‘Business as Usual’ for Tinker Sans Gannett

“It’s business as usual here,” Grant Tinker said Friday following the announced break-up of his partnership with the Gannett Co. in the production of TV shows under the GTG banner.

The GTG series “USA Today on TV,” based on the Gannett-owned newspaper, was canceled last month after endless criticism and ratings failure, and will end Jan. 7.

Gannett “made a judgment about this business and not wanting to be in it, so we’re looking for a new partner,” Tinker said in a phone interview from his Culver Studios office in Culver City.

Ironically, the split came as GTG was getting its first slight taste of success with the new NBC series “Baywatch,” a show about Southern California lifeguards that the network this week picked up for the entire season.

It’s a far from a huge ratings winner, placing 58th among all network series thus far this season. But it’s the highest-rated new series among the five that NBC presented in its fall lineup.

Three other series from GTG--”TV 101,” “The Van Dyke Show” and “Raising Miranda”--were canceled by CBS last season.

But Tinker, who accomplished wonders in reviving NBC as its stylish chairman from 1981 to 1986, refused to be negative, exuding a characteristic upbeat attitude.

“It’s an up-and-down business,” he said. “I don’t think we’ve been as successful as we want to be and hope to be.”

Right now, Tinker and Gannett are looking for a new partner to take over the media conglomerate’s financial interest in GTG. Gannett reportedly paid about $25 million for Culver Studios, where a number of historic films, including “Gone With the Wind,” were shot.

“The studio is part of our business, part of our partnership,” Tinker said. “We spent considerable money improving it, so it’s an asset. All we’re going to do is get someone who takes over the interest in the studio and the partnership of producing shows.”

Seventeen companies had offered to become partners with Tinker after he left NBC and before he came to an agreement with Gannett. GTG stands for Grant Tinker Gannett.

Those companies, said a source, included “everything from large movie studios to Wall Street firms to (TV) station groups to money men who wanted to be partners with Grant.”

Tinker’s name has been a trademark of quality throughout much of TV history, with his former MTM firm turning out such series as “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “Lou Grant” and “Hill Street Blues.”

Did he think he made a mistake hitching his wagon to struggling CBS with an exclusivity arrangement that he later ended?

A year ago, Tinker said he cut a deal with CBS because the network’s legendary founder, William Paley, “was a hero to me, and he asked me first.”

Now he says the CBS tie was “simply a tactical mistake. It seemed like a great idea in theory, but in practice it just didn’t work. But if you’re looking to pin it on somebody, pin it on me.

“I always thought ‘TV 101’ was a very fine show but never got really sampled. Maybe it was mistitled and mispromoted to seem more academic than it was. I was really sorry to see it go down.”

A new Tinker partner, said a source, presumably would get into the three basic areas of GTG business--”the studio operation, producing prime-time series for network TV and first-run syndication, which can be very lucrative.”

GTG currently has three syndicated series projects aimed for the fall of 1990.

They are “Celebrity Update,” which the source described as an “Entertainment Tonight”-type entry; “Just Between Us,” a talk program with Diahann Carroll and her daughter, Suzanne Kay; and “Love Thy Neighbor,” a game show in which people resolve their disputes on camera, with the audience voting its views.

As for “USA Today on TV,” Tinker had a close relationship with Gannett chairman Allen Neuharth, who has since retired. Gannett reportedly stepped in and assumed control of the series earlier this year, dissatisfied with its status and appointing its own executives to run the program.

Of his own approach to beginning anew after the MTM and NBC glory days, Tinker has said: “One of the things when you’re starting a business is you’ve got to get in the race. You can’t be too cute about it and too special and too precious . . . until we have what we ultimately had at MTM, which was the ability to do only those things that we wanted to do.”