“Kill it!” US programmer spills on devious tactics

How much of television programming is about putting your best foot forward, and how much is about trying to kill off the competition?

You’d be hard pressed to get a straight answer on that one, but this year Australians have looked on with some scepticism as genre has been programmed against genre -something networks are now conceding hit their own audience share hard.

In the US FOX scheduler Preston Beckman has retired after 35 years, a period during which he oversaw d NBC’s Must See TV and American Idol chapters. He has a reputation as the “Masked Scheduler.”

In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, he divulges on some of his war stories, including how he plotted to kill off opposition shows.

Here are some excerpts:

“When we picked up Friends, Jennifer Aniston was in second position. She was on a CBS comedy, Muddling Through, and they had six episodes of it. We heard that they were putting the show on Saturday nights while we were in a current meeting. I remember [NBC entertainment chief] Warren Littlefield turns to me and said, ‘Kill it!’ So I did. The first one or two weeks that it was on, I put original Danielle Steel movies against it. We wanted to make sure they weren’t going to pick up more episodes just to be spiteful.”

On boss Rupert Murdoch he says:

“It was always fun to have Rupert [in the scheduling room]. He had a point of view. We didn’t necessarily agree with him, but he’d put his schedule up. He’d talk about the shows he liked and didn’t like, and he had a very populist point of view. Then we’d explain to him why we were going to do what we were going to do.”

On keeping the competition guessing over American Idol scheduling:

“Every year, everybody thought we were going to move Idol. Every year. Now, we weren’t going to do it, but I liked to play the game just to aggravate people. I’d say to people here, ‘You may want to drop hints to your friends that this is year that we were going to do it.’ But we didn’t do it for the longest time. Each December, Warren would put together a party with people who worked together in the ’90s. One year, when Kevin Reilly was over at NBC, he ripped into me: ‘You play this game every year! I know you’re moving it this year!’ I just smiled and said, ‘Tune in tomorrow.’ The next morning, we announced that Idol would be on Tuesday/Wednesday, as it was every year.”

You can read more here.