{alltv} NBC program chief Bob Greenblatt faces 'big challenge'

LOS ANGELES — Management turmoil. A scarcity of hit shows. A late-night debacle. New owners.

It's the sorry state of cellar-dweller NBC, whose new programming chief, Bob Greenblatt, will face TV critics today and outline his plan for turning the former must-see TV network into a player again.

Once home to TV's crown jewels, from Hill Street Blues to Friends, Seinfeld and ER, the network has fallen on very hard times, the result of ill-advised strategies and poor choices. And it has lost nearly half its audience over the past 10 years, a far greater decline than its rivals, and is now losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

"It's a big challenge," says Greenblatt, interviewed last week in his office, which offers a panoramic view of the Universal backlot. "It's not Enron, or anything where there's been some sort of scandal or catastrophe. (But) any time you get to a company that is at some kind of a crossroads, you have to think through everything. There's such a legacy from what this company has been, which is good news because people are positively disposed to this place. But it's a tough time for broadcast networks in general, and we have to redefine what we're doing."

For the past eight years, Greenblatt headed programming at Showtime, where he nurtured a handful of increasingly popular series, including Dexter, Weeds and The Tudors, lavishing attention on marketing and awards campaigns.

Now he has a much bigger canvas and a "massive" task: filling 22 hours of weekly programming at a time when the network increasingly relies on NFL football and reality series such as The Voice, its top two programs last season.

Not only does NBC have fewer scripted hits than any other network, but two of its most popular series, The Office and Law & Order: SVU, have lost leads Steve Carell and Christopher Meloni as their contracts expire. (On The Office, James Spader will be the new focus, appearing in 15 episodes as Dunder-Mifflin's boss, though a lesser-known actor will fill Carell's shoes as local manager.)

Greenblatt's task is doubly difficult at a time when cable channels have stolen much of the buzz among viewers, if not ratings, with edgier, more ambitious shows.

"The shows you can do in cable are just more buzzworthy and are about subject matter that's more unusual or dark. And broadcast shows tend to be more mainstream or middle-of-the-road," Greenblatt says. "The audience continues to gradually drift from broadcast, and I don't think that's going to stop in the near future. We have lost a significant amount of our audience, so we're extra-challenged. The shows we had didn't deliver and didn't capture the audience's imagination the way they did eight or 10 years ago."

New directions

As cable giant Comcast assumed control of NBC from General Electric early this year, one of its first moves was to bring in Greenblatt as its top programmer and give him a free hand to make personnel changes and reinvest, adding 11 new series next season.

So NBC is pushing in new directions, aiming for more broadly appealing relationship comedies and a wide variety of dramas. Fall brings Prime Suspect, a remake of a British series with ER's Maria Bello as a tough-as-nails homicide cop; The Playboy Club, a 1960s drama about Bunnies and gangsters at the Chicago hangout; and Grimm, a fairy-tale-inspired fantasy.

"Our audience is a little more sophisticated, higher-educated, higher-income, which gives you allowance to do things not as down-the-middle, straight-ahead procedurals and soap operas," Greenblatt says. "You can take those familiar franchises and genres and twist them a little bit. On some level that's really our only hope: Do something that shakes it up a little."

Prime Suspect, he says, is "a good example. It's a cop show; if you squint, it probably feels a little like Law & Order. But what makes it unique is a really iconoclastic strong female character. It's a familiar genre, but I hope it has a new kind of feel to it that makes it something fresh in a genre where there's been hundreds of cop shows."

And though he inherited most of the scripts that were contenders for the upcoming fall season, he was deeply involved in their reshaping, casting and direction. "For better or worse, I was very involved in these pilots."

Midseason will bring riskier material that bears his stamp entirely. Smash, a passion project Greenblatt brought with him from Showtime, portrays the behind-the-scenes drama of putting on a Broadway musical, with Debra Messing and American Idol's Katharine McPhee.

