Still recovering from the dumbass Jay Leno experiment.
The Jay at 10 experiment was one of the last gasps of the Zucker era. Jeff Zucker had one great skill, which was squeezing his good shows for every bit of revenue possible, and one HUGE flaw as a network president: he sucked at developing new shows. And his big skill ultimately hurt NBC in the long run.
Nearly every show ultimately fails. You need to develop new shows to replace the old ones. NBC under other regimes was hit and miss - everyone is - but Zucker largely greenlit failures. To make up for a long run of being unable to launch anything good to step into Friends and Seinfeld's shoes when the time came, he started doing the 'super sized' episodes, which meant they could sell more valuable Friends ad time because now there was more to sell, but that also meant less air time to develop new shows. To be fair, I guess we can credit him with Fear Factor (good ratings, bad for NBC's brand identity as the classy network) and Scrubs (good show, mediocre ratings).
To save NBC's ratings, he had to get the Monday/Sunday night NFL contract back, and then his bosses said he had to hold development costs down to offset the giant NFL contract, so he did that.
This same 'manage for margins' philosophy (hold costs down, rather than develop hits) was what led to the Jay at 10 experiment: now Jay would do five shows a night
in primetime, meaning they would spend a lot less than they would developing and programming five hours of real primetime entertainment. And it even kinda worked for NBC - Jay's ratings were terrible but his costs were low too. But affiliates were getting
killed in their local 11 pm newscasts because Jay as a lead-in was awful, and this was leading up to open revolt.w So ultimately NBC had to cancel the experiment and provide real primetime programming at 10 again.
With this record of inability to build the network, only squeeze it for margins, and now with five hours of prime time left to fill again, Zucker was eventually fired, because he couldn't do what NBC/GE/Comcast actually needed him to do: develop shows. And because in corporate America at that level failure is rewarded, it cost Comcast another $30+ million just to be rid of him.
(So of course CNN hired him later... sigh.)
That said, Kevin Reilly worked for NBC as a high-ranking exec (President for Entertainment?) from 2004 to 2007 and it's widely held that he was a good exec, creatively. He developed and championed a bunch of good shows (Heroes, 30 Rock, The Office)... so of course he was fired in 2007. Fox hired him almost immediately, because Fox was not run by complete idiots.
I don't know anyone under 40 that gives a shit about a single thing NBC does.
You don't know anyone who watches Parks and Rec or Community? You have bad friends.
Look at CBS. Their entire lineup is just bland lowest common denominator shit. And they're a hit! People love to watch dumb shit. It's one murder investigation after another. And then a typical laugh track sitcom. The only good things NBC has : pamrks and Rec and Community. And no ones tuning in for them either.
As stated before-They fucked up majorly with the Jay Leno fiasco and they've been trying to recover ever since. I really don't see any way they can recover. Think about this-it was a little over 10 years ago that they had Friends, Seinfeld, Fraiser and ER all on the same night.
Frasier was almost (?) never on Thursdays. It was always the Tuesday night sitcom. And directly competing with CBS by aping them isn't necessarily a great idea. TV viewers already have a CBS, and it's giving them everything they want (except for the Voice, I guess). Like people said, NBC tried to give viewers a CBS experience with Whitney and Are You There, Chelsea. Didn't work.
Go On and Revolution got really high ratings, didn't they?
Yeah, because they ran with a Voice lead-in. Revolution was taken off the air until the Voice comes back, and Go On's ratings cratered without The Voice. Paper tigers.
And IMO Do No Harm wasn't just cancelled because of catastrophic ratings. It was heavily promoted
and it looked terrible. People justly stayed away from a dog of a show. This was supposed to be their big midseason show. At least with crap they kill -- and this was the season where they cancelled Dane Cook's new sitcom after shooting 3 episodes plus the pilot
and never aired a single episode -- they don't promote it.
