Top of the Rock: Inside the Rise and Fall of Must See TV

by Warren Littlefield, Former NBC President of Entertainment

  David Lee: When we found out we were going to be producing Cheers, we heard that Nick Colasanto died. So we started out having to replace the most beloved character on the show.

  Lori Openden: Woody Harrelson came in and read against another actor. The producers expected to go with the other actor, but we liked Woody. Woody was an understudy in Biloxi Blues in New York. He was also in a Goldie Hawn movie called Wildcats as football player number 4. Those were all of his credits. Woody was reading for Woody Boyd. People thought we’d changed the character’s name to suit the actor. Nope. That was a real meant-to-be kind of role. He did a film test the next day, and then he went to work right after that.

  Jim Burrows: Woody came out here, and the second night he was here he was robbed, mugged, his car taken.

  Lori Openden: When Woody got the part, he called his mother—single mother, raised three boys while Woody’s father was in prison. He told his mother he got the part and wanted her to quit her job.

  David Lee: Shortly after we’d solved the Coach problem, Shelley Long waltzed in and said she was leaving.

  Bob Broder: Shelley was an award-winning television actress with movie aspirations. She had one or two children during the run of Cheers, and then she decided she wanted out of the show. She’d done five years, and she was finished. It was probably a good thing. At that point, if they’d continued the series arc, she and Teddy would have had to get married, and it would have been a different show.

  Kelsey Grammer: I wasn’t aware of the numbers for Cheers before Shelley left, but I did think, once she’d left, it was a huge opportunity for the show to catapult into legendary status. Because her story was kind of over when Shelley decided to leave. So a show that had built an audience had a chance to become a new show. I thought, “Boy, this could really turn out well.”

  Jim Burrows: When Shelley left Cheers, we hated her for that. We went back to the original concept of the show—Sam Malone working for a woman. We told Jeff Greenberg, our casting director, what we wanted, and the first name out of his mouth was Kirstie Alley. We brought her in. She was wonderful, but we said, “No, we can’t buy the first house we’ve seen.” So we went through this long process, but nobody could beat her. She was great.

  She showed up for the first reading as Rebecca Howe dressed as Shelley Long. She came in a blond wig and a skirt. It was hysterical.

  Bob Broder: We gambled and got Kirstie Alley, and that gave us another six years. She flipped the show.

  Jim Burrows: The first run-through with Kirstie was abysmal. We wrote Rebecca Howe as a martinet. She wouldn’t give Sam Malone the time of day. She was mean. It wasn’t working. She had to exit to her office, and somehow the office door got locked. An accident. She started wrestling with it, and we cracked up. It dawned on us that we had to make her a woman of the eighties and the nineties who thinks she’s empowered but can’t get through the day. The minute we found her frailty and vulnerability, then we had it.

  Warren: There was a lot riding on the decision, and I remember holding my breath that night on the Cheers set hoping that this show that I loved wasn’t over. But the audience loved Kirstie. She got big laughs. I couldn’t wait to tell Brandon and called him at home that night after filming. I told him Kirstie was funny and she was great—very different from Shelley Long but sensational—and Cheers was going to be all right.

  Bob Broder: Then came Ted’s decision in year eleven that he was done. We could have gone on for another two years. Everybody was disappointed but respectful. Ted had given eleven years of his life to the show.

  John Pike: I can name very few actors as cooperative as Ted Danson. We never had a disagreement. He never held us up for money. Ted came and sat in this very room, and it wasn’t about money. He was just tired and didn’t want to do it anymore.

  He was the highest-paid actor at the time without question. But he was tired, tired of coming to work every day. The leverage Ted had was unbelievable. The leverage Ted used was absolutely in the spirit of the partnership.

  When you make a movie, you have a beginning, a middle, and an end. A television series is a living thing that doesn’t really end. I went through a lot with Ted, so I knew when we sat down that it was over. Nobody wanted to believe it, but it was over.

