Acquired
00:14:06 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[00:14:06] S0: happy to go to a concert and hear Taylor Swift shake it off again and again and again every tour. That's, like, exactly what the fans want is to play the hits. You don't wanna go see stand up and see them tell the same joke again. You kinda get it once, and then it's over. [00:14:19] S1: So eventually, this leads to Jerry getting another sitcom opportunity. He gets considered for the lead in a pilot show for ABC called Past Imperfect. Yep. And there's a new production company. It's a hot ticket. Things are looking promising for this show. Ultimately, the production company decides to go with somebody else because Jerry doesn't have enough sitcom acting experience. Just acting experience, period. Being a stand up is not at all the same thing as being a great actor on a sitcom. These are two very different skill sets, even though the same people are doing it a lot at this point in time. Yep. But losing the show doesn't matter that much to Jerry, because his stand up act is killing it, thanks to all this exposure he's getting on the late night shows. So he's touring basically every week, and he was so popular that he was making on average about $25,000 a week from the clubs that he was playing Wow. Across the country. So call it, like, a million dollars a year that Jerry's making just from his stand up touring here in the mid eighties.
00:14:19 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[00:14:19] S1: So eventually, this leads to Jerry getting another sitcom opportunity. He gets considered for the lead in a pilot show for ABC called Past Imperfect. Yep. And there's a new production company. It's a hot ticket. Things are looking promising for this show. Ultimately, the production company decides to go with somebody else because Jerry doesn't have enough sitcom acting experience. Just acting experience, period. Being a stand up is not at all the same thing as being a great actor on a sitcom. These are two very different skill sets, even though the same people are doing it a lot at this point in time. Yep. But losing the show doesn't matter that much to Jerry, because his stand up act is killing it, thanks to all this exposure he's getting on the late night shows. So he's touring basically every week, and he was so popular that he was making on average about $25,000 a week from the clubs that he was playing Wow. Across the country. So call it, like, a million dollars a year that Jerry's making just from his stand up touring here in the mid eighties. [00:15:29] S0: Didn't realize that before the show. Because the life of a stand up when you're playing in comedy clubs, you get paid in stage time. They're like, you should be grateful to get an audience to test your material. When you go on Carson, I don't think you get paid, at least not anything material. [00:15:43] S1: Significant. Yep.
00:15:43 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[00:15:43] S1: Significant. Yep. [00:15:44] S0: And so it's this, like, building a brand around yourself using the clubs and then using TV shows and then using the late night shows so that you can tour. That's the first time you're, like, actually getting paid doing this form of art. And there's not that many people at any given time who are touring headlined artists, comedians, making a living.
00:16:06 · David Rosenthal
[00:16:06] S1: No. Jerry is in rare air here, and this is gonna become super important because this is why he has leverage with NBC, which is gonna come up here in just a sec. So Shapiro and West, his managers, are like, okay. Jerry's a big star. He's making tons of money. We're making tons of money as his agent, but, like, he can do more. They start going to NBC. In fact, George Shapiro starts writing letters, starts a letter writing campaign to Brandon Tartakoff, who is the president of NBC Entertainment at the time, saying, you've got this guy, Jerry, this comic. He's regularly coming on The Tonight Show. He's doing great. Don't you think he needs a show of his own? Jerry actually has a great quote on this. He says, imagine you have this kid who's been on The Tonight Show, like, 30 times and on Letterman 30 times. He's on your network all the time. Presentable fellow, seems to do well. Nobody ever thought, why don't we talk to this young man? Maybe we can do some business. Do a show. So finally, in November 1988, Shapiro succeeds in convincing Brendan Tartakoff and the powers that be at NBC that, okay, maybe we should consider this this Jerry guy. Yep. So they schedule a meeting to discuss it. But it's not with NBC's comedy department. So the comedy department at NBC means sitcoms. They control the sitcoms. They're not thinking of Jerry as sitcom material. They're thinking of him as late night material, where he's obviously already doing great. Can he do specials for us, which is the direction the sense of going? And, you know, I think probably in the back of their minds, they're also thinking, like, hey. Can can this guy be a be a host? You know, Johnny Carson's getting older. It would be a few years later that Johnny would retire, and then there's the whole, you know, Jay Leno, David Letterman drama, and the succession. But, like, this is a couple years away. You know, maybe Jerry Seinfeld deserves to be in this mix.
00:18:05 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[00:18:05] S0: You mentioned specials. There were network comedy specials. Like, Bob Hope would get these specials where he would go and do these routines. So it wasn't like, hey. We're gonna pitch you a whole new format called Jerry Seinfeld does stand up on TV. That was a thing. [00:18:19] S1: Yep. So on 11/02/1988 at 05:15PM local time in Los Angeles, NBC finally takes the meeting. And Jerry shows up. George Shapiro, the manager's there. Brendan Tartikoff, president of NBC Entertainment. Warren Littlefield, who's head of prime time for NBC. And then Rick Ludwin, who heads the specials department, the variety and specials department that they're thinking about Jerry for. So Jerry says of the meeting, we sat in there. We chatted about, what do you think you wanna do? Would you be interested in a talk show? And we kinda settled on doing a special in the Saturday Night Live time slot one week when Saturday Night Live wasn't airing. So NBC says, come back with a script for what [00:19:02] S0: you wanna do for the special, and we'll make it. I always like when they ask Jerry, so what what do you want out of this meeting? And he has some comment like, oh, I I actually hadn't really given that thought. Success as a comedian is getting this meeting. So I'm I'm like in this room. I'm excited to be in this room with you right now. [00:19:19] S1: I'm just happy to be here.
00:19:19 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[00:19:19] S1: I'm just happy to be here. [00:19:21] S0: So NBC at the time is in this pretty interesting place. They had just recently figured out who they were. In the late seventies and early eighties, they did not have a cohesive strategy. It was the classic, we're making anything and everything for everyone. But they turned it around in the mid eighties. So Brandon Tartakoff, who you mentioned, was the the president of NBC Entertainment, had developed this philosophy to try to appeal to urban audiences aged 18 to 49 with smart content. And it worked. They're becoming the number one network. In 1986, GE comes in and buys the company, and they had two big messages. Keep in mind, this is GE. So [00:20:02] S1: GE. Like Jack Welch GE. General Electric. Yeah.