Sony’s Hit Man : New Chief of Television Unit Gets High Ratings From Peers

When Mel Harris joined Sony Pictures Entertainment last year, he knew he was taking on a tough job as president of the newly configured television group. The unit had been posting large profits from the sale of reruns of “Who’s the Boss?” and “Married . . . With Children,” but earnings were due to tumble in the fall of 1993 because of a dearth of fresh programs available for syndication.

For four years, the key Columbia Pictures Television unit had failed to develop any new hit series, despite lavish spending on writers and producers. That meant no series had accumulated the 88-plus episodes required by stations looking for five-day-a-week reruns.

Worse, the company’s prior management had elected to sit on the sidelines in the late 1980s as other studios produced talk shows and “reality” shows for first-run syndication. Sony would have a tough time cracking that market, dominated by the likes of King World Productions and Paramount Communications Inc., where Harris had played an instrumental role as a TV executive for 14 years.

Even on the administration front, Harris inherited an unwieldy structure with three different production companies. His predecessor, Gary Lieberthal, oversaw only Columbia Pictures Television. But in the fall of 1991, Sony decided to revive its defunct TriStar Television by acquiring most of the television assets of New World Entertainment.

Unlike Lieberthal, Harris also was charged with overseeing the third unit: Merv Griffin Enterprises, the game show producer (“Wheel of Fortune,” “Jeopardy!”) that had been acquired in 1986. Four months into his new job, Harris quietly took control of all international television and pay-TV operations as well.

His mandate: slash Columbia’s spending on multi-year development deals for traditional network series, while designing new shows for every market, with emphasis on first-run syndication and cable TV.

How well has the 50-year-old executive performed in his first year on the job?

Harris and other company executives declined to be interview for this story, but his peers give him high marks for driving hard-nosed bargains and making steady--if cautious--progress in new businesses, such as an interactive game-show network that is expected to begin in 1994. And this month, Sony announced that it has lined up enough stations to launch “Ricki,” a new talk show for first-run syndication. The show--developed and produced by former Fox programming chief Garth Ancier--is targeted for a young adult audience and premieres in September.

“What he has done is amazing,” said Fox Broadcasting Chairman Lucie Salhany, noting that her network, NBC, CBS and ABC together have ordered 20 pilots this spring from the Columbia and TriStar units. With that volume, Sony should stand an improved chance of getting a new hit series on the air.

Salhany has been a fan of Harris for 25 years, since meeting him at her first TV station job in Cleveland. It was Harris who brought her to Hollywood in 1985 as president of Paramount’s domestic television division, and the two have remained close friends. During their Paramount tenure, that studio became the leader in first-run programming with such hits as “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” “The Arsenio Hall Show” and “Hard Copy.”

“Mel sets guidelines and then lets people go do their job. That’s his strength, that’s why people want to go work for him,” Salhany said.

Indeed, the top executives at Columbia and TriStar Television have remained in place, as has Barry Thurston, Columbia’s veteran president of syndication. Thurston, like Salhany, is an old Harris colleague from Kaiser Broadcasting, when that company pioneered group ownership of independent UHF stations in the 1960s. Their former Kaiser boss, Richard Block, now works as a consultant on the Game Show Channel, the cable network Sony expects to launch with partners United Video and Mark Goodson Productions.

Harris, with a Ph.D in communications, a deep, disc jockey voice and a military bearing, has proved no pushover at Sony for producers or their agents and lawyers. As recently as 1991, Columbia Television reportedly spent more than $40 million on development deals with writers and producers: Harris vowed publicly to cut that sum in half. One Hollywood lawyer said he was told that the development budget has fallen below $15 million; the same lawyer said deals are taking longer to complete because terms are negotiated in painstaking detail.

Not everyone is high on the new regime. When NBC scheduled writer-producer Norman Lear’s political satire “The Powers That Be” on its flagging Saturday night schedule, Lear said Columbia did not go to bat for the series, which was abruptly canceled. “I don’t think they have any leverage. If they have any, it wasn’t used in my situation,” Lear said.

Columbia also suffered a setback last year when “Christina,” its initial entry into the first-run syndicated TV talk show business, bombed.

In syndication, however, Sony’s business partners are lavish with praise. King World Productions, for example, says its relationship with the company has been rejuvenated since Harris came aboard. King World distributes “Jeopardy!” and “Wheel of Fortune” for the Merv Griffin unit, under an agreement that preceded its 1986 acquisition by the studio.

Although those two game shows generate an estimated $100 million annually for Sony, King World President Michael King said that “nobody knew we existed” until Harris arrived. According to King, Harris has been an active participant in meetings to freshen the content and promotion of the veteran shows, with the result that the two garnered their highest ratings in several years during the February sweeps.

King said Sony Pictures Entertainment President “Alan Levine was very smart to put him there, knowing he has an executive who knows all aspects of the television industry worldwide.”

Despite the kudos, Harris will probably see Sony’s television earnings plunge below $150 million this fiscal year, according to entertainment analyst Jeffrey Logsdon at Seidler Amdec & Co. By contrast, the TV unit reportedly generated in excess of $240 million for the year ended February, 1992, when Harris joined the studio.

Earnings should rebound when reruns of “Seinfeld” become available--probably in fiscal 1995. As the series’ distributor, Columbia will collect a fee and portion of the profit because it owns a 34% stake in Castle Rock Entertainment, the show’s producer. In addition, Sony may get a boost from a recent distribution deal reached with HBO Independent Productions for new HBO shows developed for the broadcast networks.

But in the interim, the TV group may feel under pressure to find quicker profits, particularly if Sony Corp. wants to take all or part of its entertainment holdings public. Such an offering has long been anticipated, because it could help the Japanese company repay some of the debt assumed with its $3.4-billion acquisition of the studio in 1989. And studio chairman Peter Guber’s contract requires Sony to award him a percentage of the studio’s appreciation in value regardless of whether the company goes public by March 31, 1995.