WILL JAMIE GET WITH THE PROGRAM?

By Richard Zoglin

Network programming chiefs typically are glib, self-assured guys who can rattle on about demographics or development deals even when the sky is falling. ABC Entertainment president Jamie Tarses, by contrast, looked a little battered during an interview last week, taking long, contemplative pauses before answering even seemingly simple questions. There was the weight of the world in those pauses--or, just as burdensome, the weight of a relentless Hollywood lobbying campaign against her, a stream of rumors that after a season of dismal ratings, she'll soon be out of a job.

"It has been stressful," Tarses acknowledged, scrunched into a leather chair behind the desk in her spartan temporary office at ABC headquarters in New York City. After a siege of near all-nighters to finalize the fall schedule, the fine-boned, soft-spoken programmer was clearly tired, not to say beleaguered. "I don't want to seem self-pitying. But it seems to me that rarely has a week gone by since I've taken the job that I haven't been attacked for one thing or another somewhere in the press. There are a lot of people bent on seeing me fail."

The very public ordeal of Jamie Tarses is a cautionary tale that could play out only in Hollywood, where bright young executives are thrust from gotta-have-her to you're-outta-here without pausing at that crucial intermediary stop: Who is Jamie Tarses, and what has she done to deserve this? At 33, she's the youngest person--and the first woman--ever to run the entertainment division of one of the Big Three networks. Nearly a year ago, ABC hired her away from NBC, where she had gained fame for overseeing the development of such hits as Friends and Mad About You--just the sort of young, hip programmer who might be able to revitalize a struggling network with an impatient new corporate parent, the Walt Disney Co.

Yet she ran into trouble even before she got the job, when word leaked out that in trying to extricate herself from her contract at NBC, she had raised allegations of sexual harassment against West Coast president Don Ohlmeyer. (Ohlmeyer denies the charges; Tarses has refused to comment on them.) Since joining ABC last June, she has weathered an almost nonstop run of bad-ratings news. ABC dropped even further into third place this past season, losing a startling 13% of its audience in the space of just a year. (Over the same period, the four broadcast networks collectively lost 6% of their audience, largely because of competition from cable.)

It is unfair to blame Tarses for ABC's bad season, since virtually all the shows the network aired were in the works before she arrived. Still, that hasn't stopped the Hollywood boo birds. She has been criticized for everything from poor scheduling during the May sweeps to giving only grudging approval to the network's one mid-season success, the Dan Aykroyd sitcom Soul Man. (Tarses admits she had problems with a first draft of the script but insists she was a solid backer of the show by the time it was finished.)

Last week, at least, she finally had the stage to herself, appearing before a crowd of advertisers in New York's Radio City Music Hall to announce her first fall schedule. It was an aggressive lineup, with 10 new shows and several old ones in new time periods. Among the newcomers: Total Security, a Steven Bochco drama about a security firm; Hiller and Diller, starring Richard Lewis and Kevin Nealon as comedy writers with families; and two fantasy-comedies for the Friday-night kid audience, Genie and Teen Angel, both produced by corporate parent Disney.

Despite the spate of rumors, Tarses says she has been reassured that her job is not in jeopardy. "Basically I've been assured I'll be given time to fail," she says. That is echoed by her boss, ABC president Robert Iger. "The speculation as to whether we're happy or unhappy with her is ridiculously premature," says Iger. "She has my support. We have a very talented person in Jamie Tarses, and as far as we're concerned she's the right person for that job." Still, Tarses is realistic--or fatalistic--enough to know that such support could disappear quickly if she doesn't produce results soon. "My feeling is, if [the schedule] is an unmitigated disaster by December, they'll need to do something," she says. "And perhaps they should do something."

She is nettled by the sniping that has dogged her first year in the job. "I have no problem with being judged for the work that I do. I have a lot of trouble with being judged based upon nothing. When I walked in the door--I wasn't ready for this job, was what everybody said. My age and my sex, I think, have a lot to do with it. And I'd never felt that before."

Hollywood's version of the old-boy network does appear to be engaged in an insidious form of hazing. "I think there is a fair amount of sexism and reverse ageism at work here," says Ted Harbert, Tarses' predecessor as ABC Entertainment chief. "That gets the skeptics going full speed." Still, her detractors say her behavior in the job has not helped her cause. They describe Tarses as both insecure and out of her depth, driving underlings hard and treating former friends and colleagues shabbily. She raised eyebrows by ordering two pilots co-produced by her boyfriend, former Letterman executive producer Robert Morton, and giving one of them, Over the Top (a sitcom starring Tim Curry), a choice Tuesday-night time period. Worse, from the standpoint of Hollywood's dealmakers, she is perceived as having been stripped of real power by her bosses, Iger and Disney chairman Michael Eisner.

