February 2, 2021
"A young, female executive arrives in.. broadcast television in the 1990s and... is so good at spotting hits that she becomes, at 32, the president of entertainment at ABC...."
"But she fizzles in epic fashion, brought down by corporate dysfunction, unvarnished sexism, self-sabotage, weaponized industry gossip and scalding news media scrutiny.... ABC badly needed fresh hit shows, and Ms. Tarses... had shepherded the cuddly 'Mad About You' and the neurotic 'Frasier”' to NBC’s prime-time lineup. 'Friends,' which she had helped develop, was the envy of every network.... After a year at ABC, Ms. Tarses, who had alienated some colleagues by not returning calls and missing morning meetings, gave the journalist Lynn Hirschberg unfettered access for an 8,000-word cover story in The New York Times Magazine. The piece portrayed Ms. Tarses as 'a nervous girl' who swung erratically between arrogance and insecurity. 'Women are emotional, and Jamie is particularly emotional,' one male agent, speaking anonymously, was quoted as saying. 'You think of her as a girl, and it changes how you do business with her.'... Ms. Tarses resigned in 1999. She left ABC with one popular sitcom, 'Dharma & Greg,' and one comedy that was a hit with critics, Aaron Sorkin’s 'Sports Night.'... 'I just don’t want to play anymore,' she told The Los Angeles Times when she left ABC. 'The work is a blast. The rest of this nonsense I don’t need.'"
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49 comments:
In a business that's largely all about relationships missing meetings and not returning phone calls is going to bring you down.
She sounds like your typical flash in the plan--talented, but poison to the office environment. If it weren't for the crutch of "sexism," she would have just faded away, quickly forgotten.
Sounds like a salesman I had to let go.
Insecurities prevented him from answering his phone, then he evaluated their voice message to determine if they warranted a call back, or how soon. He assumed any contact was a potential problem, rather than opportunity. Peers the same. It's almost impossible to survive in business by pissing on everyone around you.
I'm sure there was some sexism. But as many who have experienced the sexism of being called a "girl" or being labelled "emotional" (even with the intent to compliment, as in, "high emotional intelligence") know, the best way to make it go away is to defy the expectations of the sexist and do the job well. Lather, rinse, request.
And return phone calls.
It sounds like she did a lot of great work, but the reward for it was something inconsistent with her talent set. Who belongs in the top management position? How can the others accept a 32-year-old in charge of everything when she's also very emotional and opinionated? It's a set-up for failure.
Oh, for gosh sakes. Lather, rinse, REPEAT.
To the coffee!
The whole subject is emotional: What will people love watching on TV? The emotionalism is valuable.
Hollywood is a sexist, misogynistic, greedy, ugly town. That’s why they’re so keen to lecture the rest of us in every endeavor. It’s a progressive habit.
Yes, I agree that "high emotional intelligence" really is an important aspect of this job. But it might be even better to have an "anthropological" understanding of emotionality (I'm coining that word, possibly - "emotionalism" want what I meant) rather than to experience it oneself - so you have the ability to make hard and painful decisions despite the emotional impact on you or others.
My husband has the reverse - he has the ability to turn on the pure quant so he can deal very effectively with his accounting group, yet his base state is "people person."
Also, the Peter Principle applies to women cuz it’s named after a person not a body part.
There's a risk to bringing them up from the minors too soon...
She was involved with some great television.
No one person is responsible for a show's success. I know the most about Frasier, and pretty much everyone should have known it had potential.
Also: Showing up to work on time and sober is the *bare minimum* for most jobs. I can't think of how many meetings I could miss and not get tossed out.
Apparently, adult women need to be protected from their own follies from the age of 18 (Evan Rachel Wood) all the way into at least their mid-30’s. Who could have guessed that the Biden era would usher in a return to Victorianism?
They started grooming her when she was only 32...
It looks like she was a great program finder and talent scout for a network... but was then thrust to a position she had no chops for. Then they tear her down and blame it on that she was a woman...
Just because you cab be a great program manager does not mean one is ready or able to be put in executive management. ABC made a bad choice, she was given the opportunity, if she turned it down advancement would have totally dried up, and it was more than she could handle. The entertainment industry is the most sexist, racist, ageist, and every other "ist" you can think of.
Sounds like a savant. The qualities that made her great at her job don't translate into corporate success.
