Dumping on the third-place network is as much a part of Hollywood as valet parking. People were burying CBS two years ago, NBC before that. But ABC’s travails are taken more seriously than the usual boom-and-bust rhythms of TV competition because of who bought the network in 1995, with $19 billion and a belief that it could manage it better than anybody. Why? Because it’s Disney.
Chairman Michael Eisner had been waiting to get his hands on ABC for years. He had started his career there, and, never afraid to micromanage the creative parts of his empire, he immediately began appearing at network meetings. To the bemusement of younger executives, Eisner had a habit of invoking antediluvian shows like “Baretta” and “Three’s Company” to make his point. But while Eisner was highly visible at the schedule-setting meetings a year ago, he didn’t entirely take over.
Executives expect him to be more aggressive in the meetings beginning this week. “He’s one frustrated guy,” says one, and with good reason. ABC’s prime-time weakness has helped drag down news, sports, daytime and the morning show. Worse, ABC stands in danger of losing the identity it has boasted since the mid-’70s as the young, urban network. Even when its overall ratings hit rough patches, it stayed strong among the young viewers advertisers covet. But ABC has dropped 14 percent among viewers age 18 to 49 since last year, and now often trails Fox with that audience.
When such events occur in the entertainment business, it must mean there’s a big X on somebody’s back, and the industry is buzzing that Eisner must make a change. ABC’s entertainment division is being run by 33-year-old Jamie Tarses, a former NBC development executive whom Michael Ovitz wooed and won during his ill-fated stint as president of Disney. One scenario has a replacement waiting in the wings at Disney in the form of Geraldine Laybourne, the former “Boss Lady” of the Nickelodeon cable network, as its young viewers used to call her.
NEWSWEEK has learned that discussions about the details of such a promotion have taken place at Disney and await only Eisner’s final go-ahead. (ABC passionately denies that Laybourne will get an entertainment job. Eisner, Laybourne and Tarses didn’t comment. ABC chairman Robert Iger, in a statement, voiced “confidence” in Tarses, saying, “Her job is not in jeopardy.”) The timing is delicate: On May 19 ABC will announce its new fall schedule to advertisers in a ritual hypefest at Radio City Music Hall, then start the selling season–perhaps not an ideal moment to set heads rolling. Later comes a similar presentation for the affiliates, then the media. Industry handicappers differ on which meeting is a better venue for bugling in the cavalry.
With her lustrous reputation, Laybourne, 49, could probably lead the charge. She built what is now the highest-rated cable network, worth at least $4 billion. She did what the entertainment business most values in the 1990s: she constructed a “brand” that could be put to use in music, movies, merchandise and theme parks. In an age when executives seem to spend most of their time taking credit or taking cover, Laybourne delivered on her vision for Nickelodeon– as a place where kids could be kids and not receptacles for what grown-ups think is good for them.
The unspoken enemy in the creation of Nickelodeon was Disney, so it was ironic when she allowed Ovitz and Iger to hire her away a year and a half ago. Her expertise in children’s programming went right to the heart of Disney’s franchise, and her timing was prescient. Nick’s done well since she left, but its parent, Viacom, hasn’t. Still, she’s had little to do at her new job. She runs Disney’s cable assets, but the new ventures that she could have shepherded–an all-news channel, a soap-opera channel, an educational children’s channel–are stillborn, partly because cable space is scarce and expensive these days. So she presides over the smallish Disney Channel, sits on the board of Disney’s partial cable investments like Lifetime and handles the government’s concerns over children’s programming. But she’s confided to friends that she feels restless and stifled, that she wants to be more entrepreneurial.
ABC could use an entrepreneur. Its hit shows are aging, with little to replace them. The new supposed savior, “Arsenio,” was an expensive flop. “Soul Man” with Dan Aykroyd has been a recent bright spot, but Tarses wasn’t always a fan of the show, and its producers had to appeal to Eisner to see it through, according to people close to the series. Some believe Tarses should be given more time. This season is “an inherited mess,” an associate says, and she should be judged on the quality of her upcoming fall slate, not this year’s debacle. Tarses’s strengths are in developing comedies like NBC’s “Friends,” but other aspects of the job have been more difficult: some advertisers complained about an unenthusiastic presentation of her development slate last March.
The crucial May sweeps, “Ellen” notwithstanding, are off to a poor start, though ABC hastens to say they’re an improvement over last May. The signature miniseries, Stephen King’s “The Shining,” underperformed, and people are wildly second-guessing scheduling decisions: did it make sense to lead into ABC’s critically important miniseries with an updated news-magazine report about Mount Everest? This week ABC execs will sit down to view pilots for shows with Jim Belushi, Paul Sorvino and Tim Curry, among others. They’ll consult reams of test data, then move the “squares,” picking new shows and figuring out where to slot them. Eisner will be there, helping to move those squares, and perhaps a few more of his own.
