Drama follows end of a comedy

For 10 years, viewers have laughed at the foibles of six New York City “Friends.” NBC and producer Warner Bros. have laughed too -- all the way to the bank.

Now comes the drama. Viewers might miss Ross and Rachel, but the show’s end Thursday will leave an even bigger void in the behind-the-scenes television world, where a hit sitcom like “Friends” can generate a multibillion-dollar business and make or break a network, and the executives who run them.

But not everyone at NBC is crying big tears. “Friends” in its last season cost $10 million an episode -- far more than the $500,000 to $750,000 most networks pay for sitcoms. So as that show concludes, NBC’s fancy is turning in a new direction.

And it’s toward Donald Trump and his unexpected hit reality show, “The Apprentice,” which is now the centerpiece of NBC’s Thursday lineup, along with “ER.”

Is “The Apprentice” just a cheap, short-term fling after a long, expensive marriage? It’s too soon to tell. But at a time when all of the economics of television are coming under intense scrutiny, there are at least some half-smiles in Burbank at the thought of having a Thursday night hit that’s less than one-tenth the cost of the exiting show.

While “The Apprentice” may not generate quite the same $453,000 per ad spot of “Friends,” it nonetheless has higher profit margins. And NBC will have 32 hours of “The Apprentice” next year, compared with just nine hours (18 half-hours) of “Friends,” as NBC Entertainment, News and Cable Group President Jeff Zucker has been saying to anyone who’ll listen.

Of course, even in the new network world of fast-changing viewer appetites for next-hit reality, and for dramas such as “Law & Order” and “CSI” that can be spun into multiple hours throughout the week, NBC won’t easily forget the well over $1 billion in ad revenue that “Friends” generated throughout its long run.

And there’s certainly no celebrating at Warner Bros., the studio that produced the show. Once the show became a hit and the studio was able to boost the fee it charged NBC for it, “Friends” became a cash cow that is still producing. With rerun rights for the year 2011 currently being offered for sale to local TV stations, the studio will continue to reap financial rewards for years to come.

Not only does the show air nightly on cable and local stations, the studio also has several more years’ worth of episodes to release on DVD. Between local station, cable and international DVD sales, the studio’s projected gross take from the sitcom, so far, is about $4 billion, according to some educated guesses, which is not a bad legacy for a long-term relationship, even if it is over.

As for the six core cast members -- Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox Arquette, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry and David Schwimmer -- it has certainly been a lucrative run. Although they were paid the same as most unknowns cast in sitcoms during the show’s first few years, they’ve each made $1 million per episode for the last couple of seasons.

NBC declined to estimate how much financial value it derived from “Friends.” At its peak in 2000-2001, the show was earning an average of $540,000 per 30-second commercial (second to “ER” at $620,000), according to Advertising Age; this year, it is still bringing about $473,500, according to the trade publication’s calculations, with ads for Thursday’s finale at $2 million each, putting it in reach of what Super Bowl ads cost. Not for a 10-year-old show. Even when the network was losing money on the show itself, however, the shows that aired following “Friends” got higher ad rates than they might have on their own.

“You can’t pay too much for a hit show, although networks don’t like to tell that to producers,” said Tim Brooks, co-author of “The Complete Directory of Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows.” At one point, “ ‘Little House on the Prairie,’ ” he said, “paid for the entire prime time NBC schedule, so one show can make a tremendous difference.”

Although “Friends” was often the top-rated show of the week, it wasn’t just the ratings that gave it such sway with advertisers.

Chris Geraci, director of national TV buying at ad firm Omnicom Group’s OMD unit, said the show turned Thursday night into a “marketing phenomenon” because of the way its audience of sophisticated young adults dovetailed precisely with the pre-weekend needs of movie studios and some retailers. “I’m not a culturist, but there’s a certain connection that it has to people’s aspirations, they see themselves in this format and that lifestyle, and it’s lightning in a bottle, so to speak,” he said, adding that “It’s only happened a few times,” with other examples being “Seinfeld” and “Mary Tyler Moore.”

“The characters were the target audience,” said Ted Frank, NBC’s senior vice president of current programs. “It was a perfect melding. That’s the magic you’re always chasing in developing comedies and ‘Friends’ was a home run in every area,” from what he called a “wonderful fresh concept that connected with the audience to great writing. It was really funny and had that fabulous cast, where each character fit with the actor hand in glove.”

Aside from the money, NBC reaped a host of intangibles. Although its slightly racy content was considered edgy for the 8 p.m. “family hour,” NBC used the program from its second season on (it aired later at night in season one) to power its Thursday night schedule, and to fill holes on other nights when other shows failed.

