TELEVISION : Running CBS’ New Game Plan : Jeff Sagansky got the job he always wanted--head of CBS programming--but he took over at a critical juncture for the network

On a spring day in 1977, Jeff Sagansky was eating lunch at Chadney’s restaurant in Burbank with Michael Klein, a young programming executive at NBC.

Sagansky was there to interview for a coveted slot in NBC’s “associate” program, which picked young hotshots with no television background and put them on the fast track.

As one of the first kids to have gone through the program’s boot camp-like first year, Klein was asked by his bosses to take Sagansky across the street and see how he acted in a more relaxed setting than the formal interview that had occurred earlier that morning.

The 25-year-old Sagansky had applied to NBC’s training program because, as a low-level financial analyst for CBS in New York, he had been repeatedly rebuffed in his request for a transfer to the network’s programming department.

“So, what is it you want to do, you know, over the long term?” Klein asked. It was one of those throw-away questions designed for idle chit-chat and warming up the subject. Klein expected some vague, general answer about helping to make TV programs and entertain America.

But with a blank expression that revealed he had decided that issue a long time ago, Sagansky looked Klein right in the eye and matter-of-factly replied: “I want to head programming at CBS.”

Thirteen years later, Sagansky was named president of CBS Entertainment, the network’s de facto programming head.

Without a doubt, he is the most important person at the sputtering network. Although technically he is just one of eight CBS division presidents, jacking up prime-time ratings is the only thing that matters at CBS these days.

CBS is betting that the lanky programmer is the network’s last, best hope. Earlier this month, CBS Inc. said it would spend $2 billion to buy back 44% of its own stock, signaling that the company would likely remain a small entity in the increasingly global entertainment business. If Sagansky fails, CBS may not survive as an independent company.

Many believe that the network is so tattered after years of corporate cannibalism that Sagansky’s task is an impossible one.

When he joined CBS one year ago, the network had just come off its worst performance ever in the crucial November ratings “sweeps.” The network hadn’t produced a hit since “Murder, She Wrote” six years earlier, and had ranked third for two previous seasons.

Most troublesome, the typical CBS viewer was a middle-aged man or woman living in a backwoods town or small city. NBC, and to an increasing extent ABC, were attracting the richer urban viewers--the audience advertisers most want to reach.

Turning a network around is like piloting a new course for an aircraft carrier: So lumbering is the vehicle that there is an enormous lag time between execution and effect. Recent signs of life in CBS’ schedule predate Sagansky’s arrival, and decisions he makes today won’t be felt for another year or two.

But in fact, CBS has made some discernible improvement in the past 12 months. It is the only network to have bettered its prime-time ratings this season, while NBC and ABC have both declined.

“I think Jeff has exceeded anyone’s expectations,” exclaims Paul Schulman, president of his own New York agency that buys advertising time for major packaged goods companies. “His decisions about which shows to get rid of and what commitments to buy out of have made CBS a player in the three-network ratings race, when a year ago CBS was a definitive third.”

Much of the new strength is concentrated during a 90-minute block on Monday with “Major Dad,” “Murphy Brown” and “Designing Women,” and on Tuesday with “Rescue 911.”

The Monday shows attract a younger, female-skewed audience, and that has helped CBS lower the median age of its viewer to 44.5 years from 46.8 years a year ago--still much older than NBC and ABC. Sagansky once joked that to target anybody older would be to “program for an audience that shows no vital signs.”

Sagansky, however, is not looking to turn CBS into a network with a big urban audience, where ABC traditionally has done well, or even a youth-oriented network such as NBC in the mid-1980s, when it staged its comeback, or Fox now. Instead, he is pushing CBS toward the greener outskirts of American cities, where the baby boomers are settling down with their one- and two-kid families. “The baby boom is basically a suburban phenomenon,” says Sagansky. “That is where we are going to make our stride.”

Sagansky’s “game plan” is relatively simple: Woo brand-name producers back to the network and put on shows that appeal to younger viewers. One way to do this, he points out, is to borrow “pretested” concepts based on successful movies or established acts.

That CBS has done with a vengeance. The network’s comedy development slate of 10 shows for this season included four that were based on big box-office hits--”Big,” “Steel Magnolias,” “Pink Panther” and “Uncle Buck”--and three centered around comedians. He went after brand-name producers such as Norman Lear and Tom Miller and Bob Boyett to develop shows for CBS.

And in its biggest producer deal ever, CBS committed this month to spend at least $45 million to buy five series from the husband-and-wife producing team of Linda Bloodworth-Thomason and Harry Thomason, creators of “Designing Women” and “Evening Shade.” For the first three years of the eight-year deal, the Thomasons will be exclusive to CBS.

