Jonathan Storm: New boss, high hopes at NBC

Inquirer television critic Jonathan Storm is reporting from the television critics' press tour in Beverly Hills, Calif.

Repeating the buzzword excitement what seemed like a hundred times, new NBC Entertainment chairman Bob Greenblatt told TV critics at their annual summer meeting Monday that his goal this season was to program "original, attention-getting, high-quality" series.

In its first fall since being bought by Comcast, the network, which has languished perennially in fourth place in the ratings, has a trio of new dramas that have nothing in common thematically, but, Greenblatt hopes, qualify under all three of those adjectives.

There are three new sitcoms, too.

He's not expecting instant success. "Hopefully," he said, "we'll have the patience . . . to rebalance the network with scripted shows that become long-lasting hits."

Most controversial is the return-to-the-'60s The Playboy Club, which Community and Talk Soup star Joel McHale, who did a little stand-up warm-up for the executive, described as "Mad Men with boobs."

Don't focus so much on that, said Greenblatt. "It's a fun, energized soap opera."

Also on tap:

Grimm, in which a cop discovers he's descended from the real Brothers Grimm and has to deal with all the awful fairy-tale villains, who are also real and still awful, hiding in human camouflage that only he can see past. In the first episode, he runs up against the Big Bad Wolf, who is still attacking girls in red hoodies.

Prime Suspect, in which Maria Belo takes on the Helen Mirren role in a remake of the gritty British detective show, set in New York.

The three comedies:

Free Agents stars Hank Azaria and Kathryn Hahn as newly single office mates tap-dancing around romance.

Up All Night stars Christina Applegate and Will Arnett as new parents.

Whitney stars Penn grad Whitney Cummings and Chris D'Elia as longtime lovers seeking to heat up their relationship.

The shows were all born before Greenblatt left Showtime, where he had worked seven years, boosting its subscription base by about 50 percent with such series as Weeds, Dexter, The Tudors, and Nurse Jackie, to join NBC, but, he said, he was deeply involved in selecting and developing them for air.

Coming in winter are two even more demanding dramas in which he has been involved from the start. One, Awake, follows a man who lives in two different realities, which Greenblatt acknowledged had some of the trappings of a niche-audience cable show.

Greenblatt brought the other, Smash, over from his former employer. It's one of the new season's most ambitious broadcast series, about a Broadway production of a Marilyn Monroe biography, and, more than any of the new series, could ignite the kind of pop-culture fire that NBC needs.

"I certainly don't want to change NBC into Showtime," he said, "but I do want to bring the kind of creativity we had there into a broader arena."

Reality is still king of the beaten-down country that is NBC. Greenblatt noted that The Voice was the highest-rated new show last season on any network and confirmed that its second-season premiere will come in the coveted post-Super Bowl spot Feb. 5. Smash will premiere a day later, after a two-hour installment of The Voice.

Greenblatt joked that as the federal government worked on raising its debt limit, he had been working the last six months to get Comcast executive vice president Steve Burke, who is CEO of NBC/Universal, to raise his debt ceiling for the network.

He said he felt that General Electric Corp., NBC's former owners, had a sense that the broadcast business was shrinking and ran the company to manage the decline.

On the other hand, Comcast, he said, is excited about its new network and production businesses. "They have a desire to invest," he said, "and be patient so the investment will pay off. They are really interested in the venerable NBC institution and raising it back up."