Transcription
Our salaries are fine, but you're making such massive profits in syndication. Profits of 3 to 4 million per show and in, in, you know, in to infinity, and you don't want to give us any of that. Okay.
In order for us to feel good about doing this show, I want to leave the most successful half hour in the history of television knowing that I never have to work again. That is what I require, or you can't have my services.
So, knowing what all the revenues were, what we would have made had they given us the syndication, what everybody was making up front, we said we tried to figure out what percentage of the success formula of the show were the three of us. And we came up with Jerry, Larry, the writers, us, and everything else, the, the wonderful guest players, you know, all the other stuff. Well, as 1/5th of that formula, we said, "Here's the number. A million an episode."
And >> And when you uttered that number, what did they say? >> They did what they should have done, which is laughed at us.
I also knew that it was detrimental to television if they made the deal with us. And it has proven to be detrimental. It is outrageous upfront money. Outrageous. It is bad for television. $13 million an episode for, er, a million dollars each to Paul Riser and Helen Hunt for a show that's number 25 to 30 in the ratings. These are bad prices.
You ask for that kind of money when you are producing the kind of profit revenue that we are producing. But we couldn't ask for it on that side, they wouldn't give it to us. So we had to take it out up front. And I personally feel that we damaged the economics of television and that NBC was foolish to give us what they gave.