

Now, television is made by human beings. The rules of television production--that there will be a huge traffic jam around the middle, the safe, the tried and the tired--are rules of human conduct, with the first rule "Me first and everything else way back there." But that rule, like all rules of human conduct, has exceptions that test it.

Occasionally, a human being comes along who is so creative, so confident and so articulate that he convinces other human beings that their interests will be maximized by taking a chance on his concept. Norman Lear did it with his first line of shows about real human anger, fear and weakness, starting with All in the Family and continuing with Maude, The Jeffersons and his masterpiece, Mary Hartman. Those shows were enormous hits and laid the groundwork for a television empire. (Although, interestingly enough, they were followed out of the Lear emporium by far more conventional, more orthodox shows such as One Day at a Time, which were basically throwbacks to safer programing days. The power of the conventional, the normal, the safe money was felt even by Norman Lear.)

One of the great geniuses of television production, Grant Tinker, encouraged two of the great writers of television, Jim Brooks and Allan Burns, to turn out the dazzling Mary Tyler Moore, one of the only shows on television ever to talk about alienation in any meaningful sense. The same Tinker, as head of NBC, facilitated two other geniuses, Tony Yerkovich and Michael Mann, who gave the world the perfect visuals of Miami Vice; Mann was also executive producer of Crime Story. The same Tinker also gave a nudge to NBC to make it accept slightly more intelligent material, and the results were the intelligent outcroppings of Cheers and Family Ties.

But these were rare exceptions. As any writer, producer or network executive can see with his own eyes, for every guy who hits it big by trying something new, there are 50 or 100 living off their dividends, playing golf every day, who played it safe and wrote to the specifications of the commonplace. For every guy who tried something new and made it, there are a legion who tried something old and made it. The result is that now, after 35 years of network television, the man or woman who tries something new is rarer every year. After all, there is now a mountain of experience--getting higher every year--that tells us that tried and true in Hollywood is tried and rich.

The writers and producers and studio execs need no threats to stay in the center lane. They want to take the safe, sane, conservative path. That route leads to their being rich. That route leads to their having grandchildren who are financially secure. That route leads to multimillion-dollar accounts at Merrill Lynch, the Morgan Bank as your own private banker, a house in Bel-Air, a cottage on Malibu Road, two Porsche Carreras, a wife who gets her legs waxed every month and a girlfriend half or one third your age--or a boyfriend with muscles that make Dolph Lundgren look like a garden hose. That safe, sane route, in other words, leads to the rich, lavish helpings of rat food.

Alas, there are consequences of the lavish-rat-food diet beyond its effect on the rats. First, after so many years of network shows' coming out safe, sane and repetitive, the viewers get fed up. If they can, they turn off the TV. If they cannot, they turn to cable or to the VCR.

Likewise, the size of the network audience drops, and its demographic quality deteriorates--both of which are already happening in a big way. Obviously, the first persons to decide they have had enough and cannot take it any longer will be the most educated, most intelligent watchers, and they usually have the most money and are the ones sponsors want to reach. As they leave the network audience permanently, the networks get more and more panicky. They get more and more scared of doing something wrong. That means, they get even more conservative in their program choices, circle the wagons a little more closely and take an even saner, safer route than before.

Now, eventually, inevitably, one might suspect that the sameness of TV, its reminiscent flavor of those gravies we all used to get in fifth grade that might have been anything but were the same on every food--fish, meat, lamb, carrots--will drive still more viewers away, and then one day--presto!--the networks will no longer be the lavish feeding machines they now are. Then, when the feeding stops--at least the lavish feeding--we will get the real test of how right the Pasadena psychologist was: whether the writers and producers keep pitching rehashes of The Odd Couple in dusty, empty corridors in deserted offices hung with calendars from five years ago. We will see whether the writers and producers keep pitching another version of Mary Tyler Moore until they simply keel over with their little Gucci loafers pointing into the air.

But that day is not here, and not even close. For now, the rat food is flowing like water and wine, the feedings are regular and the jumping is fine.