Network programming chiefs typically are glib, self-assured guys who can rattle on about demographics or development deals even when the sky is falling. ABC Entertainment president Jamie Tarses, by contrast, looked a little battered during an interview last week, taking long, contemplative pauses before answering even seemingly simple questions. There was the weight of the world in those pauses--or, just as burdensome, the weight of a relentless Hollywood lobbying campaign against her, a stream of rumors that after a season of dismal ratings, she'll soon be out of a job.
"It has been stressful," Tarses acknowledged, scrunched into a leather chair behind the desk in her spartan temporary office at ABC headquarters in New York City. After a siege of near all-nighters to finalize the fall schedule, the fine-boned, soft-spoken programmer was clearly tired, not to say beleaguered. "I don't want to seem self-pitying. But it seems to me that rarely has a week gone by since I've taken the job that I haven't been attacked for one thing or another somewhere in the press. There are a lot of people bent on seeing me fail."
The very public ordeal of Jamie Tarses is a cautionary tale that could play out only in Hollywood, where bright young executives are thrust from gotta-have-her to you're-outta-here without pausing at that crucial intermediary stop: Who is Jamie Tarses, and what has she done to deserve this? At 33, she's the youngest person--and the first woman--ever to run the entertainment division of one of the Big Three networks. Nearly a year ago, ABC hired her away from NBC, where she had gained fame for overseeing the development of such hits as Friends and Mad About You--just the sort of young, hip programmer who might be able to revitalize a struggling network with an impatient new corporate parent, the Walt Disney Co.
Yet she ran into trouble even before she got the job, when word leaked out that in trying to extricate herself from her contract at NBC, she had raised allegations of sexual harassment against West Coast president Don Ohlmeyer. (Ohlmeyer denies the charges; Tarses has refused to comment on them.) Since joining ABC last June, she has weathered an almost nonstop run of bad-ratings news. ABC dropped even further into third place this past season, losing a startling 13% of its audience in the space of just a year. (Over the same period, the four broadcast networks collectively lost 6% of their audience, largely because of competition from cable.)
It is unfair to blame Tarses for ABC's bad season, since virtually all the shows the network aired were in the works before she arrived. Still, that hasn't stopped the Hollywood boo birds. She has been criticized for everything from poor scheduling during the May sweeps to giving only grudging approval to the network's one mid-season success, the Dan Aykroyd sitcom Soul Man. (Tarses admits she had problems with a first draft of the script but insists she was a solid backer of the show by the time it was finished.)