can someone explain NBC'S ridiculous collapse?

[cash money 1999]

they ran the 90's LENO ,CONAN ,FRIENDS ,ER ,THE COSBY SHOW ,SEINFELD ....then they took more risk's than anyone . when everyone was making laughtrack sitcomsthey where making really good television....friday night lights ,freaks and geeks ,the office ,hannibal ....why are their ratings in the toilet?even right now big bang are killing it with the same old 90's and shows like parks and recreation community are struggling to stay on the air....where did they go wrong?

 

[thadoctadvocate]

no i cant explain sorry. wish i could do

 

[water]

People stopped watching TV. 

 

[cash money 1999]

People stopped watching TV. 

even then they where the first to the itunes and hulu party while having a good amount of shows on netflix

 

[mw2889]

You diidn't even mention losing the NBA, and that was the most catastrophic loss

 

[water]

People stopped watching TV. 

even then they where the first to the itunes and hulu party while having a good amount of shows on netflix

I don't know then. I barely pay attention to what channels the shows I watch are on. I just stroll through guide and hit record to watch later. 

 

[cash money 1999]

You diidn't even mention losing the NBA, and that was the most catastrophic loss

they have the nfl which makes 100000000 times more money . i dont think they could afford both

 

[Nike Jordan]

 

[big j 33]

Yeah, pretty much Jeff Zucker.

From the time of the Tonight Show debacle

Peacock-Killer Jeff Zucker Must Go
http://gawker.com/5447336/peacock+killer-jeff-zucker-must-go

Many years ago, NBC decided that the guy who came up with the idea of doing concerts on The Today Show would make a great network head. Now they are in last place. Except in jokes, where they are first.

Jeff Zucker is the chairman of NBC Universal. And no one is sure why. He made his name at The Today Show, where he proved really good at attention-grabbing gimmicks. Like: let's have a bunch of yokels with signs right behind the anchors! More of that adorable pixie Katie Couric! Make it three hours long! (And, eventually, four hours long!) That sort of thing. The Today Show was broadcast from a streetside studio in the 1950s, by the way. They also had a chimp for a mascot. Gimmicks always work on morning shows. And any moron can think of them.

But because he made a morning show popular and profitable, Zucker became the head of NBC Entertainment. He took over a network that still had Friends and Frasier and Will & Grace and E.R.. He came up with the brilliant idea of making some of the more popular shows slightly longer, sometimes (during sweeps). (This meant that there was a night, during sweeps week, when popular sitcom Will & Grace aired from 8:40-9:20 p.m. ET. Set your VCRs!) He also came up with the brilliant idea of replacing Friends with Joey, which finally answered the question, "what if the show had just been called Friend?"

NBC's 2005-2006 season was the worst it had seen in decades. So, naturally, when NBC Universal chairman Bob Wright finally resigned the next year, Jeff Zucker got his job! At that point, Zucker had already planted the seeds of this hilarious mess: in 2004, he told Conan he'd give him The Tonight Show in 2009. Leno had been making money for the network for years and showed no signs of stopping, but apparently Zucker thought the guy who still does standup every damn weekend after taping five terrible but very professional shows during the week would be tired of show business after five more years. While some people greeted this news with relief that our long national nightmare of Jay Leno was almost over, it made no sense at all from a network programming standpoint, even at the time. 54-year-old Leno was high-rated and popular and loved his job. 59-year-old Leno was not going to retire. He was going to go to another network.

(Zucker also replaced a fairly successful network programmer with Ben Silverman in 2007, and then refused to fire Ben Silverman for two years, as Ben Silverman basically destroyed the remains of NBC's primetime lineup.)

Jeff Zucker is a failure and an idiot. A child could run a network better than this. Like, for example, a bright child could've predicted that cheaply produced late-night comedy at 10 p.m. would not attract an audience as large as real TV, and that it would destroy the lead-in for local news, piss off affiliates, ruin ratings for everything airing on the network after 10 p.m., and destroy two profitable long-running franchises. That negates the little profit you were hoping to squeeze out by airing actual garbage in prime time. A child also understands that you cannot promise to give the same thing to two different people.

There was a time, a couple years back, when CBS was in the tank, and Letterman spent night after night specifically mocking, by name, CBS President Les Moonves. It was wonderful TV. Letterman is a crank, of course, but once CBS recovered, he stopped. Moonves may be a prick, but CBS is on top. Conan doesn't have Letterman's killer instinct, but the time might be right to switch from the "NBC" jokes to Jeff Zucker jokes. Amusingly, they know each other: when they were at Harvard, Conan was with The Harvard Lampoon and Zucker was the president of The Harvard Crimson.

As a prank, O'Brien's staff stole all the Crimson issues one day before they could be delivered. Zucker called the cops. "My first meeting with Jeff Zucker was in handcuffs, with a Cambridge police officer reading me my rights," says O'Brien.
See? Humorless ******* then, humorless ******* now.

Jeff Zucker did something incredibly dumb: he screwed a comedian. A comedian with a TV show. A comedian that other comedians like. You don't do that unless you really want your dumb decisions ripped to shreds on your own (and everyone else's) network every night. And Zucker did this while attempting to keep his job in the event of a successful Comcast acquisition of NBC Universal.

