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

by Warren Littlefield, Former NBC President of Entertainment

  We went to David and Marta as a group and said, “We’re really concerned about this. It doesn’t feel right. We have a problem with it.”

  David said, “It’s like playing with fire, and then you put it down, and you go, ‘Remember when we played with that fire?’ We’re aware of everything. The feelings that you’re feeling, we’re feeling them too, and we like it.”

  David Crane: Once it actually started, it was heartbreaking because it couldn’t go anywhere. It was always going to be Ross and Rachel.

  Marta Kauffman: The Ross and Rachel thing was fascinating. My rabbi, when I dropped my daughter off for Hebrew school, would stop me and say, “When are you going to get them together?”

  David Crane: From a technical standpoint, it was really challenging to keep them apart without pissing off the audience. In the pilot, Ross says to Rachel, “Can I ask you out sometime?” We go through an entire season, twenty-four episodes, and he never asks her out. Every time it’s about to happen—we brought in the Italian guy, we threw a cat on his back—we kept asking ourselves, “Will they let us go one more?”

  Then they got together and broke up.

  Marta Kauffman: And got married and broke up. Their fights were some of my favorite moments.

  David Crane: The episode where Ross and Rachel are on a break and Ross sleeps with the Xerox girl, and the whole episode is in the living room with the other four locked in the bedroom. It’s really sad, and we kept going to the bedroom for funny. That’s probably one of my favorite episodes.

  For the two of us, the emotional stuff was what sustained us.

  Marta Kauffman: We did not want to go out on the bottom. We wanted to feel more like it was time for your child to go to college, not die.

  David Crane: We wrote three last seasons. It looked for a while like season eight was the last season. Then season nine. Warner Bros. told us this has to be the last season. Two days later, they come back and say, “Jeff Zucker stepped up, and it’s not the last season.” Amazing reversal.

  Marta Kauffman: At that point, we said, “Season ten it is.”

  David Crane: You can’t keep writing the last season. You have to know where you’re going and go there.

  Having seen the Seinfeld finale and knowing when you depart from who you are, it doesn’t make the audience happy, let’s deliver to the audience what they want and what they’ve earned.

  Marta Kauffman: Everybody knew where we were going to end up. Ross and Rachel were going to be together somehow. We just had to make it entertaining.

  David Crane: We talked about doing a qualified ending … they’re not together together, but there’s the hope they can be together. We said, “Fuck it. We’ve jerked these people off for ten years. Who are we kidding? We’ve just got to do it well.”

  Lisa Kudrow: I felt like we could have gone longer. David and Marta were saying, “It is getting harder for Rachel and Ross, coming up with reasons why they’re not together.” And then ultimately, it’s a good thing that we were done, because sometimes you have to be pushed out of the nest.

  Matt LeBlanc: That whole ending, that was a rough two weeks. We went away for Christmas for two weeks, and then we came back for two final weeks to shoot the one-hour finale. I had quit smoking for four years, and in that final two weeks I started smoking again because we were so aware that our time together was coming to an end. “Yes, I’ll talk to you. Yes, I’ll always know you, but I won’t know you like this. I won’t see you every day, all day. Eat lunch together every day. To have this awesome, awesome experience every week. It’s coming to an end.”

  So in those final two weeks, we would steal away these little moments. “Hey, let’s go hang out. Let’s go sit in my room.” It was really … a lot of Kleenex.

  David Schwimmer: You just knew intuitively that that’s how it had to end, with Ross and Rachel together. It was a romantic comedy, so it must end—as in great Shakespeare—with the lovers together. So the challenge is how the writers are able to create enough obstacles to sustain over ten years.

  I really sympathize. I think it’s incredibly difficult, because I don’t think anyone expected it to go for ten years. So for David and Marta to rise to the challenge of making sure every moment, and every choice, and every decision made by this group of writers—in conjunction and collaboration with the actors—kept this tension going without upsetting the audience or driving them crazy.