Sagansky’s preference in programming “is very populist,” says David Neuman, a producer at Fox who worked with Sagansky at NBC. “His taste is not extremely high-brow or low-brow. He doesn’t have to guess what America likes.”

All through the 1960s, CBS was successful because, despite a carefully crafted image as the “Tiffany network,” it was “really the blue collar network,” explains Sagansky, citing such shows as “The Beverly Hillbillies,” “The Andy Griffith Show” and “Green Acres.”

Then in the 1970s, CBS threw out those shows in favor of more sophisticated comedies that included “All in the Family,” “MASH” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” Westerns were replaced by cop shows. But while CBS seemed to make all the right moves in the ‘60s and ‘70s, the ‘80s turned out to be a decade of disaster. And in one of the most wrong-headed observations in TV history, the network’s head of programming in 1983, pronounced that “Comedy is dead,” only months before “Cosby” made NBC the No. 1 network.

Now, Sagansky says, “as America becomes much more service-oriented and less blue-collar, that’s where we’ve got to follow. We’ve got to be in the center, where the audience is.”

This is reflected in the programs CBS is picking to put on the air, such as the Thomasons’ “Evening Shade,” a comedy about life in the slow lane in a small Arkansas town, designed to appeal to viewers in their 30s, 40s and 50s; “WIOU,” a drama centered around a Chicago TV station in the tradition of “Hill Street Blues” and “St. Elsewhere”; “The Trials of Rosie O’Neill” starring Sharon Gless as a 40ish lawyer starting over as a public defender; and “Good Sports,” a series that debuts Jan. 10 about husband-and-wife sports columnists, starring Ryan O’Neal and Farrah Fawcett.

The “new” center, as Sagansky sees it, are people between the ages of 25 and 54, a somewhat older group than the traditional Holy Grail of network television: upscale, urban viewers between ages 18 to 49. This is who CBS is now targeting.

“It’s going to take some time, but clearly there is an audience out there for this type of programming,” he believes.

A couple of months after he was installed as CBS’ new programming chief, Sagansky climbed onto a stage before a throng of TV critics at the Century Plaza Hotel. The pop group the Temptations, which CBS had hired to promote the network’s new fall schedule, had just wrapped a 35 m.p.h. version of their 1970s hit, “Get Ready.”

The ballroom full of TV critics, attending a dinner bash thrown by the network, were approvingly waving fluorescent Day-Glo twirlers above their heads. Sagansky grabbed the microphone and, smiling, shouted: “This sure is a long way from Wellesley.”

Wellesley is an upper-middle-class Boston suburb better known for its lawyers and investment bankers than show-biz bigwigs. But even as a teen-ager, Sagansky wanted to go to Hollywood.

He was raised in a business-minded family with a knack for making money. “Jeffrey has a very good financial head,” says his friend, Scott Siegler, president of Columbia Pictures Television. “He grew up in that kind of an environment.”

His father, a wealthy real estate owner and developer, had inherited a warehouse and trucking company, which he later sold. Sagansky’s mother has an MBA and is an investment and portfolio manager. One of his sisters is a banker.

When Sagansky entered Harvard in the fall of 1970, the university was breathing the last gasp of leftist student politics of the late ‘60s. But the freshmen class was much more conventional--these would be the ones who studied hard and then went on to law or business school, the first wave of neo-conservatives who would later ring in the Reagan revolution of the 1980s.

Sagansky’s chief interest in college was politics, but he was no radical and today is a registered Republican.

During his freshman year, he went to see a French gangster film called “Borsalino” with his best friend, Paul Josephowitz. The film had a profound effect on him.

“We concluded that film represented the two most exciting jobs in the world: either being a gangster or making films about them,” Sagansky recalls.

Actually, Sagansky already knew something firsthand about the former.

His great-uncle, Harry (Doc Jasper) Sagansky, a dentist-turned-bookmaker, was a reputed “top financial man” among bookies with links to the Boston mob. Once called the “kingpin” of numbers runners in New England by law enforcement authorities, Doc was busted in 1943 by an army of 52 state troopers for running a $90-million gambling syndicate. He went to prison three times, most recently for 10 months in 1988-89 at age 90, after he refused to testify to a grand jury investigating organized crime figures.

“I didn’t have much to do with him,” his grand-nephew says.

