The Ride of a Lifetime Read online

  The next day, Thursday, Tom and Dan announced that I would be the new head of ABC Entertainment. Three days later I flew out to L.A. and started the job.

  CHAPTER 3

  KNOW WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW (AND TRUST IN WHAT YOU DO)

  IT WASN’T QUITE leaping without a parachute, but it felt a lot like free fall at first. I told myself: You have a job. They’re expecting you to turn this business around. Your inexperience can’t be an excuse for failure.

  So what do you do in a situation like that? The first rule is not to fake anything. You have to be humble, and you can’t pretend to be someone you’re not or to know something you don’t. You’re also in a position of leadership, though, so you can’t let humility prevent you from leading. It’s a fine line, and something I preach today. You have to ask the questions you need to ask, admit without apology what you don’t understand, and do the work to learn what you need to learn as quickly as you can. There’s nothing less confidence-inspiring than a person faking a knowledge they don’t possess. True authority and true leadership come from knowing who you are and not pretending to be anything else.

  Luckily, I had Stu and Ted by my side. I was thoroughly dependent on them, especially in those early days. Their first order of business was to schedule what felt like an endless string of breakfast, lunch, and dinner meetings. Back then, the head of any of the three networks was one of the most powerful people in television (a fact that felt surreal to me), but to everyone in the industry, I was a looming question mark. I had no sense of how things were done in Hollywood, and no experience managing relationships with creative people or working with their representatives. I didn’t speak their language. I didn’t understand their culture. To them I was a suit from New York who suddenly—for reasons that must have seemed baffling—had immense influence over their creative life. So every day I met with the managers and agents and writers and directors and TV stars that Stu and Ted lined up for me. In most of those meetings, I had the distinct sensation of being poked and prodded in an effort to figure out who I was and what the hell I was doing there.

  The task was to not let my ego get the best of me. Rather than trying too hard to impress whoever was across the table, I needed to resist the urge to pretend I knew what I was doing and ask a lot of questions. There was no getting around that I was a square peg there. I didn’t come up through Hollywood. I didn’t have a big personality or any obvious swagger. I barely knew anyone in town. I could be insecure about that, or I could let my relative blandness—my un-Hollywood-ness—be a kind of mystery that worked to my advantage while I absorbed as much as I could.

  I arrived in L.A. with six weeks left to decide on a lineup for the 1989–90 prime-time season. On my first day in the office, I was handed a stack of forty scripts to read. Each night I’d take them home and dutifully make my way through them, making notes in the margins but struggling to imagine how the script in front of me would translate to the screen, and doubting my ability to judge what was good and what wasn’t. Was I even paying attention to the right stuff? Were there things that other people could obviously see that I was missing entirely? The answer, at first, was yes. I’d come in and meet with Stu and others to winnow the pile the next day. Stu could dissect a script so quickly—“His motivations aren’t clear at the top of Act 2…”—and I’d look back through the pages on my lap, thinking, Wait, Act 2? When did Act 1 end? (Stu would become one of my closest friends. I sometimes wore him down with my questions and inexperience, but he persevered and taught me vital lessons, not just about how to read scripts but about how to interact with creative people.)

  I started to realize over time, though, that I’d internalized a lot by watching Roone tell stories all those years. Sports wasn’t the same as prime-time TV, but there were important lessons about structure and pacing and clarity that I’d absorbed without even knowing it. In my first week in L.A., I had lunch with the producer and writer Steven Bochco, who had two huge hits for NBC, Hill Street Blues and L.A. Law, but had recently signed a lucrative ten-series deal with ABC. I mentioned to Steven that I was anxious about reading scripts. I didn’t even know the lingo and yet there was pressure to make decisions, quickly, on so many shows. He waved it off in a way that I found comforting coming from someone like him. “It’s not rocket science, Bob,” he said. “Trust yourself.”

  At the time, there were several successful shows in ABC’s prime-time lineup—Who’s the Boss?, Growing Pains, Roseanne, The Wonder Years, and Thirtysomething. But we were a distant number two to NBC, the network juggernaut. My job was to find a way to narrow that gap. We added more than a dozen new shows that first season, among them Family Matters and Life Goes On (the first show on television to feature a major character with Down syndrome), and America’s Funniest Home Videos, which became an immediate, gigantic hit and is now in its thirty-first season.

  We also aired Steven’s first big success for the network. He’d just delivered the script when I arrived: Doogie Howser, M.D., about a fourteen-year-old doctor juggling his life as both a physician and an adolescent boy. Steven showed me a video of the teenage actor, Neil Patrick Harris, whom he wanted for the lead role. I told him I wasn’t sure. I didn’t think Neil could carry the show. Very politely and straightforwardly, Steven slapped me down, gently suggesting that I didn’t know a thing. He informed me that it was basically his decision—not just whom to cast, but whether to go forward with the project or not. According to his deal, if we said yes to a project, he got a thirteen-episode commitment. If we said no, we had to pay him a kill fee of $1.5 million. Saying yes to this show was one of my first program decisions, and thankfully Steven was right about Neil. Doogie Howser, M.D. had four strong seasons for ABC and marked the beginning of a long collaboration and friendship with Steven.

