The Hit Maker
With a slew of popular programs, CBS entertainment President Nina Tassler (CFA'79) has helped put the network on top.
By Cynthia K. Buccini
Photograph by Amanda Friedman
Nina Tassler was driving home from work one day in October 1999, worn out after the long "pitch" season, when writers and producers flock to the TV networks with their ideas for new shows. During the previous four months, Tassler (CFA'79), then head of drama development for CBS Television, had heard hundreds of pitches and had already bought all the scripts she was interested in developing for the 2000 season. So when her cell phone rang and a producer friend begged her to listen to one more, she hesitated. "He said, 'Look, I don't know if you're going to buy it, but I promise you it'll be the most entertaining pitch you've ever heard," Tassler recalls. "I said okay. Rule number one is you never say no, because you just don't know."
Good thing. At the pitch meeting, writer and producer Anthony Zuiker laid out his idea for CSI, an hour-long drama centered on a team of Las Vegas crime scene investigators who analyze the clues, from tire treads to toenail clippings, blood stains to bird feathers, and solve the cases using all manner of high-tech tools and techniques. "We were so used to seeing cops," says Tassler, now president of CBS Entertainment. "These were not cops; these were science geeks who ultimately would say the evidence is what reveals the truth."
But it wasn't just the ins and outs of DNA testing and bloodstain pattern analysis that intrigued her. "He knew who these people were," says Tassler. "He knew what they did. He knew the spine of the show, the way we were going to solve the crimes. He knew every detail about how these people operated." She bought the script on the spot. "I remember sitting in that pitch and just feeling I didn't want it to end."
Now in its seventh season, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation has become a ratings hit, attracting millions of coveted younger viewers and spawning two spinoffs. In 2005 Television Week described it as "one of the most powerful franchises in television history." The series, along with reality shows like Survivor, has been credited with changing the fortunes of CBS, which had long drawn older audiences. "I think it helped CBS redefine itself as a network," Tassler says.
It also helped cement Tassler's reputation as an accomplished development executive with something of a golden touch. In nine years at CBS, she has had a role in developing nearly every program in its prime-time lineup. Tassler, Daily Variety wrote in 2004, "is considered the Eye's hour-long hitmaker, boasting a string of successes in the drama arena that have helped CBS rise to the top of the total-viewer tally."
Her success is due in part to a network of colleagues with whom she's worked for years and a talent for recognizing strong narrative and character development - a skill honed during her days as a theater major at the College of Fine Arts and as an avid reader since childhood. "All you can do is identify good writing, new voices, and create an environment where writers and directors are given the opportunity to do their best work," she says.
Meetings, Pitches, Phone Calls
On a recent summer day, Tassler sits in her comfortable corner office in Television City, a complex of offices and studios where programs like The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, The Young and the Restless, and The Price Is Right are shot. In addition to comedies and dramas, Tassler oversees the development of daytime, reality, and late night programs, as well as specials, movies, and miniseries.
The current schedule has long been set, and Tassler is planning the 2007 season. Her days are filled with staff meetings, pitches, and phone calls, some professional ("Do I have a deal?" she says into her headset as she scans her computer screen. Then, with a hint of exasperation, "Omigod. What is the Sturm und Drang going on with this?"), and one personal ("Love you," she says to her eight-year-old daughter, Alice. "See you in a little bit.").
She meets with two associates from the drama development department to talk about business affairs and the pitches they've heard. "It seems a little soft to me," Tassler says of one pitch. "It sounds like a movie. I worry if there is enough to sustain it for five years."
She will hear 300 to 400 pitches from July through October. If the network buys an idea, it then orders a script, and around Thanksgiving, Tassler will be reading a stack of them: thirty dramas and thirty comedies. Each one undergoes a slew of revisions before the network chooses which pilots to cast and film. Roughly twenty to twenty-seven pilots are shot each season; the best ones will make it onto the 2007 schedule. "I try and read all of the new episodes and look at the dailies and the new cuts and stay on top of things," she says, "making sure that our new shows are consistent, that the character work is good, that we don't have any glaring problems." Scheduling begins in April; in mid-May Tassler will be in New York to present the fall lineup to advertisers.
Tassler says she applies the same principles when developing comedies and dramas. "You still have to have a strong narrative regardless of the form," she says.
An example is The New Adventures of Old Christine, which was the number-one new comedy last year and earned star Julia Louis-Dreyfus an Emmy in August. "When I read the script, I knew we had to pick it up," says Tassler, who believes the show owes its success, in part, to creator Kari Lizer's storytelling. "Her personal life has somewhat informed the show. I think when writers pull from their own experiences, reflecting on their own past, it does make the story feel more relevant and the characters much more accessible and honest. Kari, who's a very talented and experienced writer, had such a clear sense of who this woman was, what her life was all about. And when Julia read the script, she loved it right away."
Tassler was similarly struck by the specificity of Zuiker's CSI pitch. He had nailed not only the characters and the forensics but the location itself. "He described Las Vegas in such detail - because he's from there - that you said, 'This is a unique world.'" In September 2005, Advertising Age wrote that CSI profits were expected to total more than $1 billion from sources such as syndication and DVD sales. "It's huge," Tassler says. "CSI: Miami just celebrated its 100th episode, and it's huge. CSI: NY, which had a rough first year, took off in its second and third year."
