How NBC's new honcho failed his way to the top

CHARM OFFENSIVE Zucker thinks you're an "asshole" for even reading this

Anybody who's followed the astonishing rise of NBC chief Jeff Zucker over the past dozen-or-so years is accustomed to the peculiar exhaustion of the facial muscles that attends his every promotion.

No amount of eye-rolling, sighing, mimed gagging, mouth-gaping, nostril-flaring, or brow-furrowing is up to the task of registering the sheer audacity—the flabbergasting, topsy-turvy, logic-free, cosmic injustice—of Zucker's ascent, given the massive and manifest failures that he's left in his wake. So even though the news over the weekend from the Los Angeles Times that Zucker will assume the mantle of CEO at NBC Universal from
Bob Wright this week surprised no one, it still triggered a rash of red-faced sputtering in certain quarters of New York and Los Angeles. My cheeks
still hurt.

Getting Wright's chair caps a relentless and flawlessly executed campaign on Zucker's part to finesse his way into the top slot at NBC Universal without having to actually accomplish anything of substance along the way. It's not like Zucker is a loyal company guy with little to offer who drifted to the top; he actually fumbled NBC's historic stranglehold on young viewers and lost NBC
$1 billion in ad revenue with his failure to program a decent replacement for Friends. And for this, he gets a raise.

It is through force of
will alone that he has managed to create, in the minds of people who matter, the perception that he is a talented and visionary executiveIn 2003, Wright reshuffled NBC's corporate structure and elevated Zucker, who was at the time in charge of NBC's entertainment properties, so that NBC News would report to him as well. I was a reporter for the Chicago Tribune at the time and interviewed Zucker for a story on the promotion. I asked him whether it was appropriate, given the pressure for synergy and cross-promotion, for one man to oversee both NBC's entertainment shows and its news division (it was an issue that most other newspapers addressed in their coverage of the announcement). Zucker told me it was a stupid question and I was an "asshole" for asking it.

That unique brand of tact and charm has earned Zucker innumerable detractors over the years and made him an object of fascination for many industry observers, who marvel at his arrogance. In truth, his almost reptilian ability to size up and dispatch a rhetorical opponent without regard to social niceties makes him rather likable—he is pugnacious, funny, and brutally honest, except when he's lying to you. Moreover, he knows exactly what he is and doesn't give a shit what you think about it, unless he has to in order to get something he wants: His star turn as a vain, craven, dishonest network boss on Showtime's short-lived Fat Actress was a brilliant comic performance, but he was playing himself.

And so it is through force of will alone that he has managed to create, in the minds of people who matter, the perception that he is a talented and visionary executive. "He's a champion of spin," says one NBC News source who witnessed Zucker's rise through the news division (he launched his career by being named executive producer of Today in 1992 at the age of 26). "This is a country in which a lot of people think Richard Nixon was a great president. And I should be surprised that Jeff Zucker's doing well? He's an expert at the three-card monte of television—keeping people's eyes off the fact that we're losing viewers."

Zucker took the reigns at NBC entertainment in 2000. In the 1999-2000 television season, NBC averaged 6.2 million 18-to-49-year-olds, making it the number two network in that crucial demographic. Since then, that number has declined in every season but one. In the disastrous 2004-2005 season, NBC slid from first place in the demo to fourth in a matter of months, losing 16 percent of its core audience in the process. The network is currently averaging 4.5 million young viewers so far this season, on track to come in third or fourth place in the final tally and 10 percent behind a dominant CBS.