  * * *

  —

  THERE WAS ANOTHER, much bigger risk we took that first season. Based on a literal back-of-a-napkin pitch at a restaurant in Hollywood, ABC’s head of drama had given the go-ahead to a pilot from David Lynch, by then famous for his cult films Eraserhead and Blue Velvet, and the screenwriter and novelist Mark Frost. It was a surreal, meandering drama about the murder of a prom queen, Laura Palmer, in the fictional Pacific Northwest town of Twin Peaks. David directed the two-hour pilot, which I vividly remember watching for the first time and thinking, This is unlike anything I’ve ever seen and we have to do this.

  As they did every year, Tom and Dan and a few other executives came out that spring for pilot season. We screened Twin Peaks for them, and when the lights came up, the first thing Dan did was turn around and look at me and say, “I don’t know what that was, but I think it was really good.” Tom was much less taken than Dan, and the other New York–based executives in the room agreed. It was too weird, too dark, for network TV.

  I had such respect for Tom, but I also knew this show was important enough to fight for. There were changes taking place that we had to face. We were now competing with the edgier programming available on cable TV, and with the new upstart Fox Network, not to mention the growth of videogames and the rise of the VCR. I felt that network television had become boring and derivative, and we had the chance with Twin Peaks to put something on TV that was utterly original. We couldn’t just fall back into our same old stance while everything changed around us. It was the Roone lesson all over again: Innovate or die. Eventually, I convinced them to let me screen the pilot for a younger, more diverse audience than a group of older guys from ABC in New York. The test audiences didn’t exactly support putting the show on network television, particularly because it was so different; but it was just that—its being different—that motivated us to give it the green light and make seven episodes.

  I decided to put it on in midseason, in the spring of 1990 rather than the fall of ’89. Each season we hold back shows as midseason replacements for the inevitability of a few failing shows. There’s a bit less pressure on those replacement show
s than the ones that launch in the fall, and it seemed like the best strategy for Twin Peaks. So we put it into production, to air in the spring, and in the intervening months rough cuts of the first few episodes began to come in. Although he’d given me permission to go ahead months earlier, Tom watched a couple of them and wrote me a letter that said, “You can’t air this. If we put it on television, it will kill our company’s reputation.”

  I phoned Tom and said we had to air Twin Peaks. By that point, there was already a tremendous buzz in and outside of Hollywood that we were doing this. There was even an article on the front page of The Wall Street Journal about this buttoned-up guy at ABC who was taking huge creative risks. Suddenly I was getting calls from Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. I visited Steven on the set of Hook, which he was directing at the time, and George at his Skywalker Ranch. They were both interested in talking about what they might do for ABC. That notion, that directors of that caliber would be interested in making television shows, was unheard of until we started making Twin Peaks. (Two years later, in 1991, George delivered The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, which lasted for two seasons.)

  I told Tom, “We’re getting unbelievable praise from the creative community for taking this risk. We have to air this.” To Tom’s credit, that’s what won him over. He was my boss, and he could have said, “Sorry, I’m overruling you.” But he understood the value of our winning over creative people in Hollywood, and he accepted my reasoning that this was a risk worth taking.

  We promoted the show on the Academy Awards in late March and aired the two-hour pilot on Sunday, April 8. Nearly thirty-five million people—about a third of TV watchers at the time—tuned in. We then scheduled it for Thursdays at 9:00 P.M., and within weeks Twin Peaks became the most successful program we’d put in that time slot in four years. It was on the cover of Time. Newsweek described it as being “like nothing you’ve seen in primetime—or on God’s earth.” I went to New York that May for the up-fronts, the big spring gathering where networks preview upcoming series for advertisers and the press, and had to go onstage to talk about ABC. “Every once in a while a network executive takes a big risk,” I said, and immediately the crowd broke into a standing ovation. It was the most exhilarating thing I’d ever felt in my career.

  The wave of euphoria broke almost immediately. Within six months, Twin Peaks went from cultural phenomenon to frustrating disappointment. We’d given David creative freedom, but as we got toward the end of the first season, he and I became locked in an ongoing debate about audience expectations. The entire show hinged on the question of who killed Laura Palmer, and I felt David was losing sight of that, laying breadcrumbs in a way that felt random and unsatisfying.

  David was and is a brilliant filmmaker, but he was not a television producer. There’s an organizational discipline that running a show requires (delivering scripts on time, managing a crew, making sure everything moves forward according to schedule) that David simply didn’t have. There’s a storytelling discipline, too. With a film, you need to get people in for two hours and give them a good experience and hope that they leave the theater engaged and enthralled. With a television series, you have to keep them coming back, week after week, season after season. To this day, I love and respect David, and will forever be in awe of his work, but the fact that he didn’t have a television producer’s sensibility resulted in storytelling that was too open-ended.

