NEW YORK, May 19
Chris Rock ought to kill "Joey" this fall.
UPN has moved "Smackdown!" from Thursday to Friday night to put four sitcoms on Thursday from 8 to 10 p.m. Most notably, a new comedy series from Chris Rock.
One way or the other, Leslie Moonves is going to wipe out NBC's Thursday night.
As co-president and co-COO of Viacom and chairman of CBS, Moonves oversees both CBS and UPN broadcast networks, which gives him two avenues of attack. And going after NBC's Thursday is not just a hobby for Moonves; it's a mission.
He can't stop talking about NBC, even when it is going to finish the television season in fourth place among the 18- to 49-year-olds it targets, while CBS will finish first among regular programs.
On Wednesday, advertisers sat through an hour of CBS's new-schedule presentation at Carnegie Hall before anyone on stage even mentioned one of the network's new series, because it took Moonves that long to get through all his prepared bits bashing NBC and NBC Universal Television Group President Jeff Zucker. (See the cast member of Broadway hit "Avenue Q" on stage with a Zucker puppet, singing "It Sucks to Be Me"; see Moonves digitally inserted into the flick "Million Dollar Baby," socking a punching bag that looks like Zucker, then deadpanning, "now I know what a Zucker punch is.")
As head of CBS, Moonves already brought NBC's Thursday to its knees with a lineup of hour-long series that includes "Survivor," "CSI" and "Without a Trace."
Now, he has Chris Rock, one of the country's hottest comics, locked and loaded on UPN's Thursday night.
The single-camera show, created by Rock, looks back at his childhood. There's no laugh track and Rock does a voiceover. Clips got a gut-busting reaction Thursday morning from hundreds of advertising execs during UPN's announcement of its prime-time slate at Madison Square Garden.
(This week each of the broadcast networks rolled out its fall prime-time plans for advertisers during what's commonly referred to as Upfront Week, when advertisers commit to buying time "upfront" on series.)
Rock came out to sell the show, called "Everybody Hates Chris," which he acknowledged is a kind of middle-finger homage to CBS's outgoing "Everybody Loves Raymond" -- this season's most watched comedy series.
