For Network Chiefs, It’s a Prime-Time Maalox Moment

It’s crunch time.

In network offices in Los Angeles and New York, the annual TV frenzy has set in--picking the series for the fall season.

Within 10 to 12 days, prime-time lineups will be unveiled. Grown men and women--producers--have been known to become ill, get drunk, throw fits, lock themselves in hotel rooms, if their shows don’t make it. Millions of dollars, sometimes hundreds of millions--if you have a series like “The Cosby Show”--are at stake.

“It’s ulcer time,” says an ABC executive. It’s also a time for secretive phone calls, sudden friendliness and lavish ploys to woo influential network executives.

The Big Party.

Well, not anymore.

As the networks’ Big Three entertainment presidents--Brandon Tartikoff of NBC, Bob Iger of ABC and Jeff Sagansky of CBS--scrutinize the pilots and make or break producers with their decisions, their annual power is at its zenith. They’re in a heady position. They dictate the distribution of wealth.

But they’d better look around. They’d better take a good, hard look at their buildings, the lots, the offices--and remember that nothing is permanent anymore.

Stupid programming and new TV competition have cut network audiences by almost a third in the past decade--down to little more than 60% of the national audience. A little more slippage--down, say, to 50%--and there may be viewers enough to support only two networks.

In the past, the feverish pilot selection was a kind of private, high-stakes, back-room poker game.

But there’s a new player.

The public.

It has delivered a mandate--an ultimatum--to the Big Three networks.

And Tartikoff, Sagansky and Iger know it. They’ve gotten the message of public impatience, ridicule and even disgust over prime-time TV.

They’ve seen total breakout shows like Fox’s “The Simpsons” and ABC’s “Twin Peaks” capture the imagination of parched viewers.

The word from Madison Avenue is that there are more unique, even bizarre, pilots than in years--like Steven Bochco’s musical police drama, “Cop Rock.”

That’s the good news.

But there are crosscurrents. Tartikoff’s NBC is No. 1 and still rolling in the ratings, but the network’s owner, General Electric, is a hard taskmaster when it comes to making its divisions show profits. It wouldn’t tolerate another decade-long slump like the one that preceded “The Cosby Show,” according to sources at the highest levels.

Can Tartikoff afford to gamble under GE? Is that why NBC’s reputation for innovation has plummeted since GE bought it? Still TV’s greatest showman, Tartikoff is upset over the critics’ new perception of NBC as a nervous No. 1. And there’s only one solution.

Gamble.

Same problem for CBS. Also controlled by a non-showman, Laurence Tisch, it’s become almost a bare-bones network as divisions, including its hugely profitable record company, have been sold off and a lack of programming know-how has put it in the cellar. Even Tisch this week called CBS prime time “a total disaster.”

That’s hopeful honesty from Tisch, the CBS president. But will he continue to interfere in creative decisions for which he’s eminently unqualified? Sagansky’s caught in the middle, too--go for safe formula series or go for broke. He’d better go for broke, or CBS just might be the network that disappears in the ‘90s.

Viewers, not Tisch, will determine Sagansky’s future.

So gamble.

ABC’s Iger is in a strange position. With most of the innovative, admired and talked-about network series in recent years--from “Moonlighting” to “thirtysomething” to “Twin Peaks”--ABC is in danger of being killed with kindness by admirers.

Somehow, because of its creative track record, ABC is expected to be more noble than its competitors, and heaven help it if it cancels such borderline ratings performers as “China Beach.”

Tartikoff and his former boss at NBC, Grant Tinker, once basked in this kind of adoration. As one splendid series followed another on NBC--”Hill Street Blues,” “Cheers” and “St. Elsewhere,” to name a few--Tinker almost found it necessary to apologize for crass commercial hits like “The A-Team,” which helped carry the network.

Tinker repeatedly tried to sidestep the “noble” label, explaining that you also had to get down and dirty to run a business like a network. And Iger faces the same crisis of adulation as “The Wonder Years” and “Twin Peaks” find themselves supported by production-line sausage like “Family Matters,” “Full House” and “Just the Ten of Us.”

Even ABC’s problematic ratings entries like “China Beach,” “Anything but Love” and “Twin Peaks”--not to mention the glorious failure, “Elvis”-- are vastly more interesting than zeroes like “A Family for Joe” and “Jake and the Fatman.”

But amid its embarrassment of riches, has anyone noticed that ABC, with its continued experimenting, is suddenly last in the critical May ratings sweeps--while Tartikoff’s much-put-upon NBC has found yet more new winners: Carol Burnett’s “Carol & Company” and “Wings”?

Has ABC’s bubble quietly burst? What is the network to do as it poises itself for a run at top-ranked NBC? It has no choice.

Gamble.

That’s what got it this far, and any noticeable change in attitude in its new fall lineup would cost it almost everything it has won in terms of reputation.

This is a great time for TV viewers. When the fall lineups are announced, they’ll have a clear picture of whether Tartikoff, Iger and Sagansky have reacted to the audience rebellion.

Do we really need any more buddy cop series? Is it written in stone that we regularly have to get our dose of by-the-numbers sitcoms like “Down Home” and “Working Girl”? Do programmers truly believe that the world is waiting for more non-purpose newsmagazines such as “PrimeTime Live”?

If so, then it’s time to re-examine the entire network system. And presumably that’s what Sagansky, Iger and Tartikoff are smart enough to be doing as they make their fall choices.

They must ask themselves: Is there really a public demand for endless potboilers like “Father Dowling Mysteries”? And have network arteries hardened so much that a fine pilot like “Shannon’s Deal” then has to be squeezed into a formula series? And isn’t it clear why the shows that people talk about are class acts like “Murphy Brown” and “L.A. Law”?

And then there’s Fox. The exciting, young Fox network. Just 3 1/2 years old, it has turned the TV industry on its ear--and, most important, sensed the desire for freshness--with the hip cartoon sensation “The Simpsons,” “Married . . . With Children” and “In Living Color.”

Fox, like ABC, is gambling. Will all the networks see that there is no other way, or will they hasten their suicidal paralysis? We’ll know in just days.

It’s up to Tartikoff, Iger and Sagansky.

If they don’t act on the public mandate, the lessons down the road will be harsh.