Although clearly wanting a show-business career, Sagansky did not follow the typical Harvard route of hanging out with the film or art crowd. Instead, he displayed a more commercial attitude--a recurrent theme throughout his career--and subscribed to the show-biz bible Variety, each week devouring the box-office charts and program ratings tables. He told friends that someday he wanted to head a studio or network.

In 1974, Sagansky went to Hollywood seek a job in the movie business. He looked up other Harvard grads in the business, including Peter Guber, now co-chairman of Columbia Pictures but then one of the producers of “The Deep.” There were no jobs.

So Sagansky went back to Harvard Business School because “that way I could sell myself better.” There he and Josephowitz began writing a dime-store thriller that they finished five years later and titled “Entangled.” New American Library bought the rights for $60,000 but “we never out-earned our advance.” Since 1987, the book has sold only 7,000 copies.

After business school, Sagansky joined the finance staff of CBS in New York, where he wrote up monthly financial performance reports of the network and stations for senior CBS managers. He immediately set out to transfer to the programming department, however, and volunteered to do “coverage” of scripts.

But Sagansky’s repeated requests for a transfer were rebuffed and, after a year, he applied to the NBC internship program, where he had to take a cut in his $20,000 salary.

At NBC, he impressed his bosses as a quick study. “Jeff went through the company like a dose of salt,” recalls John McMahon, who headed West Coast programing when Sagansky joined in 1977. His first assignment: Tell Angie Dickinson, the star of “Police Woman,” that she had to wear a bra during filming.

Sagansky earned a reputation for his definite opinions about what would work and what would not, but who also showed a willingness to listen.

Although within three years Sagansky advanced to head of drama development, he felt he wasn’t moving along fast enough.

“There was a promotion he wanted, but he was pretty young at the time,” says Bill Nuss, who replaced Sagansky after the producer David Gerber hired him away to work at his production company. Sagansky spent two years at Gerber’s company, but then returned to NBC as senior vice president in charge of all series programming.

“By leaving, he was able to come back at a much greater position,” explains Nuss, who notes that Sagansky always had his sights set for something higher.

While Sagansky became identified with some hits at NBC, such as “Knight Rider,” he also got tarred by some notable flops, particularly the science-fiction series “V” and “Manimal,” a fantasy show about an animal behaviorist who could turn himself into any kind of animal as part of a police department’s secret weapon to combat crime.

“I thought if people could believe a car could talk, then why wouldn’t they believe a man could turn himself into an animal?” Sagansky says. “Manimal” was one of NBC’s most embarrassing disasters of the 1983 season.

“The one fatal mistake you can make is stop trusting your gut and veer away from your game plan.”

Those who have worked with Sagansky over the years describe him as a high-strung, lightning-quick decision-maker. He covers his 6-foot-2 frame in custom-tailored, double-breasted suits and looks indeterminately older than his 38 years. He rarely unbuttons his jacket and projects a formal, somewhat stiff manner.

“There is one hint to Jeff Sagansky’s betrayal of emotions,” advises David Matalon, executive vice president of Columbia Pictures, who was Sagansky’s boss at Tri-Star Pictures, where Sagansky before he went to CBS. “When he says to you ‘hmm’ in a humming tone of voice, that means he doesn’t agree with you.”

Despite his prodigious work habits--associates say it’s not unusual to get calls at 11 p.m. or 6 a.m., to compare notes on scripts or check the overnight ratings--Sagansky does not invite close relationships. Hardly anybody on his staff has visited his 14-room, Art Deco-furnished Santa Monica home. Few can name his 2-year-old daughter (Gillian) or recall whether he has siblings. (He has two younger sisters.)

Although Sagansky makes the obligatory social rounds of opennings and parties, “he’d much rather be home with his wife, kid and some scripts,” confides Alan Berger, executive vice president at the ICM talent agency. He is married to Christy Welker, a former ABC programming executive, now an independent producer.

“They’re really kind of movie-mad and have an Art Deco image about life and style,” says Tom Jon, a friend and set designer. “Glamorous, but they are not jaded.” The Art Deco theme even carried over to their wedding at the Carlyle Hotel in New York, where the wedding party was instructed to wear only black or white.

Some might think it peculiar that Sagansky has rocketed to the top of the Hollywood ziggurat without ever having created a hit TV show.

Unlike NBC’s Brandon Tartikoff, who came up with the idea for such 1980s superhits as “Miami Vice” ABC’s Bob Iger, who championed “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” Sagansky has not invented a trend-setting or breakthrough program.

Sagansky admits that conjuring up ideas for shows is not his forte. “I adore writers. I love producers. But I don’t have those skills myself.”

