Word: tartikoff
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Programmer Brandon Tartikoff leads NBC out of the cellar...
Fade in: Midnight at the Tartikoff home in the Coldwater Canyon section of Beverly Hills. Baby Daughter Calla Lianne has awakened, and her parents are trying to lull her back to sleep to the strains of the Tonight show. The guest is Comedian Bill Cosby, who is doing a funny routine about the trials of middle-aged parents. As the father watches, a light goes on in his head...
...both of whom held the same title on the Bob Newhart Show. They wanted to mold a sitcom around Dabney Coleman, who had played lecherous male chauvinists in the films Nine to Five and Tootsie. ("We loved to watch Dabney slither," says Tarses.) Along with NBC Entertainment President Brandon Tartikoff, they devised a smalltown TV personality who would sell his first-born to make it to the big time. Tartikoff calls the character "a total sleaze-bag," comparing him to Archie Bunker but without Archie's tinge of lovableness. Says Producer Dennis Klein: "The only thing civilized about Bill...
...happen to think I do villains well," says Coleman. "I do them differently. I'm realistic." Indeed, unlike the sneering, comic-book persona of Larry Hagman's J.R., Coleman's Buffalo Bill is an unsettlingly familiar figure, not a caricature. "Everybody knows a Buffalo Bill," notes Tartikoff. "I know several, a couple...
...Tinker has thought a lot about programming," notes Paul Klein, the curmudgeonly sage who was an NBC vice president before joining the Playboy Cable Network. "He's very good at that. He should be doing it at NBC. Instead he delegates it to a swami like Brandon Tartikoff [president of NBC Entertainment]." So why was Tinker hired? Says Klein: "His boss at RCA, Thornton Bradshaw, said Tinker has 'bearing.' I think the stockholders might be happier if he was a hunchback with a bad mole, and put them in No. 1. But even if NBC gets there...