Remembering Supertrain

I hadn't intended to write about my old network again so soon, but an article on the front page of the Times yesterday is worthy of a brief comment ("NBC's Slide From TV's Heights To Troubled Nightly Punch Line," by Tim Arango). As the headline suggests, reporter Tim Arango regards the Leno/Conan issue as a metaphor for a larger story about how NBC has lost its way. And the man responsible for all of this, in Arango's telling, is Jeff Zucker, the CEO of NBC Universal.

It might be worth remembering that Zucker was the young man who was appointed as Executive Producer of the TODAY Show when that franchise was struggling after the wobbly transition from Jane Pauley to Deborah Norville to Katie Couric. Good Morning America was in first place and TODAY needed a new direction. Zucker had the brains and the creativity to turn the show around and, under his leadership, TODAY regained the lead in morning television.

What's especially hard to swallow is that some of the potshots directed at Zucker in the Times come from people like Fred Silverman. Silverman, some of you may recall, once headed NBC programming. In the late '70s, when NBC's prime time shows were struggling, the network hired him away from ABC, where he had been hailed as the "man with the golden gut."

Since Silverman was quoted in Arango's piece as saying that the current situation at NBC is "a corporate embarrassment," it might be worth recalling Silverman's own track record as a programmer. His showcase new offering during his first season at NBC was a drama called "Supertrain." The budget was high, the Nielsen numbers were low, and the program disappeared after the '78 - '79 season. That was my first year at NBC News, and I can still recall a joke from Johnny Carson's monologue....

"NBC's prime time shows are so bad," Johnny said, "that our crack network programming team has decided that they're going to start copying the successful shows on the other networks. Like, ABC has that hit show, "That's Incredible!" We're working up our own version. It's going to be called, "That's... kind of interesting."

Times are tough at NBC, but they've been tough before and the network has managed to turn things around. The bottom line here is that Jeff Zucker doesn't do "kind of interesting." He does bold. And I think he has the smarts to turn things around again at NBC. In my book, he's just two hit shows away from being hailed as "the comeback kid."