“Eight o’clock shows are so important and yet they are so hard to find,” Frank said, particularly for NBC. While ABC can count on families in the early evening and CBS has older viewers who are home, NBC’s largely young adult audience isn’t always home watching TV at 8, which made the “Friends” phenomenon even more valuable, he said.

While the show served as a phenomenal promotional platform, NBC was largely unable to reap the advantage and jump-start a new show, to the point that shows that aired right after “Friends” became a standing joke. The list of shows that got a post-”Friends” berth includes some of NBC’s biggest flops of recent years, from “Single Guy” and “Union Square” to “Jesse,” “Cursed” and “Inside Schwartz.” But that wasn’t money wasted, Frank said, noting that the show helped give other programs “the opportunity to succeed, turning them into among the highest-rated shows on television” when they aired behind “Friends.” “The problem has been that the bar has been high” for shows that were then asked to stand on their own, he said.

At almost the last minute this season, with “Friends” as its lead-in, NBC turned its new “The Apprentice” into a runaway hit. Despite the loss of “Friends,” Zucker recently predicted that NBC’s dominance of Thursday night won’t be in doubt next season and, in fact, might grow.

Some ad executives agree. The show won’t leave “nearly as big a hole as we all thought prior to Mr. Trump being such a television success,” Geraci said. But “The Apprentice,” he said, won’t have “anywhere near the longevity that NBC had out of such a great landmark sitcom as ‘Friends.’ ” And with “The Apprentice” airing from 9-10 p.m., NBC won’t have the benefit of being able to test out something new after “The Apprentice,” which in all likelihood will continue to be followed by the long-running hit “ER.”

“Friends” is leaving another legacy, a spin-off, “Joey,” with LeBlanc reprising his character. But it’s a strategy that usually fails. “It’s a hard thing to pull off,” Brooks said. But, he noted, NBC is following the formula that worked for one of the few spin-offs that has succeeded, “Cheers” into “Frasier,” by moving the character to another coast and changing the surrounding cast instead of trying to replicate the original. “Hopefully they learned the lessons of the past, which is to change it enough so it seems fresh,” he said.

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Friends of ‘Friends’ appear everywhere

“Friends” may be ending its long, lucrative run on Thursday, but it’s certainly not tiptoeing away. TV watchers will have to try awfully hard -- and certainly avoid NBC -- to remain unaware of the show’s departure.

Perhaps surprisingly, the most unique and potentially most entertaining in the long list of TV programming attempting to piggyback on the end-of-”Friends” frenzy will come from a channel with no corporate relationship to NBC. The cable network TV Land, part of the MTV family of channels, will in essence go dark from 9 to 10 p.m. Thursday -- the hour of the last “Friends” episode -- pre-empting regular programming for a show in which the network will remind its viewers that they should really be tuned to NBC. TV Land aired a similar stunt for the 1998 end to “Seinfeld.”

Immediately before and after, however, TV Land will attempt to grab a piece of the last-episode hype with three hours of old sitcom episodes featuring the “Friends” cast “Before They Were Friends.” The lineup includes Jennifer Aniston in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” Lisa Kudrow in “Cheers” (they’re not showing, however, “Mad About You,” on which Kudrow played ditzy waitress Ursula Buffay, twin sister to “Friends’ ” Phoebe Buffay), Courtney Cox Arquette in “Family Ties,” Matthew Perry in “Who’s the Boss?,” David Schwimmer in “The Wonder Years” and Matt LeBlanc in “Just the 10 of Us.”

VH-1, also in the MTV Networks family, has also been paying tribute. Its “The Fabulous Life of ... “ series will be running and rerunning its episode about the fortunes and glamorous lives of the six core cast members. It airs at 7:30 tonight and again at 3:30 Thursday afternoon. At 7 and 10:30 p.m. Thursday, VH-1 is airing an “Entertainment Tonight” special on “Friends.”

E! has a similar pair of shows about the careers and wealth of the cast members set for Thursday, with “It’s Good to Be ... “ installments on LeBlanc and Cox Arquette.

The cast of “Friends” will also reunite Friday on “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”

NBC is, of course, devoting as much time as it can to the “Friends” finale. It starts today when Katie Couric and Matt Lauer interview the cast on “Today,” and then tonight it will be the focus of a two-hour “Dateline.” The tributes continue Thursday on the “Today” show, which will have a segment on “How It Should End,” Al Roker’s visit to the set and a live concert by the Rembrandts, singing the show’s theme song. Jay Leno’s “Tonight” show will have the cast on later in the night. “Today’s” “Friends” fiesta winds up Friday with an analysis of the finale.

And if that’s still not enough, “Friends” airs at 7 and 11 p.m. weekdays on KTLA, and 7:30 p.m. weekdays on cable’s TBS, and will continue to until audiences tire of it.

-- Elizabeth Jensen