Awake, from the creator of Fox's infamous flop Lone Star, looks at the dual reality of a cop who has suffered a terrible auto accident. In one state of consciousness, his wife has died and he's coping as a single parent; in another, his teenage son has perished. Worlds collide, but the cop — and viewers — don't know which world is real and which is imagined.

"Some might argue it's more of a cable show, and we'll see, but I think it has embedded in it a very familiar cop franchise, which makes it something that I think can be familiar to a broad audience," Greenblatt says. "To watch it is a puzzle, and it's also a show that has such a buzz about it. Will that translate to the larger audience? I don't know. But I think it's worth trying something like that."

Greenblatt, 50, didn't even want to become a TV executive. Born in Rockford, Ill., he loved theater, dreamed of a movie career, earned an MBA and moved west for USC's film school.

He got a movie job at Lorimar, a small studio, and when Warner Bros. swallowed it, his boss, Peter Chernin, talked him into joining the 2-year-old Fox network, where he rose to the No. 2 programming slot and developed shows including The X-Files, Beverly Hills, 90210 and spinoff Melrose Place.

Chernin, later president of News Corp. and now a producer, says Greenblatt "had great taste and judgment about things," traits that he says will help pull NBC out of last place. "In those circumstances, you want someone who's willing to take chances on innovative, interesting ideas and yet has broad commercial instincts. And you want someone who's a real talent magnet. He's as good an executive who exists in television."

The man for the job

Greenblatt left Fox to become an independent producer with former colleague David Janollari on HBO's mortician-family drama Six Feet Under and ABC's black sitcom The Hughleys, experience that "gives me a perspective on how difficult it is to get these shows off the ground." (Janollari calls his former partner "the perfect candidate to help turn a ship around that obviously needs gigantic righting.")

In 2004, as other cable networks were ramping up original series, he moved to Showtime with a mandate to do the same. "We were considered the also-ran, HBO's poor cousin."

Showtime won ratings and awards, and it increased its subscriber base by 50% to 20 million during his tenure, though some of that growth stemmed from giveaways. "He made tremendous strides with scripted programming," says SNL Kagan analyst Deana Myers, which is "really what draws people back every week and had made a name for them."

And in 2009, he realized his dream, producing a Broadway musical version of Dolly Parton's 1980 film 9 to 5, informing his interest in Smash. "I loved that process. It ultimately wasn't that successful, but it was a blast."

He's the first openly gay programming chief of a major network. His tastes run to "sophisticated soaps and dramas that are really moving and emotional and tend to be on the dark side."

Greenblatt championed The X-Files, the biggest hit he has been directly involved with, even though he now says he "didn't get" the show and wasn't a fan. "It's dangerous if your strategy is to put on shows you like to watch. You have to be open to lots of ideas."

Tactics for success

And while the climate has changed, the tactics haven't: "I think you have to try to do things that nobody else is doing, but that doesn't mean they can't be broad and relatable," he says. "They don't have to just be dark cable shows with flawed leads."

Another hurdle: rebuilding NBC's in-house studio, which had been merged into the network as a cost-saving move, to better nurture its own shows and produce new ones for rivals. Currently, Fox's House is the studio's only non-NBC show.

On the business side, Comcast is patient, expecting it will take four years to reverse losses. "You don't really see the upside financially of these shows (until then). All you do in early years of shows is invest, invest, invest and lose money. We're basically looking at a brand-new slate."

At the network, he knows he needs to find that hit sooner, though he expects to finish next season again in fourth place, for the eighth consecutive year.

If he finds a hit? "I think we can get better press, better critical acclaim, more awards, all of those things in cable that matter a lot (but here) don't matter as much. They make you feel good," he says. Still, if networks' share of the viewing audience continues to decline 4% or 5% a year, "the odds of us reversing that and increasing are hard to fathom."

"So even if a couple of these shows work and we have The Voice, I don't know if in the next one, two, three years we're going to see any kind of significant lift. Everybody's realistic about it, and we'll do the hard work," he says. "And hopefully find a Glee or Modern Family."