Ben Gilbert: observation

Transcript context

…Totally. One of the things, though, that he realizes and leads to him being able to succeed is there is one commonality, which is it’s all about the stories. If you tell a great story, you’re probably going to succeed. Bob really leans on the people around him to help him learn the business and he has a very low ego about it, which is one of his hallmarks, but he has a pretty good run. He greenlights Doogie Howser, which is a massive success for the network, Twin Peaks, which ends up being quite controversial and Bob and the company probably make the wrong decision to cancel it, but a massive risk putting a dark drama on network television. The way to think about what Bob’s doing here is he knows that he’s put in there for a reason. He has to revamp this group a little bit. He knows that he’s not a typical Hollywood guy, so he can’t just go and pretend to be one, so what he’s trying to basically a flank attack, like, “I have to take a different approach to doing this. I have to zig when other people are zagging, and what do I do? Greenlight very nontraditional content, go with my gut, and take some risks on stuff that other people probably wouldn’t put on the air.” Yeah. Well, It’s a balance. It is that outsider perspective and the willingness to take risks, that we’re going to come up again, and again, and again in this episode, but he also does his homework. He doesn’t just ride in and be like, “We’re doing things my way.” He really, really trust the people around him and says, “I’m not from this industry. I respect you all as creators, I want to learn from you, and let’s think about what are some given norms in our industry that maybe aren’t right, that we should consider challenging?” Twin Peaks is a great example of that. NYPD Blue he launches. Roseanne is another great example of that. The Roseanne Show becomes very successful, the controversy with the reboot later more recently, but that all goes really well, and in 1992 Bob gets promoted by Tom and Dan to become president of all of ABC—sports, news, entertainment—all reporting up to Bob. The rest of Capital Cities have their own managers for. And then, like we said in 1994, Dan Burke retires and Tom says, “Bob...” Bob just recently, two years before, become president of ABC, says, “I don’t know that I’m ready to come in and run Capital Cities with you,” and Tom says, “Nope. You don’t have a choice. You got to come in. You’re my COO. You’re running all Capital Cities with me.” ESPN at this point time is, again real quick like we covered in that episode, it’s clear that this is going to be a multi not just billion dollar business, but tens of billions of dollars of business in the future. Enter Disney. Right after Bob becomes COO of Capital Cities……

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