Last updated on November 3rd, 2021 at 07:48 am

My Rating: 9 of 10

Summary

Anyone interested in a deep dive on how networks are created, or is a student the tv/film industry will enjoy this book.

If you’re interested more in the craft of creating story, it’s still worthwhile to jump around to sections where Susanne discusses working with different writers, like Joss Whedon, Kevin Williamson, and J.J. Abrams.

Finally, if you have only a passing interest of the film/tv industry, then skimming the notes will suffice.

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Notes

Moonves, the charismatic head of the Warner Bros.’ Television production division, also made a point of attending. At that moment, the career of Moonves was riding high; he had just unleashed two huge hits—ER and Friends—on NBC a few months earlier. Moonves was striving to be a team player by showing up for the launch party. He’d been upset by the way the WB came together in secret among Barry Meyer, Jamie Kellner, and a few other Warner Bros.’ executives during the summer of 1993. He felt undeservedly snubbed by having been kept out of the loop, and he was not happy that neither Kellner nor the network reported to him within the Warner Bros.’ hierarchy. Moonves figured that if his division was expected to supply the bulk of the network’s shows, he ought to be able to at least have a say in how the network was run. But Kellner was not about to let Moonves into the tent. During his time with Fox, Kellner had earned his credentials as a network builder. This time around, Kellner intended to be an owner, not an employee, of his new venture. He would report to Meyer, not Moonves.

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Paramount had flirted with on and off for years: the launch of its own broadcast network. Of

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dubs of the two-hour Voyager premiere episode that was supposed to screen during the Hollywood party. When the envelope was found, there were two sets of Voyager tapes inside. UPN’s energetic young head of publicity, Kevin Brockman, thought he was going to be ill when he realized what had happened. One of the Voyager dubs was supposed to be at the Roundabout Theater for the screening at the New York party. Brockman sprinted from the soundstage where the party was to be held, across the lot, and back to his office.

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introduced the special guests, including Herbert Siegel, the chairman of Chris-Craft Industries, which was bankrolling the network in partnership with Paramount, and Sumner Redstone, chairman of Viacom, which acquired Paramount in early 1994.

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and still catching his breath from dodging a bullet on opening night. Redstone and Siegel, who were both in their early 70s at the time, sauntered by as they were leaving. “I think that went rather well, don’t you?” Redstone said to Siegel.

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Just a few years after the WB’s peak, on the morning of Tuesday, January 24, 2006, the corporate heads of the network dropped a bombshell: UPN, our rival, the outfit we had been battling for more than a decade, would merge with the WB to form a single new network, the CW. The announcement, which came as a shock to most employees at both networks, signaled many things to the entertainment industry, but perhaps most dramatically, it heralded the end of an era in broadcast television.

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In hindsight, Warner Bros. and Paramount placed big bets on broadcast TV just as media began to move, in fits and starts, to broadband. With the dawn of the CW, it seems clear that the WB and UPN comprise the last chapter in the storied history of broadcast television. For the entertainment

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instances—from selling T-shirts, lunchboxes, calendars, and all sorts of other licensing and merchandising. It was found money derived from intellectual property assets that had been gathering dust in the studio’s vault for decades.

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Bob Daly and Barry Meyer were increasingly convinced that Warner Bros. needed to take a cue from Rupert Murdoch and 20th Century Fox. Across town in Hollywood, executives at Paramount Pictures had been thinking the same way for some time. Launching a broadcast network was at the top of the 10-point strategic plan that Paramount Television Group chief Kerry McCluggage had drawn up after he arrived at Paramount in 1991 following a long run at Universal Television.

