Fox Chief Likes His New Cards
LOS ANGELES _ A week into his new job as entertainment president at Fox, Kevin Reilly says he’s entered a much different environment than he did at NBC.
“The good news,” Reilly said of Fox, “is that I’m not getting behind the wheel feeling like the wheels are about to come off. I’m not replaying that scenario.”
Reilly was recently replaced at NBC, where he struggled to get the once-dominant network back on track with a series of ratings-challenged yet critically praised dramas and reality shows.
He was replaced by Ben Silverman, executive producer of “Ugly Betty” and “The Biggest Loser.”
“No one’s really fired in Hollywood, are they?” Reilly joked of his departure at NBC. “And no show is ever really canceled. Let’s just say … I wanted to spend more time with my family _ which I did, for three days.”
Reilly expressed pride in NBC’s “Friday Night Lights,” which he championed tirelessly there. He suggested, though, that the network that once nurtured “Hill Street Blues,”"Cheers” and “Seinfeld” from low-rated shows to hits may not have quite the same institutional instincts.
“I personally had wished that history was a little bit more fresh on people’s mind,” Reilly said, “and was a little bit more wired into the current environment.”
Reilly admitted that coming to a network when the fall schedule was in place was “somewhat awkward,” as it had been when he joined NBC under similar circumstances _ but that Fox now is different from NBC then.
Reilly praised the Fox slate, which includes the traditional sitcom “Back to You” with Kelsey Grammer and Patricia Heaton as TV news anchors in Pittsburgh.
One reporter challenged Grammer’s decision to return to series TV, pointing out many stars of other hugely successful sitcoms, like “Seinfeld” and “Friends,” said after those shows were over that they had done all they possibly could in the sitcom form.
“In this case,” Grammer countered, referring to himself and “Everybody Loves Ramond” star Heaton, “you’re looking at people who haven’t.”
Heaton said playing a TV news anchor permitted her to indulge her fascination with local anchorwomen across the country.
“You’ve got your local New York anchors, the gals who really could use a little wax (on the) brows,” she said. “Then you get all the way to the West Coast, and some of them look like hookers.”
In other Fox news, the producers of “24″ have retooled the first episode for January and have cast two-time Tony-winner Cherry Jones (“The Heiress,”"Doubt”) as the show’s first female U.S. president _ following in the footsteps of Geena Davis in ABC’s “Commander in Chief.”
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