On Monday night, at NBC’s reception at Rockefeller Center, I asked NBC exec Jeff Zucker if he still gets nervous when he has to go up onstage and present his fall schedule. Zucker said no, wordlessly, wagging his head in a way they only teach in Cambridge, Mass. It’s like the question was so foolish that he couldn’t even be bothered to chide me. Last night, at the shindig following CBS’s deft sales pitch, I asked Les Moonves—the ace television programmer who led CBS to the dominant position it currently enjoys, the man of “a thousand upfronts”—the same question. “I do,” he said. “I still get butterflies—and I used to be an actor.”
Moonves’ thespian aspirations are a leitmotif of upfronts. The other networks mock him as a ham. His own network—the one he led from the ratings cellar to a gilded ceiling—mocks him as a ham. In years past, he has apparently appeared in clips as Moses, Luke Skywalker, and Maggie Fitzgerald, the Hilary Swank character in Million Dollar Baby. There was no clip this year, though Moonves, up onstage at Carnegie Hall, did say that he and outgoing news anchor Bob Schieffer had considered re-creating a scene from Brokeback Mountain.
Anyway, the CBS party found Moonves holding court in his usual spot at Tavern on the Green, about midway between the coat check and the entrance to the Crystal Room. It was cute how he had a ring of stage makeup on his collar. (His wife, morning-show anchor Julie Chen, was about eight feet away in a separate circle of chat, wearing an excellent suit and a pretty engagement ring.) CBS’s numbers are so good that they’re only debuting four new shows this fall; Moonves described them as “two curveballs and two fastballs down the middle.”
The Class, a comedy, feels more like an underhand lob to me, but then I’m not really in the demo. It stuck me as an easy-listening version of ABC’s midseason replacement In Case of Emergency, another show about old friendships among hapless early-30-somethings. It was only upon seeing clips of The Class—an old-fashioned three-camera sitcom with a couch in the middle and canned laughter on top—that I realized the cinematic, one-camera My Name Is Earl-style show is well on its way to becoming the “upscale” standard. But Julia Louis-Dreyfus, the star of the recent ratings success The New Adventures of Old Christine, elegantly summed up CBS’s priorities. When I asked her if she thought the three-camera show had any inherent advantages over a one-camera show, she said, “Yes. The audience.”
Shark is a Spike Lee Joint, and Lee’s producers are Ron Howard and Brian Grazer. It’s a legal drama about a brilliant and sleazy defense attorney with conflicted feelings about his trade who becomes a brilliant and sleazy prosecutor with conflicted feelings about his trade. James Woods landed the role of the slimeball. Hey, Trekkies, it’s got Jeri Ryan!
Whether or not you think Smith is really a curveball is a kind of litmus test. Ray Liotta, who is always cool, is a professional thief. Virginia Madsen, who is always hot, is his wife. The clips made it look like a stylish assemblage of everyone’s favorite crime-film conventions, and in the context of cornfed, four-square CBS, it was delightful to hear Chris Cornell’s voice on the soundtrack. This, after all, is a network whose presentation to advertisers involved the cast of the old-school croon-group musical Jersey Boys.
Jericho—a definite curveball, perhaps even a wild pitch—is the program that CBS is hyping as the “most provocative” of the fall. It concerns the effect of terrorist attacks on cities on a close-knit little town in the middle of America. It looks like an exploitation film. Here’s a funny story about it:
Around eight, after the bigwigs had left the party and the only celebrities in attendance were some sports guys and local anchors and perhaps a Survivor or three, I ran into two other reporters who were also attending their first upfront. Like dorks, we decided to celebrate by getting a round of shots, toasted (“To television!”), tipped back our Dewar’s, and then started to leave. We were detained by a guy who introduced himself to me as a media buyer and asked my honest opinion of the shows. Feeling my Dewar’s, I said I thought it was pretty rich that urban terror fear should get repackaged for a middle-American audience. My new friends stifled giggles. In parting, the media buyer did not shake my hand. “He’s not a media buyer,” one of the reporters said. “His name’s Dana McClintock. He works at CBS.”