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“We really felt that the studios that did not have their own distribution outlet would get leveraged in the marketplace by networks demanding ownership in the programming as kind of the price of admission for access to their schedule. And that pretty much played out,” McCluggage says. “There was the battle about the financial

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Filmways had the rights to handle the syndication of the reruns of Michaels’ envelope-pushing NBC sketch-comedy series. Michaels had a sizable stake in any syndication profits from the show. But SNL’s 90-minute format made the show less attractive to TV stations. Kellner had the brainstorm to cut the 90-minute episodes down to a half-hour format and pack them with the funniest bits. Stations could program the half hours in tandem with other comedy repeats or air them back-to-back as an SNL-branded hour. The concept was a hit with station owners. Kellner’s packaging epiphany made tens of millions of dollars for Filmways and for Michaels.

NOTE: importance of packaging

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Rupert Murdoch had made headlines a few months before by spiriting a coveted National Football League TV-rights contract away from CBS. He brought the rights over to Fox, negotiating a $1.6 billion deal in the process. On that May morning, Murdoch unveiled another coup: signing long-term Fox affiliation pacts with 12 midsize-market TV stations that had recently been acquired by billionaire investor Ronald Perelman. In one fell swoop, Fox lured away a dozen old-guard Big Three network affiliates, eight of them from CBS, in vital markets like Atlanta, Detroit, Phoenix, Dallas, Cleveland, Tampa, and Milwaukee. The Fox-New World deal, as it came to be known in industry shorthand, demonstrated that nothing was sacred anymore, not even 40-plus-year affiliation relationships between station operators and their networks.

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Kellner felt an obligation to look his partners in the eye, and hash out this unexpected turn of events. When they gathered during the convention in Miami Beach, Kellner made it clear in his quietly intense way that the plans they’d discussed the previous summer had changed. Dramatically. “I wanted to make sure they understood—it was a new game,” Kellner says. “I told them it was going to take a lot more money and a lot more time to succeed.” Kellner’s forthrightness only endeared him to his partners.

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It was a “you’re kidding, right?” moment. I thought they were yanking my chain. Two hours of primetime in eight weeks? Most networks spend nine months or more on the creative development of each pilot. I had to come up with our first night of programming in less than a quarter of that time? It just couldn’t be done, I thought, shaking my head. Garth and Jamie were straining to look sympathetic. I asked them why they hadn’t mentioned this August 11 date sooner. “We were afraid you wouldn’t take the job,” Garth admitted.

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in short order that Garth, Jordan, and I made a good team. John Maatta, the former Warner Bros.’ TV lawyer who officially became employee No. 1 of the WB in the summer of 1993, remained in his role as Kellner’s consiglieri on a range of issues, including the network’s dealings in the areas of public policy and lobbying.

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During the countdown to launch phase in 1994, Jordan would frequently put me and Garth through impromptu drills in which he’d pick a random show out of a TV encyclopedia, and we’d discuss whether it would be right for the network we were trying to build. He’d distribute copies of the Big Three networks’ prime-time schedules from a random year, and we’d debate whether any of the shows belonged on the WB.

NOTE: that is love for the work

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Mintz wasn’t surprised. Nor did Jamie seem surprised when Rusty read him the numbers. The WB’s opening-night ratings weren’t just unimpressive. They were anemic. The network generated a mere 2.0 household rating, which translated to an average of about 2 million households and just under 3 million viewers for our two-hour program slate. The meager numbers made it plain there wasn’t much interest in or awareness of the network, even in the top Tribune markets where the WB had strong affiliates. By any measure, the WB had limped out of the gate.

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UPN had rocketed out of the gate with more than 21 million viewers tuning in to the two-hour Star Trek: Voyager. That was at least 18 million more than checked out the WB’s maiden voyage five days earlier. With its first broadcast, UPN beat ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox affiliates in many big cities where UPN had its strongest stations.

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At those staff meetings, everyone, from assistants to top managers, was encouraged to speak their mind: about the state of the network, the industry, pop culture, and the shows the WB was putting on. Jamie encouraged staffers to speak freely if they didn’t like a show or something else about the WB. It was clear he genuinely enjoyed debating about the industry, trends, gossip, and new creative ideas. The 10 a.m. Tuesday ritual became a good way to keep track of the company’s growth, as it became a tighter and tighter squeeze to get the entire company into our main conference room each week.