She has, moreover, proved less than adept at massaging the egos of top producers. Bochco, for example, was furious when he belatedly found out that Tarses had decided against airing the last six episodes of his struggling drama series Murder One in April, as promised. He went over her head to Iger to protest. ("From his vantage point he had legitimate complaints," Tarses says. "It's all about the way you handle a situation.") Iger has since taken on the role of running interference between Tarses and some Hollywood heavyweights. When The Practice, a lawyer drama from producer David E. Kelley, was shunted to a weak Saturday-night time period so PrimeTime Live could remain on Wednesdays (Iger's call), Iger broke the bad news in a conference call with Kelley and Tarses. "Jamie and I agreed that there are certain things I could help her with," he says. "That should not be interpreted as a lack of authority on Jamie's part at all. We decided I would handle some of the tough calls."

Both Iger and Eisner played an active role in setting the fall schedule. "It really got down to Bob and Michael and me in a room," Tarses says, while insisting that "there was truly not a tremendous amount of disagreement." Sources describe at least one instance, however, in which Eisner overruled her. When Tarses' final schedule board was presented to him, Eisner reportedly noticed one prominent show missing--the newly outed sitcom Ellen. The omission, he said in front of several executives, was "inconceivable to me," and the show was put back on the schedule. (Tarses says the show was left off an early version of the schedule only because Ellen DeGeneres had said she didn't want to continue the series. "I love the show and wanted it on the schedule," says Tarses.)

In some ways, Tarses is an odd person to be an insider in such network gamesmanship. Her father, producer Jay Tarses (Buffalo Bill, The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd), has long been known for his combative relations with the networks suits. "I learned from him that network executives were hateful, horrible people who should be shot on sight," says Tarses with a smile. She grew up in the San Fernando Valley suburb of Woodland Hills, where her parents kept her safely aloof from the show-biz scene. But her dad liked to read his scripts aloud at the dinner table and discuss his shows with the family. "It was more in the context of Dad's work," she says, "not the television business."

Tarses went off to Williams College, where she majored in theater, and spent a year as a production assistant on Saturday Night Live in New York City. Back in Los Angeles, she worked as a casting director for Perfect Strangers and other shows before joining the NBC programming department. (In 1993 she married Dan McDermott, a TV executive; they were divorced last year.) Her skills at developing comedy material are widely admired. "She completely understands the creative process," says James Widdoes (Dave's World, Boston Common). "She's very specific about what she likes and doesn't like." Producer Dennis Klein (The Larry Sanders Show, last season's Cosby) describes her as "very smart and not ego driven. She's terrific at pinpointing flaws." Klein worked on a quirky comedy pilot for Tarses this spring, The 900 Lives of Jackie Frye; though the show was not picked up, he praises her as "very supportive of its offbeat elements. She didn't want to smooth down the edges. She wanted to keep the edges."

Though primarily identified with NBC's hip urban comedies, Tarses rejects the implication that she's a one-trick pony. "We're always going to try to do shows that skew younger and more urban, because that's the desirable audience. But I think the biggest mistake you can make is to be derivative. At NBC we put the best shows on the schedule. One year it was Seinfeld, the next year it was Mad About You, the next year Frasier, the next year Friends. You put them together, and all of a sudden look what we have--sophisticated urban comedy. But we didn't say, 'That's what we are.' Shows inform the network identity rather than the identity informing the shows."

Though a comedy specialist, Tarses now has to do everything from scheduling made-for-TV movies to (despite her fear of public speaking) giving talks to advertisers and affiliates. Yet she rejects the notion that she's too inexperienced for the job. "I was at NBC for eight years. I was exposed to every aspect of what a person in the job that I have now does. There have been many people prior to me in this job at various networks who had far less direct experience in all aspects of programming."

Most insiders think Tarses' job is safe for now, if only because Disney and ABC can ill afford the embarrassment of another high-profile executive shake-up. Last December, Michael Ovitz, the former superagent who spearheaded the effort to hire Tarses, resigned after a troubled 14-month tenure as Eisner's No. 2 executive. The news division is currently going through a rocky transition, as longtime president Roone Arledge has been promoted and his successor, David Westin, is weathering a messy scandal over his affair with the network's top public relations executive, Sherrie Rollins.

Tarses scoffs at the rumors that Geraldine Laybourne, the former head of Nickelodeon who runs Disney's cable networks, might take over her job. "Gerry and I spoke on the phone and both commented on the ludicrousness of it," says Tarses. "She has a job that she loves very much and works very hard at. She has no interest in coming over here. No one approached her, and she never approached anyone." Iger also flatly denies that any overtures were made to Laybourne. A more likely scenario, say close ABC watchers, would be for Eisner to persuade Marcy Carsey, the co-founder of Carsey-Werner Productions (Roseanne, 3rd Rock from the Sun), to join the network in a position over Tarses. Eisner, who once worked with Carsey at ABC, had talks with her a year ago, but they have apparently not been renewed.

Meanwhile, Tarses, who divides her time between a house in Pacific Palisades and Morton's rented place in Malibu, was preparing for a weekend off in the Hamptons, before heading back to Los Angeles to set about proving that she's the right person for the toughest programming job in TV. "It's about the shows," she says. "All this other stuff just gets in the way." The question is whether the shows will do their job before all the other stuff will do her in.

--With reporting by Kim Masters/Los Angeles

With reporting by KIM MASTERS/LOS ANGELES