Tenuous hold on the crown

Throughout its unprecedented ratings dominance on Thursday night, NBC functioned like a basketball dynasty that had the current stars of the game and an uncanny ability to come up with the next phenom. Beginning in 1984, with the “tent pole” shows of “Cosby” at 8 and “Hill Street Blues” at 10, the network came to own the night. It anointed everything from bona fide hits like “Family Ties,” “Cheers” and the drama “L.A. Law” to duds like “Caroline in the City” as “Must See TV.”

It was a preposterous boast, but one that NBC was able to keep believable for 18 years, most especially to the advertisers willing to pay a premium for a 30-second commercial on the last night of the week before young American consumers went out to spend money at the mall and the cineplex.

The announcement last weekend that NBC had renewed “Friends” through a 10th season in 2003-2004 means the network will likely hold on to this all-important Thursday-night throne for two more years. But like the Lakers with a hobbled Shaquille O’Neal, NBC’s vaunted Thursday-night schedule had been looking vulnerable even before the “Friends” deal was made.

Thus, the news broke not so much with a bang as a qualified bang: NBC had renewed “Friends,” some of the spin went, but it was paying through the nose to do so and was only buying itself an extra year before the glory days are truly over. That’s because, the reasoning goes, nothing the network currently has on its schedule -- not “Scrubs,” not “Will & Grace” -- can replace “Friends” in the way that NBC has changed dance partners in the past, with “Seinfeld” cutting in just as “Cheers” had grown tired. Similarly, “Friends,” which debuted as an 8:30 infant between the protective parenting of “Mad About You” and “Seinfeld,” became the 8 p.m. show when the network dispatched “Mad About You” to lead off Sunday nights.

But the stable is no longer this full. This isn’t NBC’s problem alone. All four of the major networks are having trouble developing breakout hit comedies. But in NBC’s case, the struggle is more noticeable, given the network’s track record.

“It’s no secret, they articulate it to the creative community on a regular basis: ‘We need the next generation of hits,’ ” said Warren Littlefield, NBC Entertainment president throughout much of the “Must See” ’90s and who now sells programming to the network as a producer.

Thursday night is key in large part because movie studios use the night to hawk their blockbusters. “The movie companies pay a premium [to advertise],” said Bill Carroll, vice president/director for the Katz Television Group, a consulting firm. “If the movie opens Saturday or Friday, they can’t say, ‘Well, we’ll advertise it next week.’ ”

In the end, the network reportedly agreed to pay as much as $10 million an episode (the lion’s share going to the series’ six cast members, who already make $1 million a week) to keep “Friends.”

This despite the fact that the network doesn’t own the series and will lose money by keeping it on the air, though at least one high-ranking source at NBC disputed the notion that the show had become a giant loss leader.

Jeff Zucker, NBC’s current entertainment chief, was unavailable for comment.

Getting another year out of “Friends” (albeit 18 episodes, half a dozen fewer than the desired 24) means that Zucker can still credibly tell advertisers that NBC has a hold on the core 18-to-49-year-old viewership on Thursday night, despite inroads made by CBS, which has been competitive with “Survivor” at 8 and surpasses NBC at 9 with “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” the most-watched show on television.

Yes, NBC still has the tent poles at 8 and 10 with “Friends” and “ER,” respectively, but the latter medical drama, signed through 2004, has seen its ratings diminish a bit, due in part to cast departures and more significantly because its lead-ins are not as strong.

“CBS has made [Thursday night] a real game,” Carroll said.

NBC is hardly alone in encountering difficulty developing the next sitcom hit. And one of the remarkable things about “Friends” is that, 10 years later, no new thing has come along to supplant it.

In fact, if “Friends” is the only series standing between NBC’s exalted past and its worrisome future, the show is providing an odd postscript to the “Must See” years. Unlike previous hits such as “Mad About You,” “Family Ties” or “The Cosby Show,” “Friends” has actually grown more popular in its autumn years, averaging 26 million viewers in last month’s November ratings sweeps -- its best November since 1996. This despite various plot turns (Monica and Chandler getting married; Rachel having Ross’ baby) that suggest the show has “jumped the shark,” the popular phrase that describes a series experiencing story fatigue.

“This show started jumping sharks three at a time -- they had the baby, they had the marriage,” said Robert Thompson of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University. And yet, Thompson notes, “Friends” “is still a pretty competent comedy.

“You compare it to where ‘Murphy Brown’ was in its baroque declining years. They’re still able to tell a pretty amusing story that’s still funnier than most comedies on network television.”

“The audience has made a tremendous bond with those characters,” Littlefield said. At the same time, however, “the greatest difficulty in following a ‘Friends’ is that [the new show will be] compared to ‘Friends.’ If you followed ‘Friends’ with Season One of ‘Seinfeld,’ it wouldn’t look as good as ‘Seinfeld’ in its heyday.”

During Littlefield’s tenure at NBC, “Cheers” was exiting the stage. Fortunately for him, the network had two comedies about to bloom: “Frasier” and “Seinfeld.”

“The tremendous concern when ‘Cheers’ went away was, do we have the players, do we have the goods to hold on to a signature night?” As it turned out, they had “Seinfeld,” then in its first full season on the air after dying a thousand deaths in network meetings and among test audiences.

This season, NBC has been hard-selling “Scrubs” as a “Friends” heir apparent, airing it Thursday nights at 8:30, where it loses an average 30% of the “Friends” audience. The show, in its second season, has the bells and whistles of a sitcom that might speak to the same 18-to-49-year-old viewers who also watch “Friends”; young doctors coming of age at a hospital, starring a sensitive cute guy with mussed hair in a show that blends hyper-reality with the requisite amount of pop culture referencing.

Can “Scrubs” lead off Thursday night for NBC in 2004? One thing is for certain: The other networks would love to see them try.

“Ultimately they don’t need the next ‘Friends,’ ” Carroll said of NBC, “they need the next great comedy. A reason for viewers to watch. They need to have it in place for a while, for people to become accustomed to the show. That was the intention with ‘Scrubs.’ ”

Meanwhile, during the November sweeps, a wedding on “Will & Grace” carried the show to its second-largest audience ever, as Grace, played by Debra Messing, got married to a character played by Harry Connick Jr.

Once seen as daring, the show about the relationship between an openly gay man and a heterosexual woman could be the most viable option NBC has for Thursday nights at 8, 7 Central.

“The real question now is, where is the critical development of that show going to be?” Carroll said. “Now that they’ve married her off, where is the show’s focus?”

And NBC’s focus? To be sure, competition is only growing stiffer, with cable channels continuing to eat into the broadcast networks’ hold on viewers. For NBC, the challenge is to keep being NBC. With an extra year to keep the “Must See” bloodline going, the task is slightly less urgent. But as Thompson said: “It’s almost as though NBC has gotta keep the parent alive until one of the kids is able to support the rest of the family.”