Cosby

Author:Mark Whitaker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

20

“MEET YOUR NEW FAMILY”

Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner were desperate. After rising through the ranks at ABC, the two young programming executives had quit their jobs to form an independent production company. They had sold their first venture, a show about a trend-crazed housewife called Oh Madeline, to their old network, but ABC had canceled it after one season. The two partners were working in a one-room office above a shoe store and had taken out second mortgages on their homes to keep the company afloat.

Carsey, a blunt blonde from New Hampshire, and Werner, a genial preppy from Manhattan, liked working together in part because they shared the same sense of humor. But their jokes were getting increasingly morbid. Leaving the office to pick up her dry cleaning one day, Carsey mused that it might be cheaper to abandon her clothes than to keep paying the cleaning bills.

It didn’t help that many in the TV business thought the entire mission of Carsey-Werner Productions was completely out of date. The two programmers had made their names at ABC in the late seventies developing the situation comedies Taxi and Soap. But now it was 1984, and the conventional wisdom in Hollywood was that sitcoms were dead. Dallas, Dynasty, and other prime-time soap operas sat atop the ratings charts, and only a handful of comedies were in Nielsen’s top thirty.

Making their venture even more challenging, the two producers insisted on a unique approach to creating comedies. Most other TV production companies started their development process with a catchy premise or a cleverly written pilot. Carsey and Werner preferred to find comedians with strong personalities and build around them. It’s what they had done with a hyperkinetic young talent named Robin Williams on Mork & Mindy and tried to do with Madeline Kahn, the zany comedienne famous for her roles in Mel Brooks movies, in Oh Madeline. But now that show had failed, and Carsey and Werner needed to find another comedian around whom to create their next show.

The head of the television department at William Morris, a gruff-talking Brooklyn native named Larry Auerbach, had helped Carsey and Werner put together the deal of Oh Madeline, so they set up a meeting to see if he could help them.

“Who you got?” Carsey asked when they gathered in Auerbach’s office.

What am I running, a grocery store? Auerbach thought.

“Well, there’s Bill Cosby,” he said. “Norman says he may be ready to do another TV show.”

Carsey and Werner perked up. Several times in the past, they had inquired about Cosby’s availability, but his agents had always said the timing wasn’t right.

“You know how much we love Bill Cosby!” Carsey said.

“Yes, but he wants a lot of money,” Auerbach said. “I don’t know if you can afford him for a half-hour show.”

When Auerbach told them how much, the producers swallowed hard. Per episode, it was enough that they would have to pay Cosby more than $1 million per season if the show succeeded. The producers had always said

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