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

The stations had been obligated to continue buying whateverfresh episodes were produced through the ninth season. But thestudio had no more deals with stations after that. That meant theonly monetary value Warner Brothers had in Friends was whateverNBC agreed to pay for each episode.

With its $7-million-an-episode license fee, Friends was the mostexpensive show per half hour in television history. NBC had at onetime paid Warner Brothers $13 million an episode for ER, but thatworked out to only $6.5 million per half hour.

Incredibly, even at that bloated price, Warner Brothers was stillproducing Friends at a deficit: Apparently, $7 million an episode?ora yearly fee of $168 million for the twenty-four episodes NBCordered?gets eaten up fast when each of six cast members takes $1million out of the kitty every week and the creators, writers, anddirectors?not to mention all the other costs?swallow anotherhuge chunk.

When Peter Roth informed Zucker what it would cost NBC totag on yet another year of Friends, it sounded like the ravings of awould-be Croesus. Zucker told Roth it wasn?t going to happen andto plan for the definitive finale at the conclusion of season nine.Then Zucker went back to his office and dispatched Graboff toinvestigate the claims Warner Brothers was making about having nofinancial incentive to continue the show for another year. Graboffcame back with a surprising message: ?Shockingly enough, WarnerBrothers was telling the truth; there really isn?t much value, if any,to them in syndication for a tenth season.?

Zucker delivered that message?and the figure?to Wright at theNBC budget meeting in October: NBC would have to pay a heartstopping$10 million an episode to keep Friends on the air.Zucker also brought along a recommendation: NBC shouldpay up.

It had become painfully clear to Zucker, as it had to most everyoneelse at NBC, that Friends was the linchpin to holding on to Thursdaynight. The network had tried for years to find a comedy to replace it,and nothing remotely close was on the horizon. By this time, in mid-October, it was depressingly apparent that the comedy-developmentteam had struck out again. Good Morning, Miami wasn?t going to fillFriends?s shoes with anything but sand. As for Scrubs, it was lookingmore and more, as Zucker had expected, like a niche hit, unlikely toever expand beyond the core audience who loved it.

A Friends deal for $10 million an episode?or a migraine-inducing$240 million for the year, essentially wiping out the entireannual profit of the Today show?would strain the NBC prime-timeprofit machine. But only a bit. Zucker figured that NBC could stillpackage other shows with Friends in its ad sales and book somemoney that way. The alternative was to go into an upfront in Maywithout any ?must-buy? comedy to offer advertisers on Thursdaynight, endangering the huge premiums that NBC always relied on.

For twenty years NBC had been able to find the next hit to keepits Thursday winning streak going. Sustaining that run had inspiredNBC to inventiveness in programming and scheduling, moves thathad transformed network strategy and even the way Americanswatched television.

The departure of Friends would bring on an inevitable crisis, andNBC wanted to?had to?put that off as long as possible. For BobWright, institutional memory came sharply into play. He knew NBChad peeked into the abyss of a total wipeout of its Thursday-nightcomedy franchise once before, only to be saved at the very lastminute by the bizarre combination of a buried treasure and WhoopiGoldberg?s love life.

At that time, in 1993, NBC tried mightily to keep the onlyThursday show working at the moment, Cheers, alive for one moreseason. The effort failed when the show?s star, Ted Danson, quit torun off with Whoopi. Out of that trauma came a miraculous comeback,however, because NBC was able to plug an under-the-radarWednesday-night show called Seinfeld into the Thursday-at-9 slotlong occupied by Cheers.

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