Acquired
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.
00:22:26 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[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. [00:22:37] S1: As Jerry was coming up as a kid out of Queen's College, Larry David was one of the established comics that he looked up to. But their careers had gone in very different directions here by the end of the eighties. Who was Larry David here in November 1988? The answer is he is nobody. And he's not even, like, a promising young nobody who has potential and talent like Jerry. He's 41 years old. He's single. He's broke. He lives in subsidized artist housing. His stand up routine has, I think the term that people used to describe him at the time was he was a comics comic. Meaning that he was appreciated by other comics, but his, humor did not exactly land with audiences. [00:23:21] S0: And he had basically been chewed up and spat out of the industry. [00:23:24] S1: Jerry said, you know, they always just sort of had, like, a comedic resonance, the two of them, and had known each other for a long time. But Larry has had this, kinda like George Costanza, eclectic string of failures that lead to this moment. So the stories about Larry before Seinfeld, you probably already know them. You just know them as George Costanza stories. So Larry had actually moved to LA not for a sitcom, but because he got a job on a show called Fridays. [00:23:54] S0: That's right. It was an SNL knockoff.