  Matt LeBlanc: There’s only five people in the world who know exactly what being on Friends was like, other than me. There’s five of them. David, Matthew, Lisa, Courteney, and Jen. That’s it. Marta, David were close, but when they left the stage, no one knew what they did. We could never leave the stage, metaphorically speaking. Still can’t. Still on that stage. That will follow us around forever.

  Sean Hayes: I remember when I was a young person watching Friends, I thought, “This is how we talk.” I don’t see anything out there now that’s like that.

  David Hyde Pierce: I remember going over to the Friends set before it went on the air to watch Jimmy shoot. It was an episode where David Schwimmer got hit in the mouth with a hockey puck. It’s great to have that memory of that as yet unborn megahit.

  Matt LeBlanc: More important than anything else is the look on people’s faces when you cross paths with them in the street, or in the store, or in the grocery line. You can always tell that you were—maybe still are, maybe always will be—a part of their family. Movies have this thing where it’s an event. You get dressed up, you go to dinner, and you go to the movies. You’re outside of your element. But with television, people are watching you in bed, at their kitchen table eating. You’re in their house.

  I did not want it to end.

  Warren: I was on the phone with Bob Wright one day, and he sounded even more despondent than usual, so I asked him what was wrong. “We lost Diane Sawyer,” he told me. Diane Sawyer was a rising star at CBS News, and she was in play for her next contract. Bob had had several meetings with her and was very hopeful of landing her at NBC. But she went to ABC, where she remains today.

  I told Bob I was sorry, that she was great but there would always be someone else. That’s when Bob explained to me that his plan had been to give Diane a newsmagazine show stripped from Monday to Friday, every night at 10:00. If Bob had been successful at wooing Diane, there would never have been an ER on NBC.

  The original ER script was what is commonly known as a trunk job. By the time it came into our hands at NBC—in 1993—it was already a good twenty years old.

  John Wells: Tony Krantz, packaging agent at CAA, called and told me Tony Thomopoulos [president of Amblin Television] had been going through the vaults at Amblin looking for material that might work for television. He thought the Michael Crichton script was something that might work. I’d been working on China Beach, so I had some medical background. Tony wanted me to take a look at it and see if there was anything in it.

  Michael had written it. Steven Spielberg had said he wanted to direct it. Steven had worked in an emergency room as a kid in Phoenix or Tucson. His parents had made him volunteer because they wanted him to be a doctor. He had signed on to direct it sometime in the early eighties. As is his practice, he takes ownership of anything he might want to direct, which is how his name ends up on all this stuff over time.

  Noah Wyle: We heard Steven wanted Michael to write Jurassic Park II and Michael didn’t want to do it, so he dug up the ER script and said, “Why don’t we do this instead?”

  Warren: The two Tonys (Tony Thomopoulos and Tony Krantz) set up a meeting at NBC, bringing in Michael Crichton, John Wells, and Steven Spielberg. They presented Michael’s feature script based on his early years in a Boston ER. They believed it was a basis for a medical drama television series. They certainly had my attention.

  David Nevins: My job was head of drama development the summer ER was developed. It was the summer Jurassic Park was the big movie. An agent hyped the Michael Crichton script to me. He was incredibly vague, and
the script showed up on a Friday.

  Warren: It was about 180 pages, and it was all over the place. It probably had over a hundred characters. I remember getting to a scene in the script where there was a basketball game on a TV in a hospital waiting room. Tommy Heinsohn was handling the ball for the Celtics. Holy shit, as a big basketball fan I knew he had stopped playing in 1965—this was an old script.

  Biggest author, biggest director. They wanted a series commitment.

  David Nevins: We didn’t see how we could go wrong with a two-hour movie, but they turned it down. Nobody bit on their ask for thirteen episodes, and Warren stayed after them. Maybe two months went by, and Warren kept calling them.

  Warren: The ask had gone down to six episodes.

  David Nevins: Crichton decided to rewrite the script on two conditions. No network notes and Crichton would take one pass to update the medicine. He ended up doing a dozen passes of the script with John Wells. He just kept whittling it down.