  Steve Levitan: As a viewer, I was completely invested in the Cheers characters. I thought it was the greatest place on earth. Who didn’t want to go to a bar like that? Who didn’t want to have friends like that? It was smart. It was Tracy/Hepburn. It was slapstick. It was everything all in one.

  What I love is you’re watching a show and laughing hard, having a wonderful ride, and then you have a profound moment that makes you feel something, and then you’re laughing again. That’s what works for me.

  Jim Burrows: We ran eleven years. We ran more years without Shelley than with her. That’s how good the cast was. When she left, we had to do shows about the rest of the people in the bar because we didn’t want to do Rebecca and Sam in a romance. Woody came in. Bebe came in. We had a great time. It was a wonderful show.

  Mike Mandelker: The real value of Cheers was that everybody used to watch Cheers. Everybody wanted to see their commercial on Cheers. The value of Cheers was far greater than its audience share. The magic of Cheers, just as it was the magic of Seinfeld, was that it was the show Madison Avenue watched.

  John Pike: We put together a piece of paper called “The Value of Cheers.” We calculated that net dollars to NBC for one year of Cheers was $75 million. The Cheers asset over the years was about three-quarters of a billion dollars of profit for the network.

  Warren: It was worth more. Cheers was an absolute game changer for NBC. Successful both artistically and financially, Cheers validated our judgment and our taste and marked the beginning of our discovery of who we were as a network. It was a lesson I would remember and come back to.

  Warren: Cheers was bumping along well enough by 1983 to make us hopeful of its eventual success, but it was no world-beater quite yet. The conventional thinking among the entertainment press was that the half-hour comedy was dead, and most of the print interviews I gave at the time took the form of comedy postmortems. Reviving the sitcom, both in the affections of TV writers and in the habits of the viewing public, would take an out-of-the-blue ratings champion, an unmitigated comedic success that hardly anyone who turned on a television could bear to miss. It would take, in short, Bill Cosby.

  Following the airing of the first episode of The Cosby Show in September 1984, two years after the premiere of Cheers, I would never again be asked about the death of the sitcom.

  Legend has it that Brandon Tartikoff proposed the idea for the show to Bill Cosby, a legend cultivated by Brandon, who as a network president knew better than anyone how to prolong his position. It’s not true, of course. It’s just as false as the legend that Brandon “created” Miami Vice by suggesting, “MTV cops.” In response to Michael Mann and Tony Yerkovich’s pitch for Miami Vice, Brandon said, “I get it. MTV cops.” Not quite the same thing, but people don’t always argue with network presidents.

  The Cosby Show was developed by two former ABC executives turned producers, Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner. They’d approached Cosby about starring in a TV series. Bill wanted to play a limo driver in an hour drama, but Tom and Marcy convinced him to do a family comedy that was an extension of Bill’s stand-up. And Bill’s stand-up was a brilliant comedic extension of Bill’s life.

  Tom Werner: Making The Cosby Show was a transforming experience for us. Marcy and I had been in comedy at ABC and had discovered some pretty talented people and put them in shows—Robin Williams, Tom Hanks, Billy Crystal. It was scary to leave that network, with corner offices and people calling you all the time to pitch ideas.

  Marcy Carsey: I grew up at ABC with Leonard Goldenson instilling in us a really idealistic view of network television. Public trust. Public airwaves. Our job as programmers would be to deliver shows that not only were successful but shows we could be proud of. We should
put together a schedule that serves everyone. It sounds really corny now, but that’s how we felt about it.

  I would have preferred to stay at ABC if the people I liked had stayed. There was no other job available in town that was like that. The only other choice for me was to go out and be as independent as possible as a producer. I always thought it was in the network’s best interest to have strong independent voices out there along with the studios and big companies.

  Tom Werner: At the time we were pitching the show, Bill Cosby wasn’t as hot as he’d been previously. He’d been wildly successful on I Spy, and he’d done a variety show. He’d be white-hot later but not at the time.

  People think The Cosby Show, because it was such an enormous hit, was always going to be an enormous hit. Not the case. We went to ABC, where we had a big development deal, and they turned us down.