So: it's time to go, Jeff! It is time to go and be forgotten forever except as a character, hopefully to be played by Bob Balaban, in some future made-for-cable movie about how NBC died.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/opinion/13dowd.html?_r=0

Maybe America just didn’t want to look at a redhead at that hour.

“For the record,” Conan O’Brien wryly noted in a statement addressed to “People of Earth” outlining his refusal to host NBC’s “The Tonight Show” if it was shoved back half-an-hour, “I am truly sorry about my hair; it’s always been that way.”

This is the week of the television winter press tour from Pasadena, when the networks traditionally roll out their offerings for midseason replacement shows. But there’s only one replacement show that anyone here is talking about: an NBC family drama bloodier than “The Tudors” and more inexplicable than “Lost,” a tragedy about comedy featuring an imperious emperor and his two dueling jesters in a once-mighty and now-blighted kingdom.

As NBC reeled from the fallout of Jeff Zucker’s tacit admission that his attempt to refashion the customary way Americans watch prime time had failed, Hollywood was ablaze with baldenfreude.

In a town where nobody makes less than they’re worth, and most people pull in an obscene amount more, there has been a single topic of discussion: How does Jeff Zucker keep rising and rising while the fortunes of NBC keep falling and falling?

The 44-year-old is a very smart guy who made a success as a wunderkind at “The Today Show,” but many in the Hollywood community have always regarded him as a condescending and arrogant East Coaster, a network Napoleon who never bothered to learn about developing shows and managing talent. At a moment when Zucker’s comedy double-fault was smashing relationships in L.A., he showed the talent of a Mafia boss for separating himself from the hit when he went and played in a New York City tennis tournament. (He lost in the first round.)

“Zucker is a case study in the most destructive media executive ever to exist,” said a honcho at another network. “You’d have to tell me who else has taken a once-great network and literally destroyed it.”

Zucker’s critics are ranting that first he killed comedy, losing the NBC franchise of Thursday night “Must See TV,” where “Seinfeld,” “Friends” and “Will & Grace” once hilariously reigned; then he killed drama, failing to develop successors to the formidable “ER,” “West Wing,” and “Law & Order”; then he killed the 10 o’clock hour by putting Jay Leno on at a time when people expect to be told a story; and then he killed late night by putting on a quirky redhead who did not have the bland mass-market appeal of Leno and who couldn’t compete with the peerless late-night comedian NBC had stupidly lost 16 years ago, David Letterman.

Zucker is a master at managing up with bosses and calculating cost-per-hour benefits, but even though he made money on cable shows, he could not program network to save his life. He started by greenlighting the regrettable “Emeril” and ended by having the aptly titled “The Biggest Loser” as one of his only winners.

Certainly, Zucker greatly underestimated the deeply ingrained viewing patterns of older Americans, who have always watched the networks in a particular way. The kids come home, do their homework, the family has dinner. They’re in front of the TV by 8, and 8:30 is known as the dog-walking slot. At 9, it’s time for more comedy. As they get tired, they like to watch a fictional drama that leads into the real drama of the late local news. And then they like to laugh again so that those images of war or a local murder are not the last thing they see before bed.

America has been watching a very specific sort of guy at 11:35 p.m. for half a century, one who chuckles as Mary Tyler Moore or Sarah Jessica Parker tells an amusing story and lets us drift off by the time some stand-up comic or blow-up starlet tells a salacious joke.

Zucker rolled the dice because he wanted to show Jeff Immelt that he could get beyond his Ben Silverman debacle and get prime time to stop bleeding money (a problem he created). But he learned the hard way that it is a lot to undo.

As Mark Harris wrote in New York magazine in November, “Zucker has often behaved like the grudging caretaker of a dying giant. ... As much as Jeff Zucker would like to cast the blame elsewhere, substituting number-crunching defensiveness for enterprise, adventure, and showmanship is what helped get NBC into this mess.”

Consumed with the NBC game of musical late-night chairs, Hollywood machers play a game of trying to figure out the last time there has been a blunder of such outlandish proportions. Despite everything, Zucker just got his contract renewed for three years with the Comcast acquisition of NBC. “Not since J. Pierrepont Finch in ‘How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying’ has an executive failed upwards in so obvious a fashion,” marveled one TV writer.

Another called the Leno experiment the worst mistake made by anyone in television since an ABC Entertainment executive told the Chicago affiliate chief that the network didn’t want to own and broadcast the new daytime talk show hosted by a young black woman. Her name: Oprah Winfrey.

 

[651akathepaul]

You diidn't even mention losing the NBA, and that was the most catastrophic loss

they have the nfl which makes 100000000 times more money . i dont think they could afford both

I think this is an oxymoron.

 

[the hater boxden]

You diidn't even mention losing the NBA, and that was the most catastrophic loss

even if they had it now ratings plummeted after jordan left.

 

[Scarborough]

NBA on NBC double and triple headers always had me amped when i was younger.

 

[|A-Man|]

Just A LOT of stupid decisions at NBC is all. I've given up on them for now but I know eventually somebody will right the ship.

I think this is an oxymoron.

He means NBC couldn't afford the price the NBA and NFL would charge to have them on their network. Plus you don't spend your earnings from one client to pay the other. That's backwards business.