Word: silverman
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Perhaps the sickest and most tired was Fred Silverman, 41, the president of NBC, who threw two of his biggest movies into that black hole called the sweeps. "It's tragic," he says. "We had two blockbusters, Cuckoo's Nest and American Graffiti, on the air in this February period, and yet we reached only 32% of the audience. That is absolutely crazy. But the alternative would have been to put ordinary movies in there, and the only people who would have looked at them would have been the people in my family...
...Though Silverman, the "super programmer," usually has all the publicity, particularly since becoming NBC's president last year, many observers in the industry think that Pierce is really the better programmer. Organized and low key in temperament, he has largely done away with the second guessing and last-minute, panicky decisions that plague his competitors. If there have been any internal tremors since Silverman's defection, they are not evident. Tony Thomopoulos, Silverman's replacement, seems a perfect subaltern to the superefficient Pierce. "The network is working as well as or better than when Silverman was here...
...considering ABC's strength, all Thomopoulos had to do was avoid knocking over the furniture when he moved into Silverman's office. On at least three nights of the week-Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday-the network seems so secure that the opposition might just as well give lessons in Kabuki dancing. On Tuesday, Happy Days leads into Laverne & Shirley, which is followed by Three's Company and Taxi. Wednesday is a night for everybody: Eight Is Enough, the quintessential family show, introduces Charlie's Angels and Vega$, both of which unveil as much skin...
...replace the aging hits that it started the decade with. "We made a very, very serious blunder," he says. "Maybe we were too content, but when things started to go bad, we just didn't have the inventory we used to have. This was during the time Silverman was programmer [before he moved to ABC] too, so he has to take some of the blame along with other people. I frankly didn't know we were that far behind, but when the chips were down, we just were...
...itself back in contention, CBS restructured its entire organization in October 1977, modeling itself on the winner, ABC, and in the process replaced almost its entire executive lineup. NBC also made big changes when Silverman arrived, and in Hollywood, where shows are produced, the standing joke is "If my boss calls, get his name." Robert Daly, president of CBS Entertainment, and Bud Grant, programming vice president, moved to Los Angeles to be nearer production. They were handed what seems to be a blank check to order pilots, giving them a much larger choice than their predecessors ever had. "They...