Prime-Time Go Time

But McPherson, the man whose job depends on the new programs, won't even be at the big show in Los Angeles. At least not in person. He'll beam in via satellite from Paris as he's finishing his honeymoon, a move that may turn out to be confident -- or cavalier. In a recent interview in New York, McPherson, 39, counseled patience about ABC's performance, betraying no signs of sweating investor pressure.

"We haven't even set our five-year plan yet," said McPherson, a former Wall Street portfolio manager. "We're going to do our best to turn around prime. If that leads to profitability or break-even, that's great. We'll know more in the coming months when Anne and I have a chance to look at the financials and make sure we've got the money we need to turn prime around."

It's a deep hole to climb out of. In 2003, the ABC network reported an increase of $196 million in revenue compared with 2002, but that followed a disastrous 2002, during which the network suffered an $881 million revenue drop from the year before.

How exactly the network will go from black-and-blue to into the black is unclear. The facile answer, of course, is: Put hit shows on the air. But a line of executives stretching back years has found the task to be a perplexing puzzle.

McPherson and Sweeney stepped in just as the next season's pilots were being finished. Right away, they changed the way ABC picked prime-time shows. In the past, pilots had been viewed by a limited number of executives -- Eisner, Iger and top ABC brass. This year, McPherson and Sweeney flung open the process for viewing the 26 pilots, filling 15 screening rooms in Burbank during the first two weeks of May with all manner of company employees and soliciting their feedback.

At the end, each of ABC's division heads handed McPherson a dream schedule -- which shows they'd like to see and which night they should air. In the end, McPherson said, he and Sweeney chose the lineup.

"Did Michael [Eisner] and Bob [Iger] weigh in?" McPherson said. "Absolutely. And we welcomed it." But in the end, he said, "You have to be a benevolent dictator and say, 'Here's what I want to go with.' "

At ABC, the dictators have had a boss ever since Disney bought the network: Eisner. At every network save perhaps CBS, programming executives feel the hand of their superiors on the prime-time lineup. But at ABC, Eisner and Iger are even more involved, said an executive with knowledge of ABC who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal. In the past, the two have read pilot scripts, picked which pilots will be made and selected which mini-series will air, the executive said.

Further, Eisner and Iger have lost confidence in some former ABC executives, leading the two to take more of a hand in ABC prime time, a role Iger would rather not have, the executive said.

Advertisers have expressed confidence in McPherson's plans for steady growth. For instance, ABC's fall schedule was assembled to try to pick winnable nights, McPherson said, not to put new shows up against rival powerhouses, such as "CSI" and "Law & Order."