NBC’s in-house heroine

TV insiders like to say that one hit can turn around a whole network. That may be overstating the case, but NBC executives seem to be walking around their Burbank and Universal City pods these days with more spring in their heels and fewer frozen, tense smiles compared with the last few years. And it’s not hard to guess why.

“Heroes” was the prize at the bottom of NBC’s Crackerjack box this past fall. A kind of “X-Men” for prime time, the comic-book drama about everyday superheroes has become the breakout hit that the once-desperate network was praying for after a couple of horrendous seasons. Along with Sunday football, “Heroes” is responsible for a ratings surge that has teleported the network from last place into a three-way tie with ABC and CBS for No. 1 in young-adult viewers this season (and it even comes complete with an unlikely breakout star in Masi Oka, a Brown grad and former whiz kid whose nerdy character can teleport himself and freeze time).

NBC was widely expected to do better this year, but this wasn’t exactly the path to restoration that pundits (including this columnist) predicted. If NBC doubled down on any new show this season, it was Aaron Sorkin’s “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” a costly and inside-baseball-ish peek behind the curtain at a late-night sketch comedy that came from Warner Bros. Television, industrial-strength supplier of such TV perennials as “ER” and “Friends.” But “Studio 60” has generated polarized critical opinion and lackluster ratings, while “Heroes” is sucking all the oxygen from the room. And it hails from NBC Universal Television Studio, the much-smaller, in-house unit that jockeys for clout, respect and talent alongside far better-provisioned competitors like Warners.

All this has given Angela Bromstad an especially broad smile. Bromstad is president of the NBC studio and the person, her staff is happy to remind anyone who asks, who put into motion the machinery that eventually got “Heroes” on the air. She’s the one who, with subordinates, took the original 45-minute pitch from creator Tim Kring, pronouncing it “engrossing,” and the one who excitedly read the first script before getting out of bed one morning. Now she sees “Heroes” as evidence of a full-feathered, peacock-ian renaissance, something that’s “helped turn the tide at NBC.”

“When I came in” -- that is, started at NBC -- “ ‘ER’ had just happened,” Bromstad said in her Universal City office last week, fresh from talking up the virtues of NBC’s television operations (and showing a “Heroes” clip) to CEO Jeffrey Immelt and other top General Electric executives at the company’s annual “global leadership” meeting in Boca Raton, Fla. (NBC Universal is a unit of GE.) “I thought, ‘That must be incredible, to be there at the beginning and be part of a big hit like that.’ ”

“Heroes,” of course, hasn’t quite scaled “ER”-like heights yet; the former is, after all, only midway through its first season. But Bromstad’s message was unmistakable. She wants it known that NBC’s in-house studio, once the scorned also-ran known for bombs like “Surface” and “Hidden Hills,” can deliver the big, generation-defining hits, something it’s seldom been accused of doing before. In addition to “Heroes,” NBC’s studio has also found two critically acclaimed comedies with “The Office” and “30 Rock.”

To drive home the point, the studio is spending big bucks to clinch development deals with a few top writer-producers to make more shows that executives hope will be game changers.

David Shore, who created Fox’s hit drama “House,” starring Hugh Laurie as a misanthropic MD, is working on a pilot for an NBC series about a cynical female cop in the “House” mold. Just last week, the studio announced it had wooed away (from Warner Bros., no less!) Hank Steinberg, creator of CBS’ long-running missing-persons drama “Without a Trace” -- a defection that was strongly suggestive of the momentum NBC Universal is enjoying these days. NBC also inherited a number of writers, especially those attached to the “Law & Order” franchise, after it completed its merger with Universal a few years back.

Other pending projects include a long-gestating adaptation of Candace Bushnell’s “Lipstick Jungle” (an older-skewing “Sex and the City”) and an Americanization of the Australian comedy hit “Kath & Kim” as well as a remake of the ‘70s action series “The Bionic Woman.” And Bromstad said there are a couple of more high-profile producers NBC wants to make a run at soon, which may put to rest any notion that a heavily publicized corporate belt-tightening last year will crimp NBC’s development plans.

“In all the years I’ve been at NBC or GE, money has not been a problem,” she said. “Whenever I’ve really wanted something, I’ve gotten it.”

Whether the studio succeeds will have big implications for NBC and for prime-time TV generally. Unlike Warners or 20th Century Fox Television, the studio makes few projects for non-NBC networks (Fox’s “House” is an exception), which Bromstad said was an inevitable result of the “vertical integration” that swept the TV business in the past 10 years in which every network has its own sister studio. So to a certain degree, NBC’s attempt to return to its glory days will depend on the ability of Bromstad & Co. to excavate more shows like “Heroes.”

Competitors are dubious. They argue that the success of “Heroes” was nothing more than a happy accident; NBC clearly expected “Studio 60” to be its big hit. Moreover, they say, Bromstad, despite her close relationship with NBC Universal Television boss Jeff Zucker, has relatively little autonomy within the company’s top-heavy management structure and has clashed often with NBC Entertainment President Kevin Reilly, who’s responsible for picking the shows on the broadcast network.

When asked about a rift, Bromstad chose her words carefully: “Kevin and I have a very close working relationship.” And in an e-mail, Reilly wrote: “Angela has been a good partner. The fact is we’ve had a healthy collaboration between the network and the studio which has resulted in some great shows and big assets for the company.”

But she clearly doesn’t see eye to eye with the network on certain creative goals. She would like the studio to make more comedies, for example, expanding on its modest success with “The Office.” But that would entail NBC’s opening up another night besides Thursdays for comedy. “The network probably has a different view,” she said.

But NBC’s studio may have a critical if not so obvious advantage: its size, or what Bromstad calls a “small, boutique-y” feel. When I asked Steinberg why he left Warners, he said that NBC is “a smaller shop than I’m used to.”

But he reasoned that the studio is focusing its limited resources intently on a few key projects: “They’re being very strategic about what those projects are,” Steinberg said.

David Nevins, president of Imagine Television, which produces the football drama “Friday Night Lights” with NBC, said the studio had offered unstinting support for the show, despite low ratings. (Executives, for example, helped work out a costly music-rights problem that threatened to prevent “Lights” from being available for sale on iTunes, where it’s due this month.) “The show has been incredibly well produced, ahead of schedule and under budget,” Nevins said. “The studio has always known what they were going after.”

Yes, but what they were really after was a hit the size of “Heroes.” And now they’ve got it. Nevins isn’t alone in perceiving an NBC “rising tide” that’s lifting more than just executive spirits.

“I feel like the dynamic at NBC has really changed from ‘Who’s the next president going to be?’ to ‘They’re finally doing something right,’ ” he said. “And they’re being rewarded for it by the audience.”