  John Wells: It was a big, old mimeographed script. What the series was was in there, but it was still left over. The nurses were called “nurse” on every page. The doctors were all white, and they were all male. I remember thinking there was a really good idea in the script.

  Michael was a remarkably talented researcher. He was interested in a million things, but character development wasn’t really his strong point. Michael and I got together for lunch, and we had a very frank conversation about what I thought were the shortcomings of the piece, and he was very receptive. We hit it off.

  Warren: Like John Wells, we could see potential in Crichton’s script. It was either a glass half-full or a glass half-empty, but it was certainly half. Sure, the material was a mess, but these doctors felt both real and heroic. Don Ohlmeyer took a different view. He insisted we were just star fucking. At the time, I didn’t have a programming answer for Thursday night at 10:00. L.A. Law was clearly getting to the end of its run. As much as I respected a project that I developed with the feature film talent Barry Levinson, Homicide: Life on the Street, in the few times we tried it Thursdays at 10:00, it certainly wasn’t a blockbuster. When I asked Don if he wanted Policewoman Centerfold or ER, I got a reluctant okay to pursue the latter.

  I kept pounding away at Amblin, Warner Bros. (because of John Wells), and CAA. I told them NBC was their best bet. CBS was doing a new medical drama with David Kelley. ABC really didn’t have the 10:00 p.m. real estate available, and Fox didn’t program at 10:00 p.m.

  I was offering a two-hour pilot, and if they did it well, it would probably be on Thursday night. I tried to sweeten it by saying if we couldn’t agree on casting, they would have the final word. I had no idea if I could back that up, but I said it. Just go, make your vision. How can you argue with that?

  John Wells: Michael Crichton called me up once we had the offer from NBC. We’d become friendly. He apologized for taking up so much of my time, but he really didn’t think it was worth his time, and he didn’t want to do it.

  Then I got another call from Michael a few months later, and he said if he didn’t have to do much work and NBC wanted to do the show, then he’d be willing. I said I’d need a certain amount of leeway, because we hadn’t worked on the script. I’ve got to start casting tomorrow. I’ve got to hire a director. You’re just going to have to say, “Go do it,” if you feel comfortable. Michael was kind of a control freak.

  Warren: Because Crichton had been so slow to commit, everything had to happen fast from finishing the script, to casting, to shooting the pilot. I did ask them to change the location to anywhere but Boston. I didn’t want to be compared to St. Elsewhere. The bar was just too high.

  John Wells: We cast it up in a hurry. I knew Rod Holcomb [the director] from China Beach, and he came on, and we started casting like crazy. I was rewriting during that time, connecting the characters up, adding the love story between Hathaway and Ross. It was all in there, but it was a lot of Michael’s impressions. Lots of anecdotes that didn’t entirely connect up.

  Warren: Out of necessity came innovation.

  John Wells: We had to construct a way to do the show for the money, which had a lot to do with the style of the show. We had to shoot a lot and shoot fast. Rod said here are the two things I need: a four-walled set and a Steadicam.

  Warren: We talked to Rod about the visceral quality of the script and the need to have the drama feel gritty and real, not melodramatic.

  To add to the pressure, we’d learned that CBS’s new medical series was aimed for Thursday nights at ten in the fall of 1994. It was David Kelley’s Chicago Hope starring Mandy Patinkin and Adam Arkin.

  John Wells: We had a conversation about how to distinguish the show, which came partly from knowing Chicago Hope had already been picked up. I got my hands on a Chicago Hope script. I read it and realized pretty quickly we needed to be completely different from that. We decided we wanted to take people into this world.

  There was an artifice for drama that developed first at Universal but came into full fruition at MTM. It was very stylized but felt real. It’s what Bochco was doing and what NBC was doing on St. Elsewhere. It felt real compared to what had come before. That had become the audience’s expectation of what real was. We wanted to make ER feel like it was realer than what you could get someplace else.

  I wasn’t sure we were right, by any means. It ended up working out fine, but we were using real medical dialogue without explaining it at any length, or explaining it at all. The hope was the audience would feel like it got dropped in a real place. We depended on the audience’s visual literacy. Then we could do a soap opera in the midst of all that.

  At one point, Michael Crichton said to me, “What the hell is this series going to be? A soap opera?”

  I told him, “Never say that out loud again.”

  Every long-running dramatic show is a soap opera. That’s what people care about and get hooked on. That’s what they come back for and watch for years and years.

  David Nevins: We were wondering what we were going to promote, with so many stories. Your every instinct as a programmer is a big promotable story line. A lot of people believed we were going to get our asses kicked by Chicago Hope.

  Warren: The casting sessions for ER were memorable. Anthony Edwards’s Dr. Greene was the first part cast, and his remarkable performance set a very high standard for the actors who followed him. Maybe we had something here.

  Julianna Margulies: We weren’t known actors but for Anthony Edwards, and he was mostly known for Top Gun.

  Harold Brook: On the Must See TV shows, I don’t think we ever negotiated where we signed somebody and thought, “We’ll have to kill ourselves.” We had an Aaron Spelling soap opera called Titans. There was an actor up for the lead. He had no quotes, but we were told we had to get this guy. The guy wanted $40,000 an episode. No reason for it, but we signed him. A week later, I got a call saying we had to hire an acting coach for him. Bad deal.

  Lori Openden: They brought in Anthony Edwards to read in my office, and it’s still one of the best auditions I’ve ever seen. He walked in and nailed it, so we wanted everybody to be as good as Anthony Edwards.

  John Wells: Tony Edwards came in, and he’d never considered doing television.

  Anthony Edwards: I knew when I read the part that I could see who Dr. Greene was. It reminded me of the beginning of The Right Stuff. The voice from the cockpit. You want to hear the guy who loves flying. That was Dr. Greene. He loved medicine.

  I couldn’t imagine anybody else playing Dr. Greene. I didn’t know who else was up for the role. I didn’t ask. I’d been in and out of NBC a lot for TV and network movies. I’d been acting since I was sixteen, so I didn’t have anxiety. I just knew it was right.

  David Nevins: I remember crying at Anthony Edwards’s reading, the first time I’d ever cried at a casting session.

  Anthony Edwards: I had talked to Michael Crichton at a Christmas party, and I remember telling him that I was done with acting. There I was, thirty ye
ars old, and I considered myself finished. And then I had the best acting experience an actor could have on ER.

  I never felt anxious about getting the role. It was meant to be. I fell in love with acting again because of ER.

  John Wells: George Clooney begged me for a part. George was the first person to audition. He came after me for it. I knew him from around the lot. He was always smart about knowing all of the assistants on the lot, so he knew what the material was. He’d give them flowers and candy and come around and flirt with them. Our second day in the office, George showed up and wouldn’t leave until I’d let him audition. He did the “he’s just a little kid!” scene. He had it memorized, and he didn’t have a reputation for being a particularly disciplined actor.

  George got his hands on the material and was like a dog with a bone.

  Noah Wyle: George knew television inside and out. He’d done about twenty failed pilots.

  John Wells: I’ve learned you can tell a lot about whether your show has a chance of succeeding by the actors who come into the room responding to the script. If it gets into the actor community that this is a show you want to be in, people you don’t expect to show up start showing up. People you normally have to chase. There’s an instinct in the actor community about what they want to be in.

  Lori Openden: George Clooney pops off the screen. We knew him from Sisters. He was great with Sela Ward. It was on Sisters that he became a leading man.

  John Wells: His name was Falcon or something. He had really long hair and rode a motorcycle.

  Noah Wyle: When I started out, I signed with a wonderful small agency called Leading Artists. I signed when I was seventeen, and I told my agent I was interested in theater and film exclusively. I played that out for a couple of years, and then I signed with a management company, and they sent over the script for ER. It was a feature-length script, and I thought it was for a movie.