She has overseen the development of other popular programs, including Without a Trace, Cold Case, and NCIS. Under her leadership, the network has been number-one in viewers for the last four seasons.
But with a limited amount of airtime, the majority of scripts will never make it to the small screen. That can be heartbreaking, says Tassler, particularly when she has high hopes for a project. "It's also really hard when you pass on projects. If something doesn't work for us, it doesn't mean that writer or actor or producer hasn't poured their heart and soul into it. It's rejection and it's hurtful. But it's a reality."
Elements of a Good Drama
As a child, Tassler loved television. Her father was a CBS audiovisual technician in the 1950s, and she remembers watching everything from Captain Kangaroo to Walter Cronkite. "We were a big CBS family," she says. Later, her parents ran an upstate New York children's camp that had been in the family for generations.
When Tassler was a teenager, the family moved to Florida, where she took her first formal drama class. Her teacher introduced the students to such playwrights as George Bernard Shaw and Lillian Hellman and encouraged them to write their own material, compete in drama festivals, and join the International Thespian Society. She remembers the experience as "emotionally engaging" and decided then to make a career of the theater.
CFA was similarly fulfilling for Tassler, who acted in The House of Bernarda Alba and Look Back in Anger, among other productions. "But I had a tendency to overthink things," she recalls, "and when a project was over, I was constantly revising in my head, what I should have done, what I could have done. And somehow, reflecting on what I do now and how I critiqued my work then, I see that there is a connection. In the job I do now, we're constantly revising, there's a sense that as we work together on certain aspects of the script or storytelling in a particular episode, as you're working on a cut of a particular episode, you're always working to clarify and redefine."
After graduating, she and her boyfriend, Jerry Levine (CFA'79), worked at Roundabout Theatre Company in New York. "He was casting. I was doing anything: painting sets, running the box office, ushering, striking sets." Tassler pursued acting as well, "pounding the pavement," she says, "being queen of the callbacks," but never landing a major role. After Levine, whom she married in New York, traveled to California and got a part in the movie Teen Wolf, she joined him. Two pals already lived there, actresses Geena Davis (CFA'79, Hon.'99), still Tassler's closest friend, and Sarah Zinsser (CFA'79). "Most of my friends are BU alums," she says. "We're still very tight."
In California, Tassler continued to act, but needed full-time work. She found a job as a receptionist and assistant to a talent agent and later became an agent herself. Her theater training came in handy. "I could talk to actors," she says. "I could talk to casting people. I knew about the audition process."
But soon she missed the creativity of the theater. "I loved, from being at BU and working in the Roundabout Theatre, interpreting the material, analyzing a script, talking about character arcs," she says, "and going back to childhood, loved reading and really tracking a character's journey and the flow of the narrative and all of those elements of good drama." In 1990, she moved to Warner Bros. Television (then called Lorimar Television), where Leslie Moonves (Hon.'06) was an executive. She's worked for Moonves, now president and CEO of CBS Corporation, ever since. Tassler joined CBS in 1997 as vice president of drama development for CBS Productions; she's been at her current post since 2004.
Tassler's manner in person is genuinely warm and down-to-earth. Asked about being described as a "hit maker," she demurs. "It's really and truly just about the work," she says. "If you get caught up in the other mishegas, it's distracting. Staying focused and committed to the work will ultimately serve you well."
She has two priorities: family (husband Levine, an actor and television director whose credits include Monk and Everybody Hates Chris, eighteen-year-old son Matthew, and daughter Alice) and work. It's not too difficult a juggling act, Tassler says. "I think it's because I've worked with the same people for eighteen years. They know my habits."
She still makes time for books ("I read, like, six books at a time"), and last April, after studying Hebrew for two years, she was bat mitzvahed. The daughter of a Jewish father and a Puerto Rican mother who converted to Judaism, Tassler was raised Jewish (and speaks fluent Spanish). "As my kids got older - my son graduated from a Jewish high school, my daughter started Hebrew school - I just said, 'I think it's time,'" she says.
Abundance of Potential
Television is a competitive business, and every new season brings a challenge. This year is no different. CSI is going head-to-head with ABC's popular Grey's Anatomy on Thursday nights. In August, Tassler was expecting that CSI ratings might "take a ding."
Television also is venturing into new territory, making shows available to audiences in different ways. Last May, CBS launched innertube, a broadband channel offering programs on the Internet. Tassler doesn't expect such initiatives to siphon TV audiences - just the opposite. "The function of those other platforms is to drive audiences back to the original broadcast," she says. "There are so many articles speculating about whether people will feel like satisfied viewers watching on an iPod or cell phone. But television is still a communal experience. It's still that primary comfort food."
In fact, she is upbeat about the future of network television. For Tassler, at work in her office on that August day, the new season holds promise. "Every season we sort of reinvent ourselves. We start anew. You hear all new concepts, all new stories," she says, "and there's an abundance of potential."