  “You need to resolve the mystery, or at least give people some hope that it will be resolved,” I said. “It’s beginning to frustrate the audience, including me!” David felt the mystery wasn’t the most important element of the show; in his ideal version, we’d never find out who the killer was, but other aspects of the town and its characters would emerge. We went around and around until, finally, he agreed to reveal the killer partway through season two.

  After that, the storytelling became a mess. There was no engine propelling the story after the mystery was resolved. Making matters worse, there wasn’t enough discipline in the production process, which led to confusion and delays. It became obvious to me that David, as brilliant as he was, should not run the show, and I debated firing him and bringing in a group of experienced television showrunners to take it over. I concluded it was a no-win situation, and we would be vilified if we fired David Lynch. Instead, we moved Twin Peaks to Saturday night, in part to take pressure off its need to perform, and when its ratings dropped precipitously, David blamed me publicly. I’d given it a death sentence, he said, first by pushing for a resolution to the mystery, then by putting it on a night when nobody would watch it.

  Looking back on it now, I’m not convinced I was right. I was applying a more traditional television approach to the storytelling, and David may have been ahead of his time. Deep down, I felt David was frustrating the audience, but it may well be that my demands for an answer to the question of who killed Laura Palmer threw the show into another kind of narrative disarray. David might have been right all along.

  Managing creative processes starts with the understanding that it’s not a science—everything is subjective; there is often no right or wrong. The passion it takes to create something is powerful, and most creators are understandably sensitive when their vision or execution is questioned. I try to keep this in mind whenever I engage with someone on the creative side of our business. When I am asked to provide insights and offer critiques, I’m exceedingly mindful of how much the creators have poured themselves into the project and how much is at stake for them.

  I never start out negatively, and unless we’re in the late stages of a production, I never start small. I’ve found that often people will focus on little details as a way of masking a lack of any clear, coherent, big thoughts. If you start petty, you seem petty. And if the big picture is a mess, then the small things don’t matter anyway, and you shouldn’t spend time focusing on them.

  Of course, no two situations are alike. There’s a big difference between giving feedback to a seasoned director like J.J. Abrams or Steven Spielberg and someone with much less experience and confidence. The first time I sat down with Ryan Coogler to give him notes on Black Panther, I could see how visibly anxious he was. He’d never made a film as big as Black Panther, with a massive budget and so much pressure on it to do well. I took pains to say very clearly, “You’ve created a very special film. I have some specific notes, but before I give them to you, I want you to know we have tremendous faith in you.”

  This is all a way of stating what might seem obvious but is often ignored: that a delicate balance is required between management being responsible for the financial performance of any creative work and, in exercising that responsibility, being careful not to encroach on the creative processes in harmful and counterproductive ways. Empathy is a prerequisite to the sound management of creativity, and respect is critical.

  * * *

  —

  REMARKABLY, THE DEMISE of Twin Peaks wasn’t our biggest failure that season. In the spring of 1990, I gave the green light to Cop Rock, a show that would become the butt of late-night jokes and take a permanent place on lists of the worst TV shows of all time. But I stand by the decision to this day.

  In one of our earliest meetings, Steven Bochco told me that in addition to Doogie Howser, he had another idea: a police drama set to music. He’d been approached by a Broadway producer interested in turning Hill Street Blues into a musical, which for various reasons he couldn’t do. But the idea had stuck with him—not to make a cop musical for Broadway, but to make a cop musical for TV. He’d bring it up periodically, and I’d deflect the idea. I wanted a cop show from Steven, but I didn’t want a musical. That spring, though, still basking in the glow of that first season of Twin Peaks, I finally came around. “You know what?” I told him. “Why not? Let’s try it.”

  The show took place in the LAPD and in all respects it operated like a normal, well-plotted police procedural—except that in moments
of high drama characters would burst into song: blues songs, gospel songs, big ensemble numbers. I sensed from the moment I saw the pilot that it wasn’t going to work, and would possibly be legendarily bad, but I also thought there was a chance I could be wrong. I admired Steven’s talent so much, and in any case I figured if I was going to be in, I needed to be all in.

  Cop Rock premiered in September 1990. Normally, when shows first aired, I’d ask our head of research in New York to call me in L.A. with the overnight ratings. This time I told him, “If the ratings are good, call. If they’re bad, just send a fax.” At 5:00 A.M., I woke to the sound of the fax machine humming, then closed my eyes and went back to bed.

  The reviews were not, in fact, universally terrible. I remember one complimented the show’s “audaciousness.” Others said that if you stripped away the music, you were left with a great Steven Bochco police drama. Most of the rest said it was an embarrassment. We pulled it in December of that year, after eleven episodes. Steven threw a wrap party on the lot, to celebrate and mourn the end of the show together. At the end of his remarks, he said, “Well, it ain’t over till the fat lady sings,” and over our heads soared a corpulent, singing woman on a flying trapeze.

  I got up and addressed the cast and crew. “We tried something big and it didn’t work,” I said. “I’d much rather take big risks and sometimes fail than not take risks at all.”