Inside Info

I don't know how often it happens in other industries but there's a thing that happens often in television. I'll tell you this story and you'll understand the situation I'm talking about…

This occurred back in the seventies. A friend of mine was working on a Saturday morning series for NBC. Season One had aired and the production company was waiting to hear if they'd be picked up for a second season. My friend was especially interested since he had an offer to go work for another studio. If the show was going to get picked up, he wanted to turn the offer down and work on Season Two. If it wasn't, he wanted to grab the other offer while it was still available to him. The problem was that he had to decide now.

He called me for advice: "Do you think we'll get a pick-up?" I honestly didn't know. It felt like one of those things that could go either way and I told him that. "Stall as long as you can," I advised him.

A few days later, I was in a meeting at NBC with Fred Silverman, who was then the guy who decided what they bought and what they cancelled. We were talking about a project I was to be involved with and somehow, my friend's series came up in the conversation. Fred said — and this is darned close to a verbatim quote — "God, that's been a disaster for us. We're going to set our Fall schedule next week and I can't wait to cancel that piece of shit."

So I did what you'd have done. I called my friend that evening and told him about what Fred had said. He thanked me for the inside tip and the next day, he resigned from the studio that did that show and signed on with the other studio.

And a week later when NBC announced their Fall Saturday Morning schedule, the show had been picked up for a second season.

I had information from the best possible source…and it turned out to be wrong. That has happened a few times on this blog when I've had inside info on what was to happen in the TV industry — in late night, especially.

The day I got home from Comic-Con in 2008, a producer I knew took me to a meeting with Phil Griffin, who had just been named president of MSNBC. Also in the meeting was one of the network's correspondents, Chuck Todd. We were there to discuss a proposal to produce some political comedy segments. The idea was to air one or two each day on The Rachel Maddow Show, which was about to debut on MSNBC. A week's segments would then be collected into a show of their own that could rerun many times on the weekend.

The meeting — held poolside at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills — went well enough…or so it seemed. Soon after, it became apparent that the least it would have cost us to make these segments was way more than MSNBC was able or willing to spend…and that was the end of that.

But what I remember from the poolside meeting was that Chuck Todd was introduced to me as "The new host of Meet the Press," which had then been without a regular host since the passing of Tim Russert. The guy in charge of picking Russert's replacement described Mr. Todd, who was sitting right there next to me, that way. Mr. Griffin asked us not to spread that around until it could be formally announced in a week or two.

And in a week or two, they announced that the new permanent host of Meet the Press would be…David Gregory.

I have no idea what happened but I was reminded of that when it was announced recently that Chuck Todd would (at last!) take over as host of Meet the Press. I assume he's thinking, "Finally!"