  Warren and Brandon liked the idea, but I didn’t get the sense they thought it was going to be a big hit. It was more “Let’s take a shot.”

  Marcy Carsey: I don’t think Brandon believed in the show. He told the advertisers he thought it would come in a strong second to Magnum P.I.

  Warren: I was getting a haircut early one morning on my way to work, and Brandon and John Agoglia called me to say they were passing on the Cosby deal. “What?!”

  By now I was vice president of comedy programs, and they thought I had other strong shows in development and the Cosby deal was just too rich. I told them, “We have to have this show. Put a little more on the table.” Thankfully, that’s just what they did, and John closed the deal.

  We had Bill, Marcy, and Tom, but we didn’t have a writer yet, and it was getting very late in the development season. At the last moment, Tom and Marcy secured Ed. Weinberger (Mary Tyler Moore, Taxi) and Michael Leeson (Phyllis, Rhoda, Taxi) to write a pilot demo script. It wasn’t a full pilot, because of the lack of time. It was written very quickly.

  Brandon and I got together after reading it and decided for the first (and for me the only) time in our professional lives to deliver this message to the producers: “We have no notes. We love it!”

  At that time little or no prime-time entertainment production was done in New York, so for simplicity’s sake the plan was to make the demo in Los Angeles. We had the demo shot in less than a month, probably the quickest turnaround in network history. I remember thinking to myself as I watched the taping of the pilot episode, “This is a hit.”

  There’s a scene in the demo where Cliff has to go to Theo’s room and punish him for getting D’s on his report card. Cliff grabs a baseball bat as he heads upstairs. The audience did not know what to expect. Theo then passionately tells his dad, “I may not grow up to be a doctor like you or a lawyer like Mom, but you should love me for who I am.” I remember the audience, led by the young people, really applauded Theo for standing up to his father. They were on his side.

  Bill waited, and then he said, “Theo, that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. You’re going to study because I said so. I brought you into this world, and I can take you out.” There was a roar from the entire audience. It was as if they were saying, “God Bless you, Bill Cosby, for taking back your role as a parent and telling these spoiled children to study.” The energy from that laugh was explosive.

  I was sitting in the audience. The younger members appreciated Theo’s speech, but then when Bill said, “I can take you out,” everyone in the audience was united, the place went nuts. At that moment, it felt like breakthrough television. I’d never known anything like it.

  Marcy Carsey: We knew we had a hit on our hands from the pilot. We knew kind of before that, but the audience confirmed it.

  Warren: Knowing what we had in our hands allowed us to go to the scheduling board and make changes on three nights of the week. The impact was enormous.

  Tom Werner: Marcy and I were in favor of stripping away concept as much as possible. We adored Bill’s point of view about family and about parenting and about humanity. Bill really was a stand-up genius. He had this ability to tell stories about his children or his parents, and he could do this for two hours. Most comedians run out of material after fifteen minutes. Bill had his own rhythm. It’s not three jokes a minute, and we tried to emulate that rhythm in the show.

  Bill’s point of view was remarkable and unusual. People have said it had some effect on Obama’s election. In 1984, everyone wanted to be a Huxtable. We stripped away the economic underpinning of the show and were just telling stories.

  Warren: Creatively, Bill Cosby insisted on an enormous amount of control over the writing and the portrayal of his TV family, and, as with Cheers, putting our faith in the talent was well rewarded.

  In series, the first head writer and show runner, Earl Pomerantz, couldn’t handle Bill’s creative process. I remember sitting beside Earl at the table reading of the second or third script. After Bill had worked a comic variation on a piece of dialogue, Earl muttered, “Just once I’d like to hear the words I wrote.” After watching Bill’s process at the read, I said to myself, “Boy, are you in for a lot of disappointment.” Since it was Bill’s show, and its success would depend on Bill’s sense of comic invention, saying the words as written wasn’t really in the cards.

