Acquired
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.
00:20:02 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[00:20:02] S1: GE. Like Jack Welch GE. General Electric. Yeah. [00:20:06] S0: One, you need discipline in your business. You gotta pay attention to costs and ensure that everything that you do aligns with your chosen strategy. You can't just be haphazard. And the NBC guys kinda know this at this point. And two, things are changing. Viewers have way more choices with cable. They're not just gonna watch whatever you put on by default. So you need to quickly develop great shows, and if they're not great, get rid of them, that are aligned with your business strategy and the audience you wanna reach and the advertisers you're trying to reach and stop doing everything else. So, of course, NBC kinda looks at, hey. This is already kinda working for us. Let's build a real business strategy around it. Hey. This is a very valuable demographic. Urban audiences, eighteen to forty nine, who wanna watch smart content. That's a great business to sell to advertisers. This is obvious now, but at the time, that was pretty novel. [00:20:58] S1: Well, it was also novel, I think, for a broadcast network to just have a corporate strategy, period. Like Yes. The other networks and NBC before this point in time, they were just like, we're the broadcast networks. America watches what we put on TV. GE coming in and saying, no. We're General Electric. I'm Jack Welch, mister black belt, Six Sigma, greatest CEO in American history until it all fall apart. But, you know, at this point in time Yes. You need a corporate strategy. Yes. It's tied to revenue and profits and
00:20:58 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[00:20:58] S1: Well, it was also novel, I think, for a broadcast network to just have a corporate strategy, period. Like Yes. The other networks and NBC before this point in time, they were just like, we're the broadcast networks. America watches what we put on TV. GE coming in and saying, no. We're General Electric. I'm Jack Welch, mister black belt, Six Sigma, greatest CEO in American history until it all fall apart. But, you know, at this point in time Yes. You need a corporate strategy. Yes. It's tied to revenue and profits and [00:21:27] S0: everything that GE does. So the perfect thing to do is sign Jerry Seinfeld to a development deal. [00:21:34] S1: Yes. Now there's just one problem, though, walking out of this meeting when Tartakoff, Littlefield and Ludwig, they're like, yeah. Yeah. What... Whatever you wanna do. Just come back. We'll come back with a script. We'll make it. Jerry has never written a script in his life for anything, and especially not a TV show. But Jerry knows one guy, one of his old New York stand up buddies, who does have some experience with script writing that might be useful for this special here for NBC. So three days later after this meeting in LA, Jerry flies back to New York, and he goes looking for that guy, Larry David, late at night after the sets at Catch a Rising Star, where Larry was a regular as a stand up comic.
00:21:34 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[00:21:34] S1: Yes. Now there's just one problem, though, walking out of this meeting when Tartakoff, Littlefield and Ludwig, they're like, yeah. Yeah. What... Whatever you wanna do. Just come back. We'll come back with a script. We'll make it. Jerry has never written a script in his life for anything, and especially not a TV show. But Jerry knows one guy, one of his old New York stand up buddies, who does have some experience with script writing that might be useful for this special here for NBC. So three days later after this meeting in LA, Jerry flies back to New York, and he goes looking for that guy, Larry David, late at night after the sets at Catch a Rising Star, where Larry was a regular as a stand up comic. [00:22:26] S0: And they got to know each other well during this period where they're just both constantly going up, trying new material. You don't go on till nine, ten, 11PM, so you're, like, friends with the other comics just sitting in the bars chopping it up.