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Last weekend on Saturday Night Live, NBC drove Tiger Woods hard. In a skit, faux Tiger and wife Elin held a press conference, which got interrupted after a surprised Elin heard Tiger admit he had made "multiple transgressions." The shot cut away, but then Tiger returned, arm in a sling, claiming that he accidentally fell down a flight of stairs and "launched [himself] through a plate-glass window." The audience chuckled. In the Weekend Update segment, Seth Meyers teed Tiger up, noting that his sponsors were sticking with him, "a gesture that only means one thing - women don't watch...
...overwrought, it may be because the magic isn't just about what up to 8 million viewers watch every Wednesday. It's also in the copycatting that Glee inspires off screen. With an assist from other corners of pop culture - including a karaoke contest on Oprah and NBC's first-ever a cappella-oriented reality show, premiering this month - Glee is inspiring its most hard-core fans to do some singing of their own. Once the butt of jokes everywhere except on a handful of college campuses, a cappella is making inroads all over...
...Much of NBC's early DNA can be found in its current programming. Its Sunday-morning stalwart Meet the Press was originally a radio program when it was founded in 1947. The Today Show was launched on TV in 1952, followed by The Tonight Show in 1954. But by the 1970s, many of NBC's other TV offerings had foundered: local affiliates were defecting to competitors CBS and ABC, which were proving deft at luring away younger audiences. The company was bought - again - by General Electric in 1986; the new owners quickly shed NBC's remaining radio operations in part...
...acquisition coincided with a change in NBC's fortunes: the mid-1980s found the network regaining its game, debuting The Cosby Show in 1984, followed by hits like The Golden Girls and Miami Vice in 1985. It rode that wave of success well into the 1990s, when the network's famed Must-See TV bloc on Thursday nights, anchored by the smash hits Friends and Seinfeld, made NBC dominant in the ratings anew...
...recent years, the sun has not shone as brightly on the peacock. NBC was late to the reality-TV trend, and replacement shows for Seinfeld and Friends (retired in 1998 and 2004, respectively) never lived up to expectations. And while NBC's cable stations (Bravo, USA and MSNBC, among others) are performing well, the network itself places a consistent fourth in the ratings, making Comcast's job a turnaround one. Its potential plans? Possibly a name change (Comcast Entertainment is rumored) but also an increased emphasis on broadening TV's scope beyond the box itself. Comcast is a cable company...