Life Zucks

Though Jeff Zucker will no longer have anyone to blame but himself if NBC Universal falls upon even harder times, it’ll be his privilege to fire any scapegoat who might cross his peripheral vision.

Zucker, routinely considered the chief cause of NBC’s spectacular tank job of the past five or six years (the network is buoyed somewhat this year by the success of “Heroes� and the perception that even its struggling scripted shows are more than worthy contributions to the television arts), won’t have any more excuses.

In Television, the product created second only to programming is Schadenfreude, and Zucker’s self-assurance (many others would no doubt choose another term) makes him a ripe target for that. He’s a smart guy, and he knows it; that rankles many industry people, even (or particularly) when the individual in question is correct in his self-assessment.

Yeah, so maybe he can be full of himself; the thing is, he talks a good game and every once in a while he’s not just b.s.ing you. Covering the TV industry was so much more interesting when Zucker and CBS COO Les Moonves would spend their press tour sessions slagging one another with the gleeful heedlessness of combat-video-game characters. Now, pillows should be handed out with NBC’s quietly and humbly intelligent Kevin Reilly and CBS’s aggressively unprovocative Nina Tassler handling the semiannual press conferences. (Actually, that’s not true about Reilly: He’s impressively forthcoming and thoughtful in his sessions. As for Tassler: Not only should they hand out pillows, but blankets, as well.) Zucker and Moonves remain happy to speak at length at their network’s evening events, but then it’s much harder to get to them for significant periods of time, and even more difficult, in the din of the party, to hear what they’re saying.

Earlier this season, NBC drew scads of contempt for some Draconian belt-tightening moves, including announcing that its 8 p.m. hour next season wouldn’t be cluttered with costly scripted shows. (Reilly later stepped away from that announcement.)

Rather than stinginess (and getting his network to rely too heavily on reality shows), Zucker’s true weakness during his tenure as NBC Entertainment president was failing to develop and sustain a single acceptable sitcom (“Scrubs� might’ve been the one, but was torpedoed by numerous timeslot switches). Simply put, the comedies NBC put on the air during Zucker’s tenure as a programmer suggests the guy doesn’t seem to have much of a sense of humor (or, in the case of “Good Morning Miami,� was also too sweet on shows that had semi-autobiographical Zuckerian touches).

This is more significant than it might sound, as the failure of legendary sitcom network NBC arguably contributed to the other networks’ lazy – or, at least, less than stellar – comedy development as well: When everyone’s sucking wind, there’s less to prove.

So: A lot of people are rooting against Zucker. And that’s when you should seriously reconsider betting against a guy.