by Warren Littlefield, Former NBC President of Entertainment
One afternoon Bob Wright called me and said, “I can’t find Don.” I asked him if he was still in his office at 30 Rock, and he said he was. I then told him if he put on the live news feed, he’d probably be able to catch Don exiting the detention center in downtown L.A. after his daily visit with O.J. Silence from Bob.
On a nightly basis Jay Leno’s monologue would hilariously recap the proceedings of the trial, and SNL delivered some of their all-time greatest sketches thanks to O.J. In our current programming sessions (which Don sporadically attended) we were forbidden to discuss any of those antics.
Preston Beckman: We made a pilot starring O.J. with the knife he used to kill his wife. It was called Frogmen. We used to say if we were ever in a tough situation, we’d put on Frogmen. I threatened everybody [competing networks] with Frogmen.
Warren: By 1996, Don’s drinking and his behavior in the office and at numerous NBC “off campus” events had become serious liabilities. I remember one episode in particular at an NBC retreat. Don, in his cups, was hitting on an NBC female executive, an openly gay executive. When she told him, “Don, you know I’m gay,” Don shot back, “Doesn’t matter to me.”
Shortly thereafter, I approached Bob Wright and encouraged him to get help for Don. Don was clearly sick and needed our help and support. Turning a corporate blind eye was only making things worse. With Bob’s encouragement, and in the wake of a full-blown intervention, Don checked into the Betty Ford Center in 1996. I later heard that initially Bob suspected I was just angling to get Don fired.
Don dried out, but he only managed to become more insufferable.
Harold Brook: Here was my normal workday. Don was getting up early. This is sober Don. I’d get a phone call every morning on Don’s drive in. Don would call me about deals, and he’d go off on them. I’d have to pull files once I got to the office, and there was always an e-mail to Don laying out the deal. And there would be an “Okay, D.O.” So I’d have to go up, and he’d say, “What idiot signed off on this deal?”
“You did.”
John Miller: The business Don—pre-intervention—was a little easier to deal with. Whatever anxieties he had, he seemed to get rid of them through drinking. When he didn’t have that outlet, the demons festered, and he brought them to work. Don was far more difficult sober.
Preston Beckman: Don was like an abusive dad. At his 2:30 meeting, there were a couple of people who would always say something stupid, and Don would go after them. David Nevins was the worst. I wanted to say, “Just shut up!”
John Miller: You know those National Geographic documentaries where the lion takes a wildebeest, takes one down, rips its neck open, and kills it? That was Don. Once he’d savaged somebody, you could deal with him for the next few hours. He’d had his wildebeest.
Karey Burke: Don was a different person after he got sober. Don was less distracted sober, so he paid a lot more attention to what we were doing. Warren was a buffer for us. Don tried to love us to death, paid too much attention to us.
Preston Beckman: We often thought about leaving a case of vodka in Don’s office.
Warren: I tried, but I didn’t like Don. He just didn’t leave a lot of oxygen in the room for anybody else, and he made life a lot more difficult than it needed to be at NBC. Don was first a drunk bully and then a sober bully, but always a bully. He ran effective interference for us with the network suits in New York, and when Don was on your side, he was a great asset. But he was an abusive impediment far too much of the time.
Throughout my tenure as president of entertainment at the network, when we were airing the Must See shows no one could bear to miss, executives at the other networks openly coveted what they called “that Ohlmeyer/Littlefield thing.” Until now, I doubt anybody outside of NBC knew what a tumultuous, dysfunctional thing it was. It’s a wonder we got shows on the air, much less the iconic programs that made us the Must See network.
Warren: The Cosbys’ ratings juggernaut had lost quite a lot of altitude by 1990. At Fox they sensed an opening and moved the animated hit The Simpsons to Thursday at 8:00 to hasten the inevitable end of Huxtable dominance. Once Cosby finally left the schedule, in September 1992, we moved the Cosby spin-off, A Different World, into the leadoff position against Bart. Behind it we aired a show called Rhythm & Blues. It was about a white DJ at an all-black radio station in Detroit.
