David Kronke was appointed Mayor of Television after a bloodless coup in 2000. Since then, he has improved infrastructure, championed greater educational opportunities and fought for reforms that have utterly erased corruption and incompetence from the television industry. Since Mr. Kronke has ascended to power, Television is a far better place. NBC's Reilly out; "Quality with Noise" in
For more than a month, I had been trying to get NBC Entertainment president Kevin Reilly on the phone for a story we had discussed a while back.
Guess we know now why he wasn’t returning my calls.
In January, Reilly declared: “There's been a lot of conjecture, instability, and I can tell you from the top of the organization down it just has never felt better, you know, the support I have gotten from Jeff to do what I wanted to do creatively and to build the team. And what I really feel right now inside the building is a confidence back in terms of what we're doing and a confidence I tell you I have in the individuals with -- to a person, the people we have working with us at NBC I hope to work with for a long time and that feels really good to be able to say that. It's actually shockingly weirdly becoming fun again, which has been -- people are saying ‘What's that feeling that we have? Oh, that's fun.’”
So much for that. Reilly was the fall guy for NBC (though, in typical blundering-network style, he got ashcanned mere months after signing a lucrative three-year extension on his contract, so NBC – the network preaching austerity, the one that announced its intentions late last year to strip its 8 p.m. hour with low-budget reality nonsense – will be forking over a nice wad of cash to him nonetheless, with no headaches attached). The network has been in trouble since the middle of Jeff Zucker’s tenure as Entertainment president; he now, of course, runs the whole show as NBC-Universal president and CEO, a career trajectory we should all be so lucky to chart. Reilly was essentially brought in to perform CPR on a coma patient; he was kind of like the new “War Czar:” He was there to take the blame when things inevitably didn’t improve fast enough.
Despite a fairly spectacular cave-in near the end of the past TV season, Reilly decided to proceed with patience, bringing back low-rated new shows like “30 Rock” and “Friday Night Lights” and low-rated old shows like “Law & Order” and adding only four new dramas to the schedule when a lot of programmers would’ve thrown a lot more new shows up against the wall in hopes that a couple would stick. Of the new shows, one is potentially great: “Chuck,” an action-comedy about a techie who inadvertently gets the entire CIA database downloaded into his brain, which sets him up for a lot of unexpected (and unwanted) derring-do and danger and international intrigue. Unlike a lot of shows in this genre, “Chuck” refuses to take itself seriously, which makes it quite refreshing. (Following the success of “Heroes,” NBC kind of overloaded on the sci-fi-y stuff, with “Bionic Woman” and “Journeyman,” about a newspaper reporter who can travel back in time, both of which take themselves very seriously indeed. (If I were “Journeyman,” my first order of business would be to go back and stop Al Gore from inventing the Internets, so I’d have a smidgen of job security.))
So Reilly’s out and Ben Silverman’s in, with a snazzier title and reportedly greater leeway. As TV executives go, Reilly was a more honest, straight-shooting kind of guy; Silverman tends to talk a little more in industry-ese.
“Quality with Noise” would be a great name for a band, but it feels like one of those rubrics that sound like what one’s bosses want to hear but may in fact be reductive, contradictory and perhaps untenable (another popular one: “smart but accessible”). At least Silverman has already, for good or ill, chosen the epitaph for his tenure at NBC when he eventually, inevitably departs.