Jeff Zