This Media Life

Zucker Unbound

And then, quite surprising to me, there's the loyalty thing. Although Zucker has a mostly terrible reputation in the general media (possibly because he competes with all other media organizations -- Today has become, arguably, the most powerful news organization) as a screamer, and a nasty shit, and an arrogant so-and-so, I have not been able to find anyone who works for him who wouldn't, apparently, get down in front of a truck on his behalf. (Who in Hollywood can say that?)

After deep negotiations with network P.R. people, I went up to see Zucker the other day at 30 Rock on the famous third floor, where NBC has been working virtually forever, and where Zucker has worked his whole career (he's now surrounded by moving boxes with all his stuff), and where he was on the phone talking sweet nothings to his wife and young son (tough guys always make a point of doing this) when I arrived.

My first question was about moving to L.A. -- the beach? Beverly Hills? -- and he clearly waffled. I couldn't pin him down. It occurred to me that maybe he isn't moving; maybe that's the ploy. The way you deal with Hollywood is not to go there.

You can't tell. This guy is tight. Every word is calibrated. Any dig, any interesting perspective, he puts surgically off the record. He is as aware of the interview as anyone I've ever interviewed.

"Why are you still in the television business?" I ask, trying, a bit, to goad him. "Dwindling market share, cutthroat competition, rising costs, technological obsolescence. Sheeesh. I mean, you could do anything. You could go raise a couple of hundred million dollars -- a billion -- and do something fun."

"Well, I've had cancer twice," he says, as though a little defensive about not being more of a go-getter. "I guess I'm a lifer," he says, shrugging. "I actually like working for a big company. Really. I love NBC."

"It's so old-fashioned," I say, meaning almost charming.

"I don't know if I'm old enough," he says, stressing what for him is obviously an important technicality, "to be old-fashioned."

"So, okay," I say, going in for the kill, "what do you do -- you must have given this a lot of thought -- what's network television like, how does your world change, when the prime-time audience finally bottoms out at about a 20 percent market share?"

He looks sour. Then he says, a bit defensively, that network television will still have the most mass-market audience available to mass marketers. But he doesn't fight the number.

He knows what I mean: If you've lost half of your audience and are looking at losing as much as two thirds, but it's costing you even more to produce a show than it cost when you had a 90 percent market share . . . He brings up the ER thing -- with success like that, you start to have new admiration for failure.

My question was, in fact, a trick question, because I don't know of any other network head who ever admitted to audience shrinkage on that scale. As it happens, that number, that 20 percent of the television audience, which will mean that almost everyone now working in prime time will be put out of business, is not too far off the size of the morning audience.

I can't read his reaction when I offer what seems to me an obvious notion: "What about turning prime time into a Today format? Three hours live every night, on the news, economical to produce, and you could stay in New York."

No one in the motion-picture community, of course, reasonably believes that such a transformation is truly in store. For one thing, there is a pervasive confidence that anybody who comes to Hollywood is either fleeced and bankrupted or else turned by the pleasures -- the weather, the sex, the stars, the cars. Then, too, perhaps more important, Hollywood people, like most people, cannot conceive of an America without sitcoms and hour dramas.

But you know something like this just has to be going through Zucker's mind. Take prime time live. Remake television. Become the most important man in America. Make Jack Welch proud.