Peter Principle is a good fit here.
Keep promoting the great producer. Youth is the disadvantaged here. I entered into mid management way too early and made mistakes because I didn't have the experience of seeing others around me make mistakes to learn from. 5 years of seasoning would have done me wonders. Of course at the time I was the smartest and hardest working, and the old guys just weren't "keeping up with the times". All true, (except the smart part) but I also didn't know what I didn't know.
So, there are several failures here. Lots of blame goes to those that promoted to soon, and allowed her to fail. None of this happens in a vaccume.
Skeptical Voter said...
In a business that's largely all about relationships missing meetings and not returning phone calls is going to bring you down.
two words: Cocaine Addiction
It remains a point of subjective opinion that those were great shows. Hits maybe.
Matt Sablan said...No one person is responsible for a show's success. I know the most about Frasier, and pretty much everyone should have known it had potential.
As a spin off, Frasier was different from Friends or the other shows because the character Frasier was already popular from Cheers. The trick was building a show around this character that could keep the built in audience that it would start with. IMO, Friends is a more telling situation if your job is spotting potential. TV in the 90's was loaded with New York-centric comedies about people sitting around talking and most of them sucked. Developing one that worked (this list has two if you include Mad About You in "buddy comedy") is no mean feat.
Lynn Hirschberg
Is woman, no? So much for female solidarity.
Sounds like an argument for the new woke Times.
Sad that they couldn't find a middle ground.
I must have seen every episode of Mad About You. I wasn't mad about it, but it was amusing comfort TV, better than most of what's on the tube, then or now.
Her father was TV writer Jay Tarses (Carol Burnett, Bob Newhart). His short-lived sitcom with Tony Randall as a widowed father of two children was interesting casting, given how people thought Tony was (gay) and what he became (father of two children when he was almost 80).
Oh, wow. A stroke at 56. How horrible.
Sounds like she recovered from her exec stint and continued a great development career. Sad news.
There's a Seinfeld episode in which George and his fiancee are sitting in bed watching Mad About You (well, you can hear the theme music). George looks like he wants to die, which is what his fiancee eventually does.
I can’t say I cared about ABC since1999, so I’d say she deserves her credit.
Looking at IMDb and Wikipedia, I see she was producer on a bunch of things I've never really heard of, and that she helped "develop" a handful of TV shows, whatever "develop" means since it is clearly different from being creator or producer of a series.
For a while now, it has been clear that TV execs are the folks who really don't create or help make the product, they just grab all the money and do their best to screw up what the real talent is doing.
'a nervous girl'
So the NYT itself pegged her deficiency as an exec, but the industry was sexist in mistreating her?
But then, all failure is overdetermined.
Peter Principle
Ms. Tares just let her guard down. Consider female rapper M.I.A. who was interviewed by Lynn Hirschberg in 2010. M.I.A. went on at length about her seriously stupid political beliefs and the result was a brutal take down in Rolling Stone. Even worse -- Hirschberg interviewed Hole singer Courtney Love. Ms. Love confided that she had gone on a heroin binge while pregnant. Of course, Hirschberg put this in her article.
I guess it's easier for women to talk to other women. But what the hell, don't these people have sisters or girlfriends or someone to talk to???
I guess it's easier for women to talk to other women.
It's also easier for women to rip and backstab other women.
I haven't watched a network TV show on a regular basis since Seinfeld ended.
And if you remain great at your job, you can get away with missing meetings and cocaine binges.
It's all about bringing in the big bucks...it's all that matters.
How else do people like Johnny Depp keep working for decades?
It's because when the director call out 'Action,' the man can still bring it and pack the theaters.
That's all that matters in Hollywood.
Not returning phone calls, being overly emotional, and missing morning meetings sound like substance abuse issues. Which is really sad.
For a while now, it has been clear that TV execs are the folks who really don't create or help make the product, they just grab all the money and do their best to screw up what the real talent is doing.
Actually, untrue. A good tv development executive is a lot like a good book editor. To do the job well, you have to have a good eye for material that is suitable for the day part that needs to be filled. And then you have to be able to work well with writers to get the script/teleplay in shape. Writers are very often squirrelly fucks.
