Live From New York - James H. Miller [107]
Network chief Brandon Tartikoff felt an emotional attachment to the show and desperately wanted to keep it on the air, even when other network executives advocated cutting the umbilical and letting it float off into space. In his desperation, Tartikoff turned to old pal and fellow Yalie Dick Ebersol, a man who had never produced a comedy show or professionally written a sketch in his life and who, in fact, had not so long ago been fired from an NBC executive post by Tartikoff’s bellicose boss, Fred Silverman. But Brandon’s friend had also been present at, and instrumental in, the creation of Saturday Night Live. The embalming process was halted and shock therapy began.
Michaels and Ebersol had little in common when it came to style and personality, but they did have this: Each thought the other wanted too much credit for the creation of Saturday Night Live. It took both of them working together at the very outset to bring Saturday Night Live to life, but once it premiered, Michaels would have preferred Ebersol to have disappeared.
When Ebersol was asked to rescue the show after the Doumanian cliffhanger, he wisely sought Michaels’s approval and blessing before taking over. That meant that creative people loyal to Michaels wouldn’t feel they were committing heresy or poking him in the eye if they went to work on the Ebersol version — a problem that had reputedly helped sink Doumanian.
Though Michaels and Ebersol weren’t close, they were both close to Tartikoff, who felt the show represented more to the network than a profit center; it was a badge of honor too, and Tartikoff was one network executive who cared about prestige in addition to profits. For Ebersol, the situation was rife with irony. After helping create the show in 1974 and then being sentenced to a certain anonymity for his efforts, he would be called back to keep the show going by his old nemesis Fred Silverman, the guy who fired him. And Tartikoff, the longtime friend who did the actual recruitment of Ebersol, had become head of programming when Ebersol was passed over for the job.
What Ebersol lacked in imagination, he made up for in iron-willed determination. Swinging a baseball bat or just lugging it around like some swollen scepter, Ebersol pitched a ferocious battle to make Saturday Night Live a hit again. He would save the show, whatever it took.
DICK EBERSOL, NBC Executive:
I remember Jean’s last show. It was just beset with problems. It was the night that Charlie Rocket said “fuck” on the air. And I stayed up with Brandon quite late, and he asked me again, “Would you consider fixing it?” I said I would come as long as I could hide inside 30 Rock, watching on the internal system how the show works, the camera blocking, watch to see if the talent is mature enough to save a piece, because I could think of a million pieces from the earliest days of the show which absolutely sucked on Wednesday and had at least an 80 percent life by the time they went on the air. The talent was that good, and some of the writers were good enough to fix it.
And I said, “Number one, only if it goes off the air. This is not something you can fix in a week. And number two, I get to pick what airs all the weeks it’s off the air.” I wanted to put on four or five of the greatest shows from the first five years, just to get people back in the sense of “this show was about something.” Actually, I think I said to take it off for two months.
So this meeting was set up in Fred Silverman’s apartment on a Sunday afternoon. And Fred is so uncomfortable to have me there, because there is no love lost between the two of us and I just did not respect him. So they go through this whole thing about will I do it, and I said, “Yeah, under certain circumstances.” And we argued and debated, and finally it became five weeks that