I don’t know what we were thinking, certainly not about quality. Rhythm & Blues was a one-joke premise. It wasn’t very good, and America quickly told us as much. What was once a Thursday night of great television and huge audiences was suddenly in rapid decline. After I dumped Rhythm & Blues, the only palatable option was to open Thursday night with Cheers repeats at 8:00 and move A Different World back to 8:30 with Cheers originals at 9:00.
Cheers was certainly a known commodity. By 1992 it had been around for ten years, and the research department estimates for how the repeats would perform were decent. Networks didn’t use multiple runs of their hits back then and I wasn’t particularly proud of the fix we were in after years of going gangbusters on Thursday night, but I was desperate. Surprisingly, Cheers repeats at 8:00 did much better than any of us expected or research had predicted. The audience was telling us there was an opportunity for high-quality adult comedy prior to 9:00 p.m. That was a bit of a revelation, a revelation we would ultimately act upon with the Paul Reiser/Danny Jacobson comedy Mad About You.
Jamie Tarses and I had heard the pitch for Mad About You in the fall of 1991. Though compelling, it wasn’t terribly elaborate or involved and was delivered by Paul and Danny.
Jamie Tarses: The pitch was basically “It’s the car ride home. When you leave the party or the dinner, it’s you and your wife in the car.” Paul did some riffing from his stand-up, but it wasn’t much more than that.
Paul Reiser: The show came out of my stand-up. I’d started writing and performing relationship stuff, and everything else felt more trivial. I’d started to get laughs of recognition, and that’s a better laugh.
Before I was in My Two Dads, I’d written a pilot for Gary David Goldberg called Wonderland Trucking. I’d worked hard to get out of my father’s business, and there I was going into the pretend trucking business in pretend New Jersey. It didn’t work, and suddenly this pilot came up—My Two Dads—and I did it.
That was my ambivalent step into series TV. It was presented to me as a show with the possibility of being adult, but it didn’t turn out that way.
My Two Dads had taught me what I didn’t want to do. I used to hear from fans, “My little daughter loves your show!” That was okay. I wasn’t making napalm, but that wasn’t what I wanted.
I knew if I did a new show, it would be something small, a couple. Part of our pitch was “It’s Thirtysomething, but it’s shorter and funnier.” Adult, smart, introspective. Perhaps overly introspective. The show was simple. It was about simple things. We wanted to keep the show small. I think Cosby had said, “The smaller you make it, the more universal it is.”
Warren: Danny and Paul looked at me as if they were confessing something to a priest and said, “We’re both married men now … and it doesn’t suck! That’s the show.”
We liked the pitch, and we liked Paul and Danny. Paul Reiser, like Jerry Seinfeld, was a stand-up comedian, but Paul also had some serious acting experience, particularly his wonderful turn in Diner. In a sense, then, we were working an improvement on the Seinfeld equation by going into business with a comedian who could already act.
Paul Reiser: Part of what sparked the process for us was that the very people we were pitching to responded to what we were saying. It helps if the people you’re pitching to actually care. Somewhere along the line, it was thought our show might be a good companion to Seinfeld.
Glenn Padnick: Paul Reiser was a very good friend of Jerry’s, and he very much admired Jerry’s show. Mad About You was sort of the domestic version of Seinfeld.
Warren: Paul’s manager pushed very hard for it to be called The Paul R
eiser Show. I told him no, the show was about this couple. Don’t ask me again.
Paul Reiser: I don’t think I had anybody in mind when we were casting, but in December, when I was writing the pilot, I met Helen Hunt at a dinner party. She was sharing a house with a good friend of my wife’s. That evening we were talking about couples, and I turned to my wife and said, “She’d be great.”
