Prime-Time Assignment

As the key executive in charge of both comedies and dramas at NBC, it’s Karey Burke’s job to keep the network at the top of the heap--at a time when NBC’s “Must See TV” comedy franchise is fighting for its life.

Promoted six months ago to executive vice president of comedy programs, Burke, 33, ended up overseeing both comedy and drama programming after the hiring of a senior level drama executive fell through.

Although there are other women who hold executive vice president titles at the network, Burke wields the most power, overseeing the network’s prime-time schedule and a multimillion-dollar development budget.

The fact that she is a woman has not slowed her career at all, she says, but the step-up in job duties has come at a taxing time in her personal life: She has two young daughters, ages 1 and 4, at home.

“I agreed to do both areas of programming this year because it’s easy for me,” says Burke, sitting in her spacious Burbank office furnished with overstuffed white couches and French country pine. “I’ve worked in both for a long time. But we will sit down at the end of the year and figure out what happens after that.

“I’m at the point in my career where I want focus and, right now, I’m the one person here who doesn’t have focus. I also don’t want to work 18 hours a day.”

Burke’s promotion came on the heels of a major executive shuffle at the network, when NBC West Coast President Don Ohlmeyer and entertainment President Warren Littlefield left and were replaced by Scott Sassa and Garth Ancier, respectively.

One of Ancier’s first decisions was to restructure the creative division, pulling apart a strategy that had let all the creative executives have their hand in comedy and drama. Now the department is divided into two, one for comedy and the other for drama, with both departments reporting to Burke.

“One of the things that Garth and I really connected over was a vision for the department that was very specialized,” Burke says. “We both felt the department lacked focus and, while you had a lot of people who were sort of involved in everything, no one was particularly responsible for any one thing.”

Another change was a move away from the sexy urbane comedies for which NBC had become known. Shortly after his arrival, Sassa went public with his desire for the peacock network to increase its family oriented programming.

“It’s something we had recognized a couple of years ago . . . that we had abandoned a key component [families] in our comedy business,” Burke says. ABC’s “Home Improvement” was going off the air and there was no other definitive family comedy in its place. “But it’s the hardest form on television to get right because it’s been done to death.”

And, to date, coming up with a successful family comedy continues to elude NBC, although it is making strides in that direction. The network recently bought two pilots from Touchstone that could fit the bill. The first, “Daddio,” created by Matt Berry and Rick Schwartzlander, is about a guy who decides to stay home and take care of the kids. The second is an untitled nostalgic high school comedy by Adam Herz about a teenager who wants to become the most popular guy on campus.

All of these changes come at a crucial time for the network. While it continues to dominate Thursday nights with its “Must See” lineup, many of the comedies are now older, the network has struggled in the ratings on other nights and the other networks are making big gains with shows such as “Ally McBeal,” “Everybody Loves Raymond” and, the hot show of the moment, “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” which recently beat out “Frasier” in the 9 p.m. Thursday slot.

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“We will never shift all the way into one form of comedy or another,” Burke said. “And I feel very strongly that I don’t want to be doing family comedy just for family comedy sake. All those stories have been told and unless they’re told in a really honest and new way, it doesn’t work.”

But once Burke is convinced of a show’s merit, she says she believes in sticking with it, even when audiences aren’t tuning in. One such show is “Freaks and Geeks,” a show that is faltering in the ratings but has Burke’s full support.

“The writers and producers who have worked with her have found her to be a passionate defender of the projects she believes in,” noted former boss Warren Littlefield. “The executive ranks in network television can be a leveling process, one that can take the edges off a show and dull it down. Karey’s a person who fights to keep that originality in.”

Littlefield credits Burke’s persistence for keeping such shows as “Third Rock from the Sun,” “Providence” and “Just Shoot Me” on the air when times were rocky.

“You have to have the courage of your convictions,” Burke says. “And in big business, that’s not easy to do.”

It was that kind of courage that prompted Burke to sign up at the Apple One employment agency after graduating from UCLA with a bachelor’s degree in communications studies just so she could get a temp job at a studio. “When I graduated all my friends went off to Wall Street. You can imagine my parents’ excitement when I landed a temp job as a secretary,” Burke says with a laugh. “But there really isn’t a set path for creative executives.”

That first temp job at NBC led to an assistant’s job, which led to a job in the associates program, the proverbial leap from answering someone else’s phone to having a secretary answer hers.

“She had a great awareness of television, what she liked, what she didn’t like and why,” Littlefield says. “And people enjoyed interacting with her. It’s one thing to have good ideas, but it’s another to enter a creative process and get people to be open enough to consider your ideas. I thought her instincts in that area were very good.”

A typical day for Burke now finds her driving her older daughter, Riley, to preschool before heading off to the office. She’s adamant about leaving work on Tuesday afternoons so she can take Riley to ballet, but is back by 3 p.m. and often doesn’t get home until 7:30 p.m.

“My kids don’t go to bed until 9 p.m. so that I can see them for a while,” she says. And once they’re in bed, Burke continues her workday, either reading scripts or watching rough cuts. “I don’t have much of a social life,” she says.

But she says NBC is a family friendly place and the passel of toys in her office attest to her determination to have her daughters around as much as possible. “When Riley was first born I was generally the only one who had a child and brought her to the office,” Burke says. “But now there are a number of us with kids and on any given day there are kids here.”

As head of both creative departments, her days are filled with solving problems and keeping a close hand in the network’s new shows, with 70% of that focus aimed at comedies.

“In the comedy business, I think it’s become harder to discover what makes people laugh,” Burke says. “It’s more ephemeral. There’s an X-factor that’s really indefinable. Everyone who’s involved in the form is reexamining it right now. We’re all trying to figure out what the future is.

“For me, I think it will always come back to great characters that you feel you can spend 21 minutes laughing with,” Burke says. “Because people’s time is so valuable these days, unless you can get real value out of sitting down and watching, why bother?”