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The 100-episode milestone was (and still is) significant for syndication sales because it allows flexibility in scheduling those reruns. Having 100 or more episodes means that a local TV station or cable outlet can run the show on a Monday–Friday basis without having to show the same episodes more than once over a few months’ time.

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Gail Berman joined Sandollar as its head of television development shortly before the release of the Buffy movie. A former Broadway producer, Berman read the film script and thought the character would be perfect for a TV series. But nobody paid much attention after the movie came and went quickly. Berman put the script on the good-ideas-but-can’t-make-them-happen-right-now shelf.

When UPN and the WB came along, Berman started eyeing the Buffy screenplay again. She set her sights on pitching it as a pilot for the 1996–97 television season, which meant she made the rounds with it in the early fall of 1995. Before she could offer it for sale, Berman had to clear through a thicket of rights issues with the original producers and director, Fran and Kaz Kazui. In doing so, she found something interesting in Sandollar’s original distribution contract with 20th Century Fox: a mistake. The studio had failed to secure the TV spin-off rights to the movie, which has been a standard part of movie deal-making in Hollywood for years. It was an oversight, but there it was, or more to the point, wasn’t. Berman proceeded as if she could shop around as a free agent for the best network and studio home for the show.

NOTE: great for contract notes

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Paul Stupin, a television producer that he’d worked with the previous year on an autobiographical pilot script for Fox called Dawson’s Creek.

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Meanwhile, the younger UPN executives left the room shaking their heads, suspecting that the WB had a hit on its hands. UPN’s leaders didn’t see it, but Buffy had something. The younger executives understood it didn’t look like anything else on TV, and it was absolutely of the moment in its use of fashion, music, slang, and settings. It was also well written and engaging in ways that you wouldn’t expect from something called Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It was, in short, a show they’d watch.

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Even with Tribune stepping up and Acme coming together in early 1997, Jamie wasn’t satisfied. He had his eye on an offensive strike at the competition. He wanted to make headlines for the WB with an affiliate grab that would be hard for UPN to recover from and give the WB an upgrade in markets where it sorely needed them. And he knew exactly who he needed to go after: the 800-pound media gorilla of Baltimore, Sinclair Broadcast Group.

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Sinclair was asking for a boatload of money in exchange for a long-term affiliation deal. While initially some at the WB balked at the figures, when Warner Bros. crunched the numbers, they found it would be money well spent in terms of increased advertising revenue. Regardless of the bridges the WB might burn with other affiliates by paying Sinclair upfront, the move was a shrewd one because it would strengthen the WB’s distribution in key markets where the network had barely been visible before.

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On July 14, 10 days after the WB deal was finalized over the four-way phone call, Baker met Kerry McCluggage and Steve Goldman for breakfast at a hotel in the Universal Studios complex that lies between Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley. The trio made some small talk, but Baker didn’t waste time in telling McCluggage and Goldman, in a matter-of-fact tone, that his company had just signed a 10-year pact with the WB that would be announced later in the day. McCluggage and Goldman were stunned. Baker picked up the check.

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The Dawson’s Creek explosion even managed to overshadow another milestone in the competition between the WB and UPN that actually came a few days before the show’s premiere. For the first time since the ratings race between the two networks began in January 1995, the WB tied UPN in the season-long standings. By the end of the third week of January 1998, the WB was matching UPN’s overall average rating (the average since the start of the season in September for all programs) for the 1997–98 season with an average 3.0 household rating and a 5 share. That translated to an average audience of about 4.5 million viewers each week, which was better than most of basic cable by a margin of a few million but still significantly lower than Big Four network standards, then and now.

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Surprisingly, as the network embarked on such a significant strategy shift, little effort was made to analyze or quantify Valentine’s Middle-America concept, according to former UPN insiders. There was little research done on the viability of such middle-brow programming thrust vis-à-vis the audience profile of UPN’s most important affiliate stations. Nor was there much of a research effort undertaken to understand what made Valentine’s broadly defined blue-collar demographic tick.

