By Peter M. Gordon
I told my twenty-three year old son the other day about something I posted on my Facebook page. He said, “If five years ago someone told me my dad and his friends would be spending more time on Facebook than I was, I would have thought he was crazy.”
A short five years ago Facebook was a college phenomenon. Now it’s spread to all levels of society – major companies, non-profit institutions, and even products have Facebook pages. What does this have to do with NBC’s late night television controversy? Just this: Both of them demonstrate the impossibility of predicting consumer taste five years down the road.
Five years ago NBC had a problem – their competition was courting Conan O’Brien, their money-making ‘Late Night’ host, to leave at the end of his contract. In order to prevent that NBC paid him a boatload of money and promised he could host ‘The Tonight Show’ in 2009. That only makes sense if NBC executives believed Conan would be more popular than Jay Leno five years later.
Even if they weren’t sure, that agreement had an immediate benefit. It solved the immediate late night problem and pushed the controversy five years in the future. Since the glory days of Brandon Tartikoff and Warren Littlefield in the 80s and 90s, the tenure for heads of programming at NBC has been short. It made sense to solve the short term problem at the possible expense of the long term.
Fast forward five years – NBC’s prime time schedule is mired in fourth place, and the time for Conan to take over The Tonight Show approached. Leno was still popular and coming to the end of his contract. NBC proclaimed the bold, innovative, and fiscally responsible move of Leno to prime and Conan to the Tonight Show. If Leno’s show in prime time only performed as well as it did in late night, NBC would make more money than they would with more expensive scripted programming.
As you know if you followed the media news, delaying the Day of Reckoning did not turn out well for NBC. They plan to return Leno to the Tonight Show. In the meantime, David Letterman of CBS is now the King of Late Night Television, and NBC’s programming problems are jokes in every comedy monologue and stand-up routine in the country.
Therefore, the lesson to learn from Facebook, Leno and Conan is the futility of predicting the public taste five years down the road. Ironically, that’s exactly what television networks and movie studios do. It takes time to write screenplays and teleplays, put them into production, and release them. There’s an inevitable time lag between conception, creation and finished product. Tastes change, or in the case of Leno and the Tonight Show, they don’t. Either way, no one can be sure what will work.
So what’s a Head of Programming or studio Production Chief to do? First, understand the limits of what’s possible. Since we can’t know for sure what will work, networks and movie studios need a wide and deep development slate to maximize opportunities for hits. Some shows and films should be in the current mainstream, but always make sure to develop some things that aren’t. I recommend looking for genres that once were popular but have fallen out of fashion. For example, there hadn’t been a regular talent or variety show in prime time for years until American Idol hit big.
Second, understand that entertaining the public has been a hit-driven business since Florenz Ziegfeld brought Anna Held to New York to star in the Follies. Stars command high salaries because of their proven ability to entertain. That doesn’t mean everything they do is a hit (even Steven Spielberg directed 1941), but over time they’ll have more hits than misses. After all, no one ever paid to watch the accounting department.
And finally, since they’ll blame you when things go wrong, make sure to take the credit when things go well.
Peter M. Gordon is a writer, public speaker, and media consultant in Orlando, FL.