The Peacock Network Seeks to Reverse Slide

For years, NBC has been TV’s greatest success story.

The venerable network has earned mountains of profit for its parent, General Electric Co. It has won eight of the last nine seasons by delivering the audience prized by advertisers, 18-to-49-year-old viewers. Its morning and late-night shows typically crush the competition. And its executives? They’ve never missed a chance to rub it in.

At a conference for TV critics last year, Jeff Zucker, then the network’s programming czar, drew attention to NBC’s dominance by starring in a spoof of its gross-out show “Fear Factor.” Presented with a buffet cart of “hors d’oeuvres” representing rival networks, Zucker turned up his nose at a mouse (Walt Disney Co.’s ABC) and a small, fluffy-tailed creature (Fox). But when offered a candy eyeball, he popped it into his mouth.

“We’ve been eating CBS for lunch all season,” he quipped of the network whose logo is an eye.

Now, however, the proud peacock is eating a little crow.

Six weeks into the TV season, CBS has been on top, fueled by its forensic franchise “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.”

Two weeks ago NBC, whose “Must See TV” slate once ruled Thursdays, posted its worst ratings on that night since 1987. Last week it tied for third place with ABC after postseason baseball pushed News Corp.’s Fox Broadcasting Co. ahead.

In all, NBC has lost 12% of its prime-time viewership this season among 18-to-49-year-olds.

“We’ve gotten spanked,” Zucker said, referring particularly to the blows delivered by two new hit shows: ABC’s “Desperate Housewives” and CBS’ “CSI: NY.”

“I’m not in denial,” said Zucker, president of NBC Universal Television Group. “We’ve got issues.”

But he predicted that the competition would make NBC stronger. “We’re in a dogfight, and dogfights make you hungrier.”

NBC executives knew this season was going to be tough. Two of their pillars of prime time -- “Friends” and “Frasier” -- were gone. Several other stalwarts were aging, including “The West Wing,” “ER” and “Law & Order.” And next month, the public face of the network, news anchor Tom Brokaw, plans to retire after 38 years with NBC.

What’s more, NBC’s programming chief, Kevin Reilly, is still finding his footing six months after taking the reins from Zucker, who returned to New York to oversee content for the company’s broadcast and cable networks.

A respected former FX executive who helped develop such provocative shows as “Nip/Tuck” and “The Shield,” Reilly is charged with reinvigorating the schedule and rallying a development staff unaccustomed to having to find success by stretching beyond the familiar.

“When you’ve been No. 1 for a long time, you tend to play within a certain range,” Reilly said. “You go to certain writers and stick with certain formats. There’s a complacency that sets in.”

NBC Universal Chairman Bob Wright agreed.

“When you have had so much success, you begin to lean on that, thinking that success will breed success,” said Wright, who cautioned against such thinking when he met with network development executives in Burbank late last month.

At that meeting, Wright urged NBC’s creative team to shed what he called a “sense of entitlement.”

“My message was that every day we start from scratch,” he said in an interview last week. “What we did two years ago, or last year, doesn’t matter. Every day is a new day.”

For the first time in a decade, Wright noted, none of the four major networks has a lock on the ratings title. “We now have parity,” he said. “And we’re not accustomed to that.”

During the nearly four years Zucker spent in Burbank, he excelled at squeezing maximum potential from the winning lineup he inherited. He employed clever scheduling stunts, negotiated a two-year extension of “Friends” and recognized the ratings potential of Donald Trump’s “The Apprentice.”

But Zucker was unable to land many new scripted hits, despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars on program development. Since the fall of 2001, NBC has launched 32 scripted shows, only nine of which are still on the air. (During the same period, CBS tried 31 new shows, with 12 still alive.)

Then there was the one that got away -- the sleeper hit “Desperate Housewives.”

Marc Cherry, the writer who created the show, said he shopped an early script to NBC, where he found a fan in Karey Burke, who was then in charge of prime-time development.

“I loved it,” Burke said last week. “The writing was good, and the tone was really black and sexy.”

Burke distributed the script to Zucker and other executives, she said, because decisions at NBC are often made “democratically, by committee.”

But, she said, “the consensus in the building was that it was ‘too female,’ that it didn’t have enough male appeal.” Burke said some of her colleagues worried the show would go the way of “Watching Ellie” or “Leap of Faith,” both of which flopped.

“Reluctantly, I had to pass on it,” said Burke, a producer who now has a development deal at NBC.

Zucker said he never saw the script.

Being No. 1 in the key demographic of 18-to-49-year-olds is about more than bragging rights. It’s about money -- $200 million to be exact.

That’s the premium that advertisers paid this year for prime-time commercial spots on NBC, which has been able to leverage a decade of dominance into ad rates 10% higher than those of its closest competitor.

Randy Falco, president of NBC Universal Television Networks Group, said NBC executives anticipated that prime-time ratings would be down for this season, so they adjusted the ratings guarantees they made to advertisers.

“We are just about where we thought we would be,” he said.

Still, if this season’s prime-time ratings slide continues, it could cost NBC Universal plenty. NBC acquired Vivendi Universal’s movie studio, film library, theme parks and cable channels this year, in part to diversify its revenue so it wouldn’t be so dependent on ad sales. Nonetheless, the network provides a third of NBC Universal’s $2.5 billion in profit.

A measure of the ratings effect will come next spring, when NBC sells the bulk of its commercial time for the 2005 season.

NBC’s new shows have been a mixed bag. “Medical Investigations” and the “Friends” spinoff “Joey” are solidly chugging along. But a cop show, “Hawaii,” has been canceled. The Heather Locklear airport drama “LAX” and DreamWorks Animation’s “Father of the Pride,” a computer-generated comedy about Siegfried & Roy’s lions, have whimpered in the ratings.

Perhaps most surprising for NBC this season has been the vulnerability of its bedrock “Law & Order” franchise, produced by Dick Wolf.

“Law & Order: Criminal Intent” has lost 18% of its 18- to 49-year-olds watching on Sunday night, when it is up against ABC’s “Desperate Housewives.” On Wednesdays, when CBS aimed its new “CSI: NY” directly at the original “Law & Order,” the 14-year-old show’s ratings tumbled 24%.

In an interview, Wolf downplayed the softening ratings of the franchise -- which NBC acquired an ownership stake in six months ago. He said, for example, that Tuesday night’s “Law & Order: Special Victims’ Unit” was up 8%.

“Not exactly chopped liver,” he said, adding that his shows “are designed ultimately for stability, not necessarily growth.”

There’s general agreement that next season will be key in determining whether NBC’s slide is an anomaly or a trend. That puts Reilly -- known as an even-tempered executive with a knack for story lines -- in the hot seat. He’s got support from the top: Wright calls him “the right man at the right place at the right time.” But he’s got an unenviable task ahead.

Beyond a largely lackluster slate, Reilly has inherited a staff that is used to doing things Zucker’s way. Zucker was beloved in Burbank, where many credit him with bridging longtime rifts and championing his winning team. It may be difficult, some say, for Reilly to forge a new leadership style that encourages more risk taking, especially because Zucker has moved up, not out.

Reilly is upbeat. He noted that NBC has turned its fortunes around before. Its last slump, in the early 1990s, ended when it found “Friends” and “ER.”

“This is not a low-pressure job, that’s for sure,” Reilly said. “But this is a winning team and we can rise to the challenge. It’s game time.”

Times staff writer Scott Collins contributed to this report.