Dann v. Klein: The Best Game in Town

The Newlywed Game and The Dating Game are popular enough TV pastimes. But the most expensive, bitter and hilarious game of all is the one that the public never gets to see: the Rating Game. The rules are vague, the scoring is arbitrary, and the pawns are prime-time programs. Top network executives claim to have outgrown the game and have tried to call it off, but two of the all-time great competitors--CBS Senior Programming Vice President Michael Dann and NBC Audience Measurement Vice President Paul Klein--somehow did not give up the fight. The fascination lies not in who wins or loses but in how hysterically they play.

A few Sundays ago, their contest got so overheated that Dann felt compelled to phone NBC President Julian Goodman at his home. Flabbergasted at hearing from a CBS official a couple of echelons below him, Goodman first figured that Dann had been fired and was job-hunting. Dann was, in fact, on the line to ask Goodman to stop Klein & Co. from planting newspaper items knocking Dann's efforts to "improve television." Well aware that Dann was a past master at using the press in the rating game, Goodman had no sympathy. "Mike," he said, "you've created a monster, and now it's biting your ass."

"You Are Scum!" Mike Dann, 48, is a feisty, loquacious virtuoso of survival who has risen steadily through 14 presidents and two networks. Paul Klein, 41, is an irreverent disciple of Marshall McLuhan who is convinced he is brighter than his NBC bosses and not afraid to say so. Oddly enough, the rival vice presidents have never met, but they exchange terse little notes with endearments like "You are scum!"

The game has never been fought harder than in the past two seasons. Until then, CBS could claim to have won for 13 straight years. NBC contented itself with the claim that it had become No. 1 in what really mattered--the "demographic" breakdowns; that is, its viewers were younger, wealthier, better educated, and thus more desirable to advertisers. Then, in 1968-69, NBC passed CBS in total audience for the first half of the season. Desperately, Dann countered with a few maneuvers: he rescheduled Hawaii Five-O, for example, so that it played opposite a more vulnerable NBC program. At season's end, when the whole game seemed to ride on the ratings of a Cinderella special, Dann sent a poignant wire to the managers of CBS's 200-odd affiliates.

"My option is coming due shortly," it began. It wound up: "And how you promote Cinderella will tell me something about your personal feelings toward me." In the end, by CBS figures, CBS was first again, by a slivery 20.3% to NBC's 20.0% (and ABC's 15.6%).* Klein argued that the tabulation ignored NBC's premiere week, and that actually the two networks finished in a dead heat, 20.1% to 20.1%.

Condolence Note. Last fall NBC again began its season a week ahead of CBS and went on to open up a large gap. Everything seemed to go sour for Dann. When he picked up the Get Smart series after NBC dropped . it, he told Star Don Adams, "If you don't win your time period, I'll quit my job." When the show began limply, Klein sent Dann a condolence note, reading: "Pray for Mike Dann's babies." Klein was referring to the fact that Agent 99 was pregnant with twins to "hypo" the ratings, but Dann misunderstood the wisecrack as a slur on his capability to support his own three children.

By the end of the so-called "first season," NBC was so far ahead it called a victory press conference. Bright yellow buttons were passed around, proclaiming HAPPINESS is BEING NO. 1. Unhappiness, at that point, was being Mike Dann. "I've never known what it is to lose," he kept muttering. "I've never lost a season." In mid-January, with NBC .5% in the lead, Dann made his move. He assembled 60 aides from both coasts and announced "Operation 100." He picked the name because there were 100 days left to turn the season around, and because "the creative colony would respond to the emotion of it."

Gamble on a Queen. Mike's Manhattan men met at 9 each morning in his office. At lunchtime, he put in a conference call to his Hollywood team. And at home he talked from 8 to 9:30 every night to Perry Lafferty, his L.A. vice president. Among them, they devised 104 changes in 100 days--including the sprucing up of existing shows. Ed Sullivan, having an anemic year, scheduled an all-Beatles evening, a Holiday-on-Ice special, and a night in Army hospitals (`a la Bob Hope).

The 104 changes included the scrubbing of Get Smart for seven straight weeks. In its place went some respectable non-fiction shows and a CBS News special on Expo '70. Mike's master stroke was scheduling a rerun of the movie Born Free at 7 p.m. Sunday and having Dick Van Dyke introduce it; that gave it the third-highest movie rating in history (after The Bridge on the River Kwai and Hitchcock's The Birds). At 8 the next morning, on the basis of a special national sampling, Mike phoned London to buy the sequel, The Lions Are Free, for a bargain-basement $75,000. A year before on NBC, it had pulled a 25.4 Nielsen; on CBS, with a big promotion push, the rerun hit 26.4. Another Dann gamble was to throw in African Queen, which had run many times on local TV, though not since 1960; it scored 26.9 in the Nielsens.

By about the 60th day of Operation 100, CBS reckoned that it had caught up with NBC. All too well aware of what was happening, Klein officially announced in Variety: "NBC no longer desires to continue the competitive rating game. Our season ended March 22." An NBC official confessed later that "this was a gag, just part of our humble effort to drive Mike crazy." Perhaps it worked. It was at that point that Dann made his impulsive phone call to NBC President Goodman. And one day, when he ran into his NBC programming counterpart, Mort Werner, on the street, Mike grabbed him and blurted: "What are you sonsobitches trying to do to me?" Replied Werner: "Mike, Mike, how about saying hello first?"

The tumult and name-calling ended when the latest Nielsen report came in. By its own calculation, CBS had won for the 15th consecutive season--by .2%. "This is the greatest thrill of my 21 years in programming," crowed Mike. In his exultation he added: "I think I could have elected Humphrey." Over at NBC, Paul Klein snorted: "They didn't win the season. They won their season. This is what McLuhan called 'the dinosaur effect.' CBS has blown to its biggest size just before extinction." Industry evolution has indeed swung toward the Klein emphasis on demographics. In February, Dann's CBS superiors overruled him on the 1970-71 schedule, choosing to replace several of his high-rated hits with series that would probably get a smaller but more salable audience. And he seemed to be rebuffed again two weeks ago, when CBS President Robert Wood told an affiliates meeting that in the future, the network would "resist being sucked into the annual ratings rat race."

It is possible that Mike Dann will not be around for a rematch next year. He says that the years of 17-hour workdays and "all the press criticism" are beginning to get to him. He does not know exactly where he will go, or when. "It could be days, weeks, or even years," he said last week. All he really needs, as a sign-off, would be a truce luncheon and a first meeting with his NBC nemesis, Paul Klein. As might be expected, Klein has already vetoed any such possibility. "I don't want to meet Mike," he says. "I might like him."

* The numbers supposedly signify the percentage of TV-owning households tuned to each network during prime evening time. Each percentage point represents 1,175,850 viewers.

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