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J. J. Abrams and his then-producing partner Matt Reeves walked into our office in early fall 1998 with a fantastic one for a show called Felicity. J. J. Abrams, the cocreator of ABC’s Lost and Alias and writer-director of Mission: Impossible 3, is by far one of the best I’ve ever worked with in terms of pitching stories and shows. He’s charming and funny. He brings heart to a pitch and can tell you clearly why anyone would or should care about the world he’s describing. But the single most impressive thing about J.J. is the depth of the analysis he lays out in a compelling,

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But now 20th was looking at $85 million in debt before Buffy made it to syndication. The 20th executives offered to strike a new deal that would extend the WB’s hold on Buffy from two to four more seasons in exchange for a higher license fee to help offset the deficits.

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To many in the industry, Kellner had committed the cardinal sin of letting his emotions get in the way of business, letting it get personal with his former colleagues. To others, Kellner had sacrificed not just a show but a night for the network. The Buffy spin-off Angel, which came along in 1999, had been successful but only when it aired in tandem with Buffy; it was not a self-starter. “You don’t give up a show, and you don’t ever give up a night,” says Bob Daly, who handled many a tough series renegotiation during his years at CBS and Warner Bros. “Not if you can help it.”

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it’s clear that the deal signaled the end of the WB’s ascent. In a matter of weeks, Buffy would be finished on the WB and relocate to enemy territory. It was the most painful thing imaginable having to read Dean Valentine crowing in the press about stealing our show! It was sad, and wrong, and it made me angry.

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But Warner Bros. Television wasn’t having any of it. Barry Meyer and Bruce Rosenblum were dubious about what all those extra repeats would do to the show’s long-term syndication value. They were concerned that a show might wear out its welcome too quickly with viewers to have a long life in reruns. Worse, in their view, if those repeats drew low ratings, Warner Bros.’ syndication sales guys would have an impossible time getting top dollar when they went out to sell the long-term rerun rights to the show if it lasted long enough to deliver 80 to 100 episodes. Barry and Bruce would not grant Jamie the rights to repeat Warner Bros’. shows on the Turner networks.

NOTE: have to understand long term implications

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TBS orchestrated a stealth announcement that struck his colleagues back home in Los Angeles as a thoroughly Kellner-ish maneuver. If Warner Bros. wouldn’t let him use their shows to help amortize costs and beef up the WB and TNT, then he’d start his own studio to make shows that he could control.

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“UPN was the kind of opportunity that absolutely got me right away. I always love a challenge,” Ostroff says. “For me, it’s much more fun to push a boulder up a mountain than it is to be sitting on top of the mountain. And UPN was definitely a boulder that needed to be pushed up—in a big way.”

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One development that rankled many at the WB was the decision that it would fork over significant money to help Turner’s TNT and TBS pay for big-money movie rights deals with major Hollywood studios. The WB shared in the right to run the movies, but strategically the deals made no sense for a still-young network. It takes a lot of marketing muscle to bring a large audience into a

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The movie screenwriter who had penned the pilot, Laeta Kalogridis, was a TV neophyte who’d never worked on a series staff before, let alone served as an executive producer. The plan all along had been to bring in a seasoned show runner to help Tollin and Robbins bring Kalogridis up to speed. But that match hadn’t been made by the time Prey premiered. Tollin and Robbins were both juggling numerous other projects. Executives at Warner Bros. Television hadn’t kept close tabs on Prey after the pilot was picked up for a series, in part because of Tollin and Robbins’ track record on Smallville.

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“Once shows started working for us, there was this overarching, ongoing discussion about what the WB brand was. So rather than the WB brand evolving on its own, the discussion oftentimes became restrictive because it pushed us into replicating what we were doing,” Levin says. “The thinking was, Smallville works; let’s do Birds of Prey.…This was not what we had done in the past.”

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