‘Desperate Networks:’ ‘Friends’ To The End, Part II

Zucker had a new hope for Thursday at 9:30: a comedy from the
team that had brought NBC Will & Grace. This one, Good Morning,
Miami, was about a hotshot young producer of a morning television
program. The cynics who said Zucker favored it mostly because he
had been a hotshot morning television producer from Miami had a
case. The show was hopelessly lame.

But for Zucker the best news was that, so far, nothing Leslie
Moonves had tried had made a serious dent in ER?s ratings. Zucker
was confident NBC?s critical Thursday-night supremacy was in no
danger?yet.

Other scheduling pieces were clicking into place. Fear Factor
was a soaring hit on Monday nights, driving Zucker?s critics in the
press to ever-greater heights of hair-pulling, mouth-foaming outrage.
The third edition of the Law & Order franchise, Criminal
Intent, was building nicely on Sunday, and the other two editions
were stalwart 10 P.M. hits on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Overall, the picture had brightened considerably in Zucker?s
eighteen months on the job, allowing NBC to continue, and even
extend, its hold on first place in the 18-to-49 ratings and the huge
advantage in revenues and profits that went with it.

NBC had it all working, as Zucker was so fond of telling the
press. The Today show was still the master of the morning; Jay Leno
and Conan O?Brien and Saturday Night Live gave NBC a triplethreat
late-night franchise no other network could touch. NBC,
once the subject of endless rumors that General Electric would put
it on the auction block, was now a bigger profit center than any
other GE division.

But under all the bluster, Zucker had a few genuine concerns,
mainly about what was going to happen when he no longer had
Friends. As had happened twice previously, NBC had gone an extra
mile the previous winter and secured the ever-more-in-demand cast
of Friends for one more year.

Zucker got the deal done for a license fee of $7 million an
episode. That was then. Zucker started the new season in September
2002 knowing that Friends was gearing everything up toward an
end date the following May.

In October, Zucker was in New York along with his friend and
top business affairs executive, Marc Graboff, for a round of budget
meetings with the NBC brass?mainly Bob Wright and Randy
Falco. The meetings tended to go on interminably, but this time
Zucker had some big issues that had to be discussed urgently. Yes, it
was Friends again.

Zucker and Graboff laid out the situation. In discussions with
Warner Brothers the preceding spring, after concluding the deal
that brought Friends back for a ninth season, Peter Roth told NBC
that nothing short of a fully loaded and unlocked Brinks truck
would bring Friends back for a tenth year. This had nothing to do
with artistic concerns; it was all about the studio losing any substantial
financial interest in extending the show.

The explanation came down to syndication revenues. As all studios
do with hit shows, Warner Brothers had marketed the repeats
of Friends aggressively, selling them to local stations around the
country for big prices and collecting upward of a mind-boggling $3
billion. But stations do not need endless numbers of repeats to fill
out their schedules. Once a show is on for eight or nine years, it has
accumulated between 175 and 200 episodes. No station needs more
than that to run them throughout the year. At the prices Warner
Brothers had demanded for Friends, stations simply had no interest
in adding more episodes.

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