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It's hard to mistake that gravelly voice on the other end of the phone. "I'm very excited, exuberant really," says the voice, which belongs to Leslie Moonves, the 50-year-old president and CEO of CBS Television. And who could blame him? These days CBS is the hottest of the networks, thanks to strong premieres for Bette, The Fugitive, and CSI. Returning hits, such as Everybody Loves Raymond, are getting healthy ratings boosts over last season's already-strong numbers. All this makes Moonves the closest thing the network TV business has to a miracle worker.
Perhaps more than any other network exec, Moonves knows the biz from every angle -- literally. The former actor's distinctive voice made him the perfect villain for such shows as The Six Million Dollar Man. After a few gigs on the tube, he headed for the executive suite, where he worked his way up to the job of president of Lorimar Television and became chief of Warner Bros. TV when Warner bought Lorimar.
As a studio executive, he helped give birth to Dallas, Falcon Crest, Friends, and ER. In 1995, he jumped to CBS, which truly needed a miracle worker. With its viewers aging faster than many of its shows, the Tiffany Network was a distant third in the ratings to NBC and ABC and was getting perilously close to falling behind Fox.
TOUCHDOWN. No, Moonves didn't turn around the network overnight, and he didn't do it by himself. Getting back pro football, which CBS lost five years earlier, helped. He also had a hand in creating such news shows as Raymond, Becker, and Queen of Hearts to replace fading hits like The Nanny. By 1999, Moonves had done the near-impossible, returning CBS to the top ratings rung for the first time since 1994.
But it's what Moonves has done this year that has Hollywood slackjawed in amazement. Under his stewardship, CBS seems to have discovered the fountain of youth. For years the network was knocked because its viewers were older than the other networks' -- a bad thing when advertisers want free-spending thirtysomethings instead of retirement-conscious fiftysomethings. CBS is the only network whose median viewer age has gone down, according to its researchers. It's now about 41, compared to 50 last year.
In the first week of the season, Oct. 2-8, Raymond won its time slot in the critical 18-49 demographic, according to Nielsen, while the Friday-night crime show CSI was the most-watched new program that week. And the Oct. 11 premiere of Bette, starring Bette Midler, gave CBS its best Wednesday-night numbers since The Beverly Hillbillies.
CBS used the power of its summer blockbusters and parent company Viacom to push its fall schedule
How were such dramatic changes achieved virtually overnight? In a word, Survivor. Or in two more words, Big Brother. Moonves' big summer gamble -- that legions would tune in to watch a bunch of schemers stuck on an island or in a house -- paid off handsomely, providing dividends into the fall. According to CBS, those two shows brought almost 90 million viewers over the weeks they aired -- a period that traditionally draws the smallest audiences -- including 19 million people who hadn't tuned into CBS at all in 2000. And, better yet, they were younger. The median viewer age for Big Brother was 42. For Survivor, it was 38.
So CBS loaded up those shows with promos for its new lineup, including Bette and CSI as well as a new version of '60s favorite The Fugitive. To help returning shows like Raymond and Judging Amy, Moonves scheduled them to follow ratings blockbuster Survivor. The payoff has been huge numbers for The Fugitive and stronger numbers for Amy and Queen of Hearts. Of course, it helps that CBS's parent, Viacom (
VIA
), got behind all the shows. It ordered up a festival of Fugitive reruns on its TV Land cable channel, put a Bette Midler special on its MTV channel, and plastered posters all over the great outdoors -- courtesy of billboard giant Infinity, which it also happens to own.
So it's no surprise Moonves is feeling "exuberant." The ratings for CBS's new shows have shown only the slightest of dips in their second week. Compare that to what's happening at NBC, where second-week numbers for some shows are off by 40%. About the only thing Les says he isn't so thrilled about is Viacom's stock price. It's trading well below its 52-week high of $75.50. But maybe a recent $6 a share spike means Wall Street is excited about CBS's fall lineup too. Maybe even exuberant.
Grover is Los Angeles bureau chief for Business Week. Follow his Power Lunch column every Friday, only on BW Online Edited by Beth Belton
Copyright 2000, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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