  Tom Werner: Earl had written a couple of scripts he’d given to Bill. Bill had a challenging time giving notes before he’d heard the script read on the set. Bill gave notes with the understanding he could give better notes once he’d heard the script read. The process on The Cosby Show was going to be radically different from what Earl was used to. Bill would say, “I admire that writing, but that’s not me, and I wouldn’t say it this way.”

  It got to where whatever the writer’s first draft was, it was open to being thrown out on the table-read day. There are certain writers who realize a first draft is a thing to continue on or throw away. Earl just couldn’t work that way. And we had a four-day workweek. Most shows are done in five days. After a table read on Monday, you had to get the show ready in basically forty-eight hours.

  Earl came to me and Marcy and said we had to support him or support Bill. He put us in the position where, if it was Earl or Bill, we had to go with Bill. He wasn’t only the star of the show; he was the vision behind the show. Earl quit.

  Warren: Elliot Shoenman took over, and the show motored along just fine from there. A young playwright, Matt Williams, was also added to the staff, and he would go on and eventually create Home Improvement. Before Cosby, we were getting test patterns on Thursday at 8:00. It was all about CBS. Magnum. Simon & Simon. That two-hour block owned the world. But with the premiere of The Cosby Show, everything changed.

  Tom Werner: The first night the show got a 48 share nationally.

  Warren: According to Nielsen’s audience measurement, it was actually a 21.6 rating/39 share. That’s still an incredible number. TV viewership is commonly reported in ratings points and shares. A single ratings point represents 1 percent of the total number of television households in the country (households with one or more television sets). A share is the percentage of those available sets tuned to a given program. The premiere of Cosby was watched by over thirty-four million people (Nielsen Media Research). The highest-rated series today is American Idol, and it is watched by just over twenty-five million viewers.

  When Brandon saw the numbers for Cosby, he thought it was a printing error. We just weren’t conditioned to think that positively.

  Tom Werner: When the national numbers came in, Warren called and said it was the number one show in the nation for the whole week.

  I went down to the set and told Bill the show was number one. Not just for the night but for the whole week, and Bill couldn’t comprehend it.

  Warren: We could barely comprehend it ourselves. While Cheers had been an artistic out-of-the-gate success, the audience was slow to build. Everybody showed up for Cosby starting from the premiere of the first half hour.

  Tom Werner: If you read the scripts, they don’t come across as funny as when you
watch the shows. Part of what made that show so powerful was that it gave people the sense—and Bill said it—of “how did you get in my living room?”

  At times it was like shooting a live sporting event. Bill was often not on his mark and having fun, and you just had to submit to the spirit of it. Bill was very willing to take lots of chances. He’d hire actors who’d never acted before just to give them a chance. He had Dizzy Gillespie play Rudy’s music teacher just to give Dizzy a chance to be seen by the American audience.

  We would do a taping at 5:30 and at 8:00. Bill would invite people into his dressing room between tapings, and it was an incredible party. Sidney Poitier. Jesse Jackson. Maya Angelou. I don’t think he ever took the show as seriously as he might have. Bill never saw a rough cut. He trusted us.

  I do think the fact we were an independent production company helped the quality of the show. Our finances were on the line, and we shot in Brooklyn because it was cheaper. We were at Fourteenth and Avenue M. It really wasn’t show business.

  Warren: The camera guys knew soap opera. They didn’t know comedy. The room in the apartment building next door where the writers and producers worked every day was dowdy and smelled like cabbage. The stage was an antique. This wasn’t Hollywood. They worked across the street from 20th Century Fish. This was Brooklyn.

  The first season was produced at NBC’s Studio One. When that building was sold, the production moved to Kaufman Studios in Astoria, Queens. Leaving the studio one evening during rush hour in a car with Bill Cosby and a driver, I had an amazing experience. I was convinced it would take us forever to get into Manhattan, but I was riding with Mr. Bill Cosby, who would lower his window and stick his head out when need be. Almost as if by magic, traffic cones were scooted aside. Police stopped cars and trucks to let us pass, an urban version of the parting of the Red Sea. It was all out of love for Bill. We arrived at his town house in fifteen minutes, just in time for dinner.