The competitive environment of the networks changed drastically during the 1970s, with the advent of overnight ratings. A single rating point came to mean millions of dollars gained or lost. Greed and desire for success gripped executives of all three networks. They scrambled for larger shares and higher revenues:
The process of finding, producing, and placing new television shows became an elaborate kind of planned waste, costing the networks $100 million a year by the decade's end. The number of programming ideas inundating each network zoomed from 800 a year in the late sixties to 2,000 a year in 1979 . . . that increase resulted in failure on an even grander scale.
This report will examine the decline of NBC under Fred Silverman and the radically different philosophy of Grant Tinker, which transformed NBC into a successful competitor in the television marketplace.
Fred Silverman came to NBC during a period of maximum network competition for booming advertising dollars. Silverman was largely responsible for the panicky, short-term profit mentality that reigned at the networks during this time. If a program was not almost immediately successful, Silverman would yank it. Further, his programming attempts led to a decrease in quality. He became caught in a self-perpetuating downward spiral and was undone. The much maligned "Supertrain" is a perfect example. It was rushed onto the screen in about one-half the time it needed to have even a chance at success.
In the end, Silverman not only succeeded in alienating NBC's viewers in his quest for instant ratings gratification but also drove away the creative community. Some producers simply stopped coming to NBC because they knew that their shows would not be given as much of a chance to succeed. As a result, the only producers who came to NBC with ideas were far from the cream of the crop. Silverman was supposedly the one who created network interference. ...