Don and Ann Ballinger have been married for 50 years. For 46 of them, they haven't said a word to each other. That, at least, is the "true" story being re-enacted for the TV cameras on this particular afternoon in a rented house near Orlando, Florida.
"Louis, will you please tell your father to pass the pastry?" says the actress playing Ann, seated at the dining-room table. Louis, their middle-age son, obliges: "Dad, will you please pass the pastries to Mom?" Dad picks up the pastry dish and, smiling, gently places it next to his wife.
Brandon Tartikoff watches from a cramped seat against the window. Wearing ! Reeboks, an open sport shirt and a Boris-and-Natasha wristwatch, he is an easygoing but focused presence. After a few rehearsals of the scene, he huddles quietly with director Hannah Hempstead. For the next run-through, the husband picks up the pastry tray without a smile and drops it abruptly in front of his wife.
"If he just plops it down," says Tartikoff, "we'll get a laugh."
They'd better. The show, Weekly World News (based on the supermarket tabloid of the same name), teeters precariously between sensationalism and spoof. It is one of those high-concept, high-wire acts that Tartikoff was known for at NBC, like the "MTV Cops" that eventually became Miami Vice (big hit), or the crime fighter who could transform himself into a jungle beast in Manimal (big bomb). Weekly World News, a proposed series for CBS that will air for two episodes this spring, is as good a show as any to serve notice to the TV world that Brandon Tartikoff is back.
Few doubted he would return. As NBC Entertainment president for 11 1/2 years, Tartikoff was probably the most influential and broadly successful TV programmer of the 1980s. He guided NBC from last to first in the ratings, overseeing such hits as The Cosby Show, The A-Team, Cheers and L.A. Law. Later he was named chairman of Paramount Pictures, but he abruptly resigned in October 1992 after just 18 months on the job. The reasons, he insists, were strictly personal: on New Year's Day 1991 he and his daughter had been severely injured in a car accident near Lake Tahoe. Tartikoff, who sustained a broken pelvis, recovered fully, but Calla, then 8, suffered brain damage. Tartikoff and his wife Lilly moved with her to New Orleans for rehabilitative therapy, and Tartikoff said he needed to be with the family full time.
Away from the Hollywood power-breakfast scene, Tartikoff struck out on his own road to recovery. First he produced shows for New Orleans TV, among them a quiz program called N.O. It Alls, which he hopes to adapt for other cities. As his daughter's condition has improved, he has plunged back into his old world, this time as seller rather than buyer. "Anybody who has been in a position of power for 14 years," he observes, "says no far more often than he gets to say yes. And people remember those nos. I'm sure there are a lot of people who would be glad to see me under an overpass with a cardboard sign that says, WILL CREATE SHOWS FOR FOOD."