But in Hollywood, where “relationships” are the currency that gets TV programs made, Sagansky sees himself instead as the “intermediary” among writers, producers and the network brass in New York who hold the purse strings.

Even more than picking hit shows, programming chiefs must get the “creative community” to trust them if they want to ensure that producers will keep coming to the network with their ideas. A cavalier attitude can irreparably damage a network’s reputation for years, such as it did to ABC in the early 1980s.

“He never shoots from the hip,” says Bruce Paltrow, executive producer of “St. Elsewhere,” who credits Sagansky with saving the former NBC series after its rocky start in 1983. Paltrow says it was “constant hammering” from Sagansky to reduce the number of storylines in each episode that put the show “back on course.”

Sagansky really has two jobs at CBS. The first is to bring more viewers to the network, which has been the traditional role of programming chiefs. His second job is to help recast the balance of power in Hollywood between the networks and the big studios that make the majority of all TV programs.

The second is potentially a more crucial role because it has serious implications for all three networks as well as the studios.

Weighted down by $3.6 billion in TV commitments to televise Major League Baseball, National Football League and two Winter Olympics--which have turned out to be a gross miscalculation--CBS must find cheaper ways to program the network. At the same time, the price of making programs has skyrocketed because failure has become so costly.

“We are at a crucial time,” Sagansky warns. “The fundamental economics of network TV is changing.”

Sagansky in part is delivering a rehearsed speech against the backdrop of regulatory hearings in Washington that are investigating allowing the networks into a business now dominated by the major studios: selling lucrative reruns to local TV stations.

But he is also right when he describes the non-Euclidian economics that have taken root in Hollywood at a time when viewers are switching off network programs in favor of cable channels and home video.

The divide between the top-shelf producers and run-of-the-mill producers is growing. That is going to have a dramatic effect on the kinds of programs viewers see at home.

The task facing Sagansky is how to, as he puts it, “average down” the cost of programming. That will happen, he believes, by putting on more so-called “reality-based programs,” which cost half that of traditional entertainment shows.

“When TV was beginning, there were tons of documentaries on the air,” Sagansky explains. “But shows like ‘Rescue 911’ and ‘Top Cops’ are the documentaries of today. And shows like ‘Funniest Home Videos’ are the variety shows of today. Increasingly you will see all three networks move toward that.”

Because old programming staples like game shows, variety shows and traditional documentaries have fallen away in the past 10 years, the networks have been left to fill their prime-time schedules with only two types of programs: one-hour dramas or half-hour comedies.

“We’ve got to get back to juggling that mix that we used to have, not only for diversity, but for cost as well.”

Sagansky is going outside of Hollywood to find this “mix” of shows.

He has enlisted the cooperation of CBS News in New York to develop news magazines, sought out ideas from the network’s five local TV stations, and made deals with overseas production companies such as Granada TV and the BBC in the United Kingdom to deliver future programs.

On Jan. 21, CBS will unveil a late-night “checkerboard” of one-hour dramas at 11:30 p.m., all co-produced with European companies--the shows will have a distinctly continental texture because some of the partners insisted on using local actors in the roles.

Additionally, Sagansky believes, CBS will help producers by financing the deficits of their shows, similar to the arrangement ABC made with Steven Bochco and James Brooks and CBS did recently with Linda Bloodworth-Thomason.

In the fall of 1984, Victor Kaufman, chairman of Tri-Star Pictures Inc., was looking for a new West Coast-based head of production.

He was struck by how the new generation of studio chiefs, executives such as Michael Eisner, Barry Diller and Frank Price, had all come out of television.

Brian Grazer, a film producer who that year had made the hit “Splash,” recommended Sagansky to Kaufman, praising his “work ethic.”

“He gets up at 5 a.m. and will have three scripts read by breakfast,” Grazer says he told Kaufman about Sagansky. Grazer also knew Sagansky was restless.

“I was burned out from television,” Sagansky explains. “I read every script of every comedy and drama for three years, and I had had it.”

Tri-Star was the first so-called major studio started in nearly 40 years. But initially, the studio was set up to make movies with budgets in the $10 million to $15 million range, well below the industry average of the time.

Sagansky’s track record at Tri-Star got mixed notices from outsiders. Until the last year of his tenure, when the studio released “Look Who’s Talking,” “The Bear” and “Steel Magnolias,” the Hollywood rumor mill had Sagansky out the door. Before 1989, Tri-Star had only pockets of success, including the 1985 movies “Peggy Sue Got Married” and “About Last Night.”

