Jeff Zucker, President and CEO of NBC Universal.Nati Harnik
The media hounds are smelling blood, and they're after the jugular of NBC Universal president and CEO Jeff Zucker.
Everyone from The Huffington Post to The New York Times and Fortune magazine has been calling for Zucker's head after his horrendous bungling of his network's late-night lineup, the fallout from which will see Conan O'Brien's Tonight Show bumped a half-hour back - all the way into tomorrow - at 12:05 a.m., to accommodate Jay Leno, who in turn will slide back into late night from his disastrous repositioning at 10 p.m. Not surprising, O'Brien has said "No thanks," leaving Zucker and his comrades at NBC reeling and very red-faced.
New York Times shoot-from-the-hip columnist Maureen Dowd was among those asking the obvious: How does Zucker's star keep rising while the fortunes of NBC seem to do nothing but fall? Blogger/contributor Chez Pazienza of The Huffington Post (who is a former long-serving NBC news producer) put it this way: "Somebody needs to pay when a poorly thought-out experiment … fails to the tune of millions of dollars, [and results in]the loss of a bankable star and a public-relations nightmare that has the potential to threaten a proposed mega-merger."
Pazienza was referring to U.S. cable giant Comcast's $30-billion (U.S.) merger with NBC Universal. He continued, "And there is no doubt that the person who should pay for this instantly legendary [screw-up]is the man at the top who instigated the whole thing: Jeff Zucker."
So who is this now-castigated 44-year-old father of four? A man who has defeated colon cancer not once but twice, he's a seemingly Teflon-coated executive who started out at NBC right out of Harvard College as a researcher for NBC Sports at the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Steadily working his way up the corporate ladder, at 26 he was a wunderkind producer of The Today Show and head of NBC's entertainment group. By February, 2007, he had been appointed the head honcho of NBC Universal's myriad media holdings, which include cable networks Bravo, Oxygen and CNBC; movie studios Universal Pictures and Focus Features; a vast array of TV channels in Europe, Asia, and Latin America; and theme parks in Hollywood and Orlando.
Veteran media journalist Richard Siklos says the Napoleonic-like executive was widely perceived as a guy "who came up on the news side of the business, and he didn't care for or have an affinity for, the entertainment business and Hollywood per se.
"When Zucker was promoted to be head of NBC … prime time was considered a small piece of the overall business. But the whole Conan/Leno thing has exploded this thesis."
In her column, Dowd pointed out that many see Zucker's prime-time programming strategy as an unmitigated disaster. First, he killed comedy, with the demise of Thursday-night "must-see TV" lineup of Seinfeld , Friends and Will & Grace . Then he offed drama, by failing to develop successors to the formidable ER , West Wing and Law & Order . "Then he killed the 10 o'clock hour," Dowd wrote, "by putting Jay Leno on at a time when people expect to be told a story; and then he killed late night by putting on a quirky redhead who did not have the bland mass-market appeal of Leno and who couldn't compete with the peerless late-night comedian NBC had stupidly lost 16 years ago, David Letterman."
Siklos agrees that Zucker's track record as a prime-time programmer is sketchy at best. "A lot of people can't figure out why he was put in this position, because his core programming choices at NBC network in entertainment, have fallen short, again and again. The funny thing about the current fiasco is that by moving Jay Leno, he tainted the late-night thing - he extended the prime-time problem into a reliably profitable part of NBC's business."
For now, at least, Zucker's reputation for sailing through stinky situations, all the while smelling like a rose, appears to be intact. He did, after all, just get his contract renewed for three years with the Comcast acquisition of NBC.
A poll on the on-line trade publication Media Life Magazinepublished yesterday found that 43 per cent of its readers think O'Brien will accept the later time slot; 26 per cent believe he will take a buyout from NBC; 22 per cent think he will defect to Fox. More interesting still, the same poll found that 59 per cent of respondents believe the one-time boy wonder will survive in the immediate future; 27 per cent think he will flat-out survive.
Yesterday, Huffington's Pazienza blogged that he hopes that's not the case: "There was no meat in the tasty-looking sandwich he was serving day after day," he wrote. "NBC is now in ruins, and it happened under his watch, and because of his actions."