Helen Hunt: By the time Mad About You happened, I had done much more television than movies, and at that time if you did TV, then you weren’t invited to the party of being in movies. I had just started to get into movies. I had done this movie called The Waterdance, which I was very proud of, and this movie, Mr. Saturday Night, which wasn’t so successful, but it was a big movie. It was a big deal for me to finally be in that club, so the last thing on earth I thought I would do was a TV series, particularly a sitcom, because at that time you were even further from having a serious film career if you were in a four-camera show.
Paul Reiser: Helen was doing a lot of movies, and I asked her to read the script. She read it. She called and said, “I like it. What do we do now?” She came over to the house, and I think I put her at ease.
Helen Hunt: I met with Paul and Danny, and I asked them, “Where is it going?” I assumed the show would get bigger and wackier, because one would need to tell stories, one would have crazy neighbors, and the sister would do things. I remember Paul saying, “The hope is to get smaller and smaller and smaller.”
That really interested me. That, to me, felt new. It’s what I like. I just did the production of Our Town in New York, and it’s all about smaller and smaller. There are no lights, no costumes. It is spare, and I’m often interested in what kind of truth you can get out of how little.
Paul Reiser: With Mad About You, we fought to keep it from becoming “she’s X and he’s Y.”
Helen Hunt: I loved Paul’s comedy, and I knew he was a good actor too, which I think is a pretty rare combination. A lot of comedians pull it off, but they’re not really actors. He’s a real actor, not just accidentally a decent actor. But I was pretty sure that I didn’t want to be the wife on the “Untitled Paul Reiser Project,” which is what showed up.
But then I read it, and I thought, “They’ve written at least as good a part for her as they have for him. It really is a two-hander. I would have to wait a long time to get to look at a relationship the way that this does.” The only reason I took it was the writing.
I went to Paul’s house, and I knew, for me, who wasn’t a jokester, that I would have to find my way, and I intuitively felt that my way was to be physically busy all the time. Paul has this goal, this is the show that happens after you leave, after the company leaves, or after you drive away from the people’s house, what happens then.
So to really do that, I rarely sit in my living room and talk to my partner about our day without doing something. I’m emptying the trash, or checking the mail, or making lunch. So I intuitively knew that for me to pull off this kind of out-and-out comedy, I would have to be physically busy. That just seemed right. So I started doing dishes at his house. We rehearsed in the kitchen. He got an actress and a housekeeper all at once.
Paul Reiser: When we went into final casting, it was Helen Hunt and Teri Hatcher. I remember getting a phone call from the network—thirteen on the air if you use Valerie Bertinelli. She wasn’t right. She was just coming off a sitcom, and I wanted something fresh.
Lori Openden: Teri Hatcher tested the last day before Helen came in. She was good, but she wasn’t magical like Helen.
Jamie Tarses: Teri Hatcher gave Helen a run for her money. She was good, but Paul and Helen were great in that room together. It was the idea of the minutiae of that relationship. Picking out a couch, being in the kitchen and having inane conversations about everything. It was that.
Lori Openden: Paul wanted Helen for the part. They were friends. Helen’s was one of the best comedy readings I’ve ever seen.
Warren: That was the moment it went from a promising script to green-lighting the pilot. I looked at everyone in the room and said, “Let’s go!”
Helen Hunt: It was an audition for me and for the show, kind of all at once. Paul was so nervous. I remember giving him a back rub. It was supposed to be my audition, and I was rubbing his shoulders. I didn’t feel nervous, maybe because I felt comfortable with the material. Also, to sign up for seven years of anything, or five, whatever we had to sign before you walk in, I was so ambivalent about that that I thought, “It’s a win-win for me either way.” So I had that luxury of not being terrified.
Me and Paul could see the same thing in the show—the three of us, in fairness, Danny too—we could see: they should try to get pregnant, it shouldn’t be easy getting pregnant, one of them could almost have an affair, or have an affair. There should be a time where it gets incredibly hard. Whether there’s an affair or not, there should be a baby, ultimately. We could both look down the road that didn’t exist yet and see that. That’s a lot. When I meet with people now and ask what a series is going to be, they say, “Well, we’re going to explore the way the law …” There’s no good answer, because there are very few subjects that should be given seven years to be played out. Very, very few. So those were the elements for me.
I remember when we shot the pilot thinking there must be something here, because there’s so little, so low on concept here. What is this show? It’s two people, a little bit of a funny thing around them. So if that’s working, something’s happening because it wasn’t a big hook. There must be something to it, or else everyone wouldn’t be laughing this hard at so little.
Jamie Tarses: When the show went on the air, it didn’t instantly work.
Paul Reiser: For the first six shows of Mad About You, we tried it with an audience and without one. I was afraid I’d be reaching too hard with an audience, but I’m glad I got convinced out of that. I found it could be electrifying. We were putting on a play, and those laughs could really spark the show.
When I heard the audience say, “Awwww,” that really shriveled my spine. I hated it. I remember saying, “I’m going to talk to the audience,” but somebody stopped me. We just started taking the “Awwww’s” out of the track, and it trained the audience. “Oh, you don’t do that on that show.”
Preston Beckman: We had a show called Monty that was supposed to be our 8:00 show, and it sucked. We were all saying, “We’re fucked. Now what are we going to do?” We wound up putting Mad About You there and took a lot of heat for it. Paul and Jamie had sex on the kitchen table or something. You don’t do that at 8:00.
Warren: In press interviews and in discussions with affiliates, our strategy was challenged. Is this appropriate for 8:00 p.m.? I argued that the world was changing. There were plenty of kid and family choices available on network and cable. The conventional thinking had long been that you couldn’t run “adult” material at 8:00. That was the family hour kickoff and called for much tamer fare. No one had ever tried the grown-up stuff this early before, but I was desperate, and Thursday night needed to work. Hey, at least they were married. Sex on the kitchen table? Why not?
Lisa Kudrow: I did a guest star at the beginning of the first season on Mad About You. I played Karen, and I was a blind date for Paul. It was a flashback to the night he met Jamie. I was always trying to find little things that wouldn’t take up too much time or go off the dialogue to make scenes more interesting or funny or another level of stupid.
Paul Reiser: Lisa had two lines in that first show. I said, “I’m a documentary filmmaker.” She said, “That’s so funny. I work in a bank.” That was her line, but it was all in the way she delivered it, the way she connected the two.
Lisa Kudrow: Then my agent called me one morning, and I was almost out of money. I was about to get a day job. And my agent said, “Okay, Mad About You, Danny Jacobson has this part. It doesn’t even have a name. It’s called ‘the waitress,’ and they want you there in an hour. I can’t even show you anything. You’ll see it wh
en you get there. I say pass, because they can’t treat you like this.” And I was like, “Treat me like what?” I needed money, and they were offering me a job. I thought it was the best show on television, so I said, “I’ll do it.”
There’s no such thing as “You’re better than this.” You have to show up and do a good job. So I just drove down there, and I thought, “Whatever it is, just listen and respond and make it funny. That’s it. That’s all you have to do.”
I say you do everything, if it’s not porn. Do anything. Work begets work. I always thought that. You never know who’s watching. By the end of that week, Danny said, “Would it be okay with you if we brought you back for five more episodes, because you’re really funny?”
My agents at the time—and maybe I’ll be nice and not say who they were—one of them said, “Hey, my daughter watches Mad About You, and she said she saw you on it.” I thought, “Why don’t you know I’m on it?”
Paul Reiser: Then Lisa told us she was going to audition for a new show. We told her good luck, but pilots never get picked up … Friends.
Warren: In the course of its seven-year run, Mad About You got shifted around the schedule quit a bit. It was a strong show for us. We found we could play it almost anywhere, and it would draw an audience, so the show became a kind of utility fielder for the network.
As a programmer, I have found that a utility fielder like Mad About You is a rare and valuable commodity, but I’m sure Paul Reiser took a different view altogether.