But Kaufman says the traditional standards of measurement in filmmaking--the big box office hit--should not be applied to Tri-Star or Sagansky. The studio purposefully kept its budgets low, which means the movies did not need to earn as much in theaters. Of the 17 films Sagansky green-lighted in 1985 and 1986, Kaufman said, 10 made money.

If Sagansky did have a problem at Tri-Star, it was in the occasional and inevitable flare-up with a temperamental director or creative type. One incident stands out.

Tri-Star hired Stuart Rosenberg to direct the 1985 picture “Let’s Get Harry.” Rosenberg is a big-ticket director whose credits include “Brubaker” and “Cool Hand Luke.”

“Let’s Get Harry,” starring Mark Harmon, was about some small-town plumbers who band together to rescue their best friend, Harry, when he is kidnaped by terrorists in a South American country.

But when he screened an early version, Sagansky didn’t like the structure and ordered that the whole thing be recut. The about-face so infuriated Rosenberg that he went to the Directors Guild of America and asked that his name be removed from the credits.

In an unusual motion, the DGA board granted Rosenberg’s request on the spot.

Robert Singer, who was Sagansky’s boss at NBC in the late 1970s and also a producer of “Let’s Get Harry,” says that “if Jeff had any problem at Tri-Star, it was that he brought a TV sensibility to the film business.” In TV, where a series has 22 episodes a season, changes can be made overnight and producers are used to such demands. “I think that may have grated on some people,” explains Singer.

Sagansky admits he felt frustrated as a studio chief. “The thing that I never could come to grips with in the movie business was that the producer you started off with is basically thrown out once the director comes along. The budgets have gone just nuts because the producers aren’t in control. The director and stars are. TV is a producer-driven business where the script is king.”

Last year at this time, CBS was badly behind both ABC and NBC in the prime-time ratings. Throughout the summer of ’89 rumors had circulated in Hollywood that CBS management in New York was about to shake-up the network’s programming department. Sagansky’s name surfaced as a possible contender along with a half-dozen others.

CBS had actually been trying to woo Sagansky quietly for for several years. The network first approached him when he was at NBC in the early 1980s, but the prospect of taking on his friend and mentor, NBC Entertainment President Brandon Tartikoff, made him uneasy.

“I felt eventually Brandon would leave and it would be a cleaner sort of competition. I didn’t want it to change the relationship,” explains Sagansky. So he told CBS no.

Tartikoff, however, stayed at NBC. Sagansky ultimately left for Tri-Star. And now, as business competitors, their friendship has been affected: One of their favorite conversation topics, namely television, is now largely off limits.

“When I was at Tri-Star, I used to talk to Brandon once a week about scheduling moves and who was going to put what show where,” Sagansky relates. “Now that whole area of discussion we no longer broach.”

Sony Corp.’s purchase of Columbia Pictures, including Tri-Star, set the stage for CBS to renew its approaches to Sagansky. CBS had dropped into third place in 1987 and by the spring of 1989 was falling further behind second-place ABC.

The Sony deal had made Sagansky a rich man. Although Tri-Star executives were handsomely paid, some--including Sagansky--took lower paychecks in lieu of stock. It proved to be a fortuitous decision. He made about $10 million from his stock plan, according to knowledgeable executives at the studio.

But, Sagansky nearly saw the opportunity to be head of CBS programming vanish at the 11th hour.

Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner, the two producers who had made a fortune from “The Cosby Show” and also had the hottest new show of year with “Roseanne,” proposed to CBS Inc. Chief Executive Laurence A. Tisch that they run the network. Tisch was intrigued, and instructed his staff to begin negotiations, despite the fact they were already well under way to wrapping a deal with Sagansky.

There was only one tiny problem. Carsey and Werner’s two hot shows were on NBC and ABC, not CBS, and as heads of programming, one of their chief goals would be to knock off their own shows on the other two networks, a questionable incentive since the longer “Cosby” and “Roseanne” stayed on the air, the more money they made.

In fact, CBS actually reached a deal with Werner and Carsey--although Sagansky didn’t know it at the time--which immediately unraveled after it became clear there was no practical way the producers could continue making shows for NBC and ABC while programming CBS.

Columbia was able to extract from CBS a promise that the network would buy some additional pilots from the studio, and Sagansky was released. CBS executives, never revealing they had actually made a deal with Carsey and Werner, said Sagansky had been their “first choice” all along.

CBS gave Sagansky a 4 1/2-year contract at $750,000 a year, plus “contingent compensation” based on achieving “certain performance criteria.” The “criteria,” according to executives at CBS, are pegged to network profitability. Sagansky will only say about his bonus: “I do OK.”