Word: littlefield
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When NBC's top-rated block of Thursday night sitcoms (The Cosby Show, Cheers) began to fall apart in the early '90s, it was Littlefield who shrewdly remade the night, adding new hits like Seinfeld and Friends and capping it off with ER, the medical drama that is now TV's No. 1 show. It was Littlefield who found himself "laughing out loud" at a quirky comedy pilot called Third Rock from the Sun that was first brought to ABC; he put it on NBC in January and got credit for discovering the only bona fide...
...line between a programming genius and someone headed out the door for a station manager's job in Reno is, of course, notoriously indistinct. And Littlefield has had his share of bad ideas (remember Madman of the People?). Kevin Bright, an executive producer of Friends, recalls that Littlefield early on thought the series needed an older regular to counterbalance the twentysomething stars. The producers disagreed. "Another network executive might have said, 'No! I want this older character.' But Warren trusted our instincts and went with...
...Jersey native, Littlefield worked as a truck driver and foreman of a concrete-mixing crew before getting into TV. He joined NBC in comedy development in 1979, worked his way up and succeeded the charismatic Tartikoff as president of NBC Entertainment 12 years later when Tartikoff left to become chairman of Paramount Pictures...
...dominant in the ratings then, but morale was falling: many of its hits (Cosby, The Golden Girls, L.A. Law) were past their prime, and Littlefield admits he didn't move fast enough to make changes. When Don Ohlmeyer, a former NBC Sports exec, was brought in to oversee the network's entertainment division in 1993, many figured Littlefield would get the ax. Yet he survived--even through the dark days when NBC was being derided for having lost Letterman, who initially drew great ratings on CBS. "The scariest thing was when Dave came on that first year," he says...
...Littlefield's days of anonymity--and buffoonery--may be over. Last month he drew a packed auditorium when he spoke at the Harvard Business School. And when he was rushing down New York City's Madison Avenue not long ago, a homeless man greeted him by name. Just what a network programmer longs for: a mass audience. --Reported by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles