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

by Warren Littlefield, Former NBC President of Entertainment

  We were trying to figure who to cast for Ronny’s part, and I said I’d seen John Mahoney in The House of Blue Leaves, so he must play the piano. We hired him. He came out, and we shot a few scenes. Then I said, “John, now you have to play the piano.” He said, “I don’t play the piano.”

  Kelsey Grammer: We’d killed Frasier’s father off in the ninth year of Cheers. I’d walked in with a stuffed owl and said my father was a famous professor and the owl was his prized possession. I asked Sam if he wanted to keep it in the bar. Sam said, “Hell, no.” So Frasier tells him, “Toss it.” The end of his sentiment about his dad.

  When Sam visited Frasier, he said, “You told me your dad was dead.” I said, “I lied.”

  David Lee: The only character we didn’t have a good idea about was Roz. We eventually cast Lisa Kudrow, who lasted four days.

  Peter Casey: We had Lisa read and Peri Gilpin. John Pike wasn’t a fan of Peri’s. When it came time to decide, John said, “Not Peri.”

  Lori Openden: Lisa Kudrow got the role of Roz. She’d done a number of guest shots on Mad About You. She didn’t audition. We just hired her.

  Peter Casey: Lisa gave us the laughs. She was really funny. We hadn’t totally developed the character, but in that radio station she was going to be the top dog.

  Lisa Kudrow: I know originally they wanted Peri Gilpin. All along they kind of wrote it for Peri, because they loved her and had worked with her before. So order was restored ultimately for Frasier. But it was devastating for me, because I had always thought, “I’m going to do a sitcom.” And I had originally thought that I would do a guest star and it would go well, and then I would get a recurring role, and that’s how I would be on a show. So when Frasier happened, it exceeded my expectations, because it wasn’t how I saw it happening. But getting fired was devastating, because that was the best pilot.

  Lori Openden: After the run-through, the only thing that wasn’t quite working was Lisa’s character. She had a hard time with long speeches. Jimmy said she was the only thing that wasn’t really working.

  Jim Burrows: Lisa Kudrow was wrong for the part of Roz. She just didn’t have the authority she needed. For a while she didn’t like me. Then Friends came along. We’re good friends now.

  Lisa was on a Cheers. She played an actress with Woody. They were doing Our Town. Peri Gilpin was also on Cheers. Peri isn’t as comedically skilled as Lisa, but she had that “don’t fuck around, Frasier” quality.

  Lisa Kudrow: At the table read, I tanked. Then at the rehearsals Jimmy would say, “It’s not working, don’t worry about it, don’t even try.” And I didn’t, which I think was a mistake, because you always need to do your best. But it wasn’t working anyway. I think the character, the choice I made, was too snarky.

  Lori Openden: At the time we fired Lisa Kudrow from Frasier, she was dating Conan O’Brien, who was our rising star. So we also had to break the news to Conan.

  Warren: Naturally, Jimmy Burrows directed the pilot of Frasier. He certainly knew the character from his years at the helm of Cheers, and we needed Jimmy’s magic. We needed a hit.

  David Hyde Pierce: When I got the script for the pilot episode, I knew it was clearly a huge mistake because they had written two of the same characters in Frasier and Niles. I thought, “Why would they do that?” which is why I don’t run a network and make programming decisions.

  At the first table reading, I went, “Oh.” From the first moment, it went gangbusters.

  Jim Burrows: In the pilot of Frasier, the character of Niles only had one scene. I told the boys they had to go back to Niles.

  David Hyde Pierce: Jimmy was legendary, of course. I’d heard he was a great director and fun to work with, so I was looking forward to it. Then Jimmy came into the conference room for the first table read, and he said, “All right, let’s read.” I thought, “This is what we’ve all been waiting for? This is God’s gift to directing?” It turned out that that was one of the key elements of his directing: he doesn’t waste time.

  Mathilde DeCagny trained the dog on Frasier, the very first dog, Moose. Moose was this tough little dog, very smart, but if he learned a trick too soon, he got bored with it, and he wouldn’t do it anymore. Mathilde had to figure out how to train him just enough so that on shoot night he’d do the trick and move on. That’s how Jimmy treated us.

  He’d see me and Jane working on something across the way, and he’d yell at us, “Stop rehearsing.” Jimmy recognizes when you spend too much time on something, especially in that format, you kill it.

  Peter Casey: Near the end of Wings, we had nine people in the cast and just twenty-two minutes to tell a story. With Frasier, we decided to keep the cast small and give everybody more material. The story of the pilot was very simple, and it gave us all this room to maneuver.

  David Lee: We sat down to write the pilot without an outline. We did all sorts of things you’re not supposed to do to write a TV series.

  Warren: This took a lot of trust—no story document, no scene-by-scene outline. The first thing we saw on paper was the first draft of the script. This just isn’t done anymore.

  Peter Casey: I remember when we edited the pilot, we were seven minutes long. We cut it as much as we could, and we were still a minute long. NBC gave us the extra minute. They took fifteen seconds off every other show that night.

  The day we shot the pilot, we did a dress rehearsal at 3:00 in the afternoon. At the end, the audience spontaneously gave us a standing ovation.

  The first scene with John Mahoney: “Dad, your chair doesn’t go with anything.”

  “I know. It’s eclectic.”

  I looked up in the booth and could just see the soles of Warren’s shoes because he was leaning back, laughing. That’s when I knew we were in.

  Warren: I loved that pilot, but once again there were a number of people who were afraid of it when we screened it. They thought the battle between Frasier and his dad, while dramatic, was maybe too rough for a sitcom. I thought the show was real and had great texture, and that was all part of the evolution of not simply being a Cheers spin-off but becoming its own show.

  Jamie Tarses: Wings never did that well, and nobody particularly liked it. Frasier went on and worked right away.

  Jack Welch: The only spin-off that worked was Frasier. When we wanted Michael Richards to go the next step to be Kramer on a spin-off, he didn’t want to do it. We finally got him, but it bombed.

  Bob Wright: Ninety-one and ’92 marked the first advertising drop since World War II—all advertising. It was tough.

  Warren: A strong advertising marketplace can cover up a lot of scheduling weaknesses, but when both the ad market is weak and your schedule is weak, that’s the worst double whammy you can have.

  Bob Wright: We drifted down from ’89 into ’92, and then the advertising markets were collapsing. We had a lot to lose. We lost 50 percent of what we had, and we still had as much as everybody else. But we were 50 percent down.

  The breakthrough of that whole ugly period from ’91 to ’93 was Frasier coming out in ’93. Seeing the show at the upfronts was a very big deal.

  Warren: In 1993, President Clinton launched his new economic strategy that embraced budgetary discipline while investing in education and science. It paid off with a reduction in inflation and unemployment and a record 116 months of economic growth. Our creative surge could not have come at a better time. Just as the advertising market started to come back, so did NBC.

  Frasier was a hit right away. We started it out on Thursday nights at 9:30 following Seinfeld, a blockbuster pairing. Seinfeld was the number one comedy in television, but Frasier was right behind it. Amazing for a freshman show. It was a dynamite hour of television, and any other network president might have left well enough alone. In the overall network ratings we were a strong number two (behind ABC). But the criticism that we were a one-night network (Thursday) was accurate and a little stinging.

  For years we had been defensive in our scheduling strategies
because we didn’t have the weapons to attack our competition. Looking at Frasier, we knew what we had. It wasn’t Wings. It was a self-starter, a hit show. So Preston Beckman and I decided, for the fall of 1994, to move Frasier to Tuesday night at 9:00. Frasier would go up against ABC’s Roseanne, a wonderful family comedy (damn it!) but getting older and, we thought, possibly vulnerable to quality adult competition. That’s what we hoped anyway.

  We believed it was critical strategically for us to plant our flag on a night other than Thursday if we ever wanted to be the number one network. We told Don what we thought, and he agreed with us. At Frasier they felt a little differently.

  Peter Casey: We were furious. We felt we deserved a couple of years behind Seinfeld to get fully entrenched. And then we learned we’d be opposite Roseanne. Then ABC blinked, and we went up against Home Improvement!

  Warren: Word leaked of what we were doing, and before I got on the plane for New York to announce the schedule, I got a number of threatening calls from Paramount and agents representing Kelsey. I was told, “You can announce whatever you want in New York but don’t expect Kelsey to show up for work!” Shit. I called Kelsey and told him why I believed in the move. He responded to me with “Lots of people will tell you many threatening things, but I’m telling you we have the best comedy on television and it will continue to be that no matter where you put us.”

  David Lee: I remember going into Don Ohlmeyer’s office to protest the move to Tuesday night. We’d just aired an episode that ran in real time—Niles and Frasier in a coffee shop. And Don said, “About that episode that was just on—you guys were pretty self-indulgent.”

  Peter Casey: He said, “I hope you liked your little art film.”

  David Lee: My thought bubble was “You just wait.”

  Preston Beckman: We were screening pilots, and we still hadn’t come up with the full Tuesday/Thursday schedule. We were thinking Unsolved Mysteries. I got a call from New York, and a woman in sales from the network told me, “If you put Unsolved Mysteries on Tuesdays, I’ll fucking kill you.” I think she would have.

  Warren: The sales department was thrilled by our bold and aggressive move of Frasier to Tuesday at 9:00 and Wings was used at 8:00 to kick off the two-hour comedy block. But then one morning in August 1994, a month before the premiere, ABC made an announcement. They were moving their highest-rated comedy, Home Improvement, from Wednesday at 9:00 to Tuesday at 9:00 to go up against Frasier.

  Clearly they were looking at some of the same data we were, and they knew Roseanne was vulnerable. In the chess game of network television this was their “we’ll show you” countermove to hold on to their Tuesday supremacy.

  Don called Preston and me into his office. “We have to move Frasier back to Thursdays, it was a good try, but now we’ll get killed.” Our response was unified and clear: no. We knew ad sales had cleaned up on this move throughout the summer, and we reminded Don this was never about being number one on the night. It was about attacking the dominant player with a quality adult alternative. We couldn’t abandon that strategy, at least not yet. We had to play it out in the fall. Don told us we were nuts.

  David Hyde Pierce: I was never convinced the show was going to stick around. Once we were on, we got moved to Tuesday night in the second year. So whatever confidence I had went away. We were up against Home Improvement. You have a certain amount of security, but things happen all the time. Contract negotiations come up. Things change.

  David Lee: With Wings we felt we had to claw our way up the mountain, and with Frasier it felt like we’d stepped on the Zeitgeist express.

  David Hyde Pierce: Kelsey’s approach is very cavalier. He calls it “requisite disrespect.” He would be running the lines in the makeup room the night of the show, and you’d watch the color drain out of the guest star’s face, because it seemed like Kelsey didn’t know anything. But he’d get it in his head. He believed firmly in the spontaneity and an actor thinking as a real human being, which is what happens when you’re coming up with what you’re going to say in real life as opposed to having memorized it.

  In some shows, the actors are only allowed to talk to the director, and the director talks to the writers. That’s a weakness of the director, but Jimmy Burrows was completely confident. As the seasons went on, everyone realized the gifts and abilities of each other. Then the writers knew if an actor asked for a new line, it wasn’t because they couldn’t act it. Similarly, if the writers asked an actor to do a particular line, it wasn’t because they couldn’t come up with another one.

  David Lee: We knew we could do things and the writers and the cast would deliver.

  Warren: It was the first and only series to earn a record five consecutive Emmy wins for Outstanding Comedy Series. At a total of thirty-seven Emmys, it surpassed Cheers and won more than any series in television history.

  Frasier had a remarkable run. The quality of the show never flagged, and the audience was large and loyal. Frasier represented an 84 percent improvement in the time period, and Tuesday night was up 39 percent (Nielsen Media Research). ABC remained number one on the night but at significantly reduced levels. NBC was a solid number two for Tuesday, but by the 1995 season it catapulted us to number one each and every week, season after season. The bet paid off.

  After four successful years on Tuesday night, the show returned to Thursdays in 1998, and the series ended with a two-hour finale in May 2004.

  David Hyde Pierce: When the writers told us that they were going to end the show and shape the whole last season, we were stunned, but it felt right. It had been a decade, and we weren’t sick of the show. We said, “Let’s go when we’re not sick of it.”

  John Pike: When it came to Cheers and Frasier, both sides of the equation really needed each other. It was an interesting marriage of network and production. Very collaborative. Non-adversarial. It wasn’t everybody trying to kill each other. I think that’s one of the reasons Must See TV worked.

  David Hyde Pierce: Frasier was important for me. The people I got to work with, the time we spent. I don’t want to mess with that. That’s why I don’t ever want to do a reunion. I don’t want people to see us and say, “Wow. What happened?” It’s bad enough when people see reruns and ask me, “Wow. What happened?”

  Warren: NBC’s pilot season of 1994 is legendary in the business. In a world where failure is commonplace, we midwifed the births of both Friends and ER. While ER came essentially out of the blue, we’d been casting around for a Friends-like show for some time at the network.

  One morning while I was studying the overnight ratings from the major markets, I found myself thinking about the people in those cities, particularly the twentysomethings just beginning to make their way. I imagined young adults starting out in New York, L.A., Dallas, Philly, San Francisco, St. Louis, or Portland all faced the same difficulty. It was very expensive to live in those places as well as a tough emotional journey. It would be a lot easier if you did it with a friend.

  Addressing that general idea became a development target for us. We wanted to reach that young, urban audience, those kids starting out on their own, but none of the contenders had ever lived up to our hopes. Then Marta Kauffman and David Crane showed up with their pitch for a show called Six of One.

  Karey Burke: I remember reading a Kauffman and Crane play when I was a secretary at NBC. We tracked them, me and Jamie Tarses. Jamie always wanted Kauffman and Crane to develop a show.

  Jamie Tarses: That was a great pitch. Marta and David finished each other’s sentences. We’d been hearing so many of those pitches. The six friends was a concept that was around. But that was a great pitch.

  Karey Burke: The pitch was like two old friends telling you a story. The jokes were already there. They performed the pitch. The pitch was total entertainment. It was theater.

  Warren: The craft of buying comedy pitches (or any pitch actually) lies in being able to see beyond a timid presentation. People often get nervous before a pitch, but Kauffman and
Crane were magnetic. They owned it. It was their story.

  Jamie Tarses: I remember there being no question about the show.

  David Crane: Dream On was our very first show. We’d never worked on a TV show, and we were running it. It was madness. Here’s the pool. Swim or something.

  Marta Kauffman: We got to Friends in a roundabout way. We’d just come off of Dream On with one actor who was in every scene, and it was brutal. So we told ourselves, “We want to do an ensemble comedy.”

  David Crane: Not that long before, we’d been living in New York not doing TV. It was only three years later that we were pitching Friends, so we’d just been living it—that point in your life when your friends are your family.

  Marta Kauffman: And we wanted to write something we would watch.

  Warren: At the time, David and Marta were coming off the cancellation of The Powers That Be, a show they had created—largely by accident—for Norman Lear and CBS.

  David Crane: The Powers That Be is a crazy story. It was The Producers. We got a job developing with Norman Lear. It was amazing for two theater writers from New York. “Wait, we’re going to each get paid that?”

  Marta Kauffman: The first script we did for Norman that the development people liked, Norman hated.

  David Crane: TV for us was you write a show and nobody makes it.

  Marta Kauffman: Norman came in. He took my hand. He said, “It’s shallow and superficial.”

  David Crane: For six months, that’s who we were to each other—Shallow and Superficial.