Then you have to be able to sell it internally to the head of the network to get the green light to get it into production. Her specialty was comedy. She was the daughter of a successful comedy writer, and she was very good at it. Unfortunately, in her case, that didn’t translate well when it came to running a network which requires additional skill sets...mostly political.
Her problems had nothing whatsoever to do with sexism or being 32. She was, as an executive, an enormously talented industry star with the wind at her back. She didn’t make the right adjustments to her new position when she was put in charge. For one thing, she should have stayed at NBC. I talk as if I knew her, which I did since I was also at NBC and then ABC. I also knew her dad and his writing partner, Tom Patchett.
- Krumhorn
It's a while since we dropped the NYT subscription. Interesting to learn that, in addition to becoming 100 percent in the tank "progressive" since then, it also has developed a first-rate gossip section.
Still don't miss it.
I can't get chuffed about Hollywood insiders and their children turning on other Hollywood insiders and their children.
Far more important than the identity politics involved. .001% Problems. Let's talk about grocery cashiers.
By the way, the series "Episodes" explores these themes in an incredibly charming, BBC meets Hollywood way while exploring the creative process of making tv shows. It stars Joey from Friends, the randy female character from Black Books, and some other guy who is so ubiquitous on screen, I don't remember who he is in real life.
if you remain great at your job, you can get away with missing meetings and cocaine binges.
That's a REALLY BIG *IF*
But, you're right!
*IF* your drug addiction doesn't affect your career... Your career probably Won't mind
The Trouble is..... That your drug addiction probably WILL affect your career
Sounds like she should have stayed out of management.
Looking through her list of hits, I only ever watched "Friends", and I question how much input she really had to either its creation or financing.
The problem with corporations is that most don’t compensate the very talented as they should.
If her forte was identifying hit shows, she should have been the highest paid person at NBC TV, regardless of her title.
LeBron makes more than the CEO of the Lakers.
Her mistake was trusting a "journalist".
How can the others accept a 32-year-old in charge of everything when she's also very emotional and opinionated? It's a set-up for failure.
It's a real almost impossible challenge to know when you are being offered something that will bring you down. I doubt any 32-yo is up to recognizing the looming pitfall.
Sad that her stroke was so bad that a woman in her fifties could have an epic obit at the ready.
Mad About You was sort of an updated Dick Van Dyke Show. Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt lived in the city, had no kids, and had more of the wisecracking spirit of Rose Marie and Morey Amsterdam than Dick and Mary Tyler Moore did. Anything But Love was similar, except they worked together and weren't married, the city was Chicago, and Richard Lewis was much more of a downer than Paul Reiser.
NBC had big hits with Seinfeld and Friends, so they kept trying to fill the holes in their Thursday schedule with cookie cutter shows about young urbanites. Conrad Bloom? Union Square? The Naked Truth? The Single Guy? Boston Common? It's a tough business.
Keep women appointed, available, and taxable.
Why all the hate for Mad About You? It wasn't Seinfeld, but it had it's moments. Like when their daughter learned her first word; "Schmuck".
Have they added her death to the Bill of Attainder Impeachment yet?
Check out that sub-head!
"She broke barriers as a woman in the TV industry and turned out hit after hit, only to see it all fizzle under a very public spotlight"
As the professor is fond of parsing and diagramming sentences, what, exactly, is "it" in the subhead?
She "broke barriers," she "turned out hit after hit." I suspect that the "it" the NYT (and by extension, their readers) care about is her "career" and their expectations for it. (And her value as a "symbol" of some sort.) She's not a barrier-breaker, though, as much as she was a victim of white, male agents and stuff.
Had this been a handsome 56-year-old dude who had told the hectic and shallow world of television to shove it, his obit would be a heroic one, his hits celebrated, his "self-sabotage" in the second or third graf (in detail).
I hope I'm a man when I die. They get better obits.
"Ms. Tarses, who had alienated some colleagues by not returning calls and missing morning meetings, gave the journalist Lynn Hirschberg unfettered access for an 8,000-word cover story in The New York Times Magazine."
Never give a journalist unfettered access to anything in your life. I gave a New York Times "journalist" twenty minutes of my time thirty years ago and learned a very painful lesson about how "journalism" works.
Frasier and Friends is a pretty great track record for someone in her twenties. I think Friends is still the most valuable show on Netflix.
who had alienated some colleagues by not returning calls and missing morning meetings
Sounds like a euphemism.
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