Word: tartikoff
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...just plops it down," says Tartikoff, "we'll get a laugh...
They'd better. The show, Weekly World News (based on the supermarket tabloid of the same name), teeters precariously between sensationalism and spoof. It is one of those high-concept, high-wire acts that Tartikoff was known for at NBC, like the "MTV Cops" that eventually became Miami Vice (big hit), or the crime fighter who could transform himself into a jungle beast in Manimal (big bomb). Weekly World News, a proposed series for CBS that will air for two episodes this spring, is as good a show as any to serve notice to the TV world that Brandon Tartikoff...
...doubted he would return. As NBC Entertainment president for 11 1/2 years, Tartikoff was probably the most influential and broadly successful TV programmer of the 1980s. He guided NBC from last to first in the ratings, overseeing such hits as The Cosby Show, The A-Team, Cheers and L.A. Law. Later he was named chairman of Paramount Pictures, but he abruptly resigned in October 1992 after just 18 months on the job. The reasons, he insists, were strictly personal: on New Year's Day 1991 he and his daughter had been severely injured in a car accident near Lake Tahoe...
Away from the Hollywood power-breakfast scene, Tartikoff struck out on his own road to recovery. First he produced shows for New Orleans TV, among them a quiz program called N.O. It Alls, which he hopes to adapt for other cities. As his daughter's condition has improved, he has plunged back into his old world, this time as seller rather than buyer. "Anybody who has been in a position of power for 14 years," he observes, "says no far more often than he gets to say yes. And people remember those nos. I'm sure there...
...Tartikoff, 45, won't exactly be panhandling next week at the annual * convention of the National Association of Television Program Executives. He will be peddling Last Call, a new late-night talk show featuring a panel of journalists and critics (among them former Esquire editor Terry McDonell, entertainment critic Elvis Mitchell and London Times correspondent Sue Ellicott) discussing the day's news. Designed as a sort of hip McLaughlin Group, the pilot looks more like an MTV remedial class for the news-impaired (after trading quips about Michael Jackson, these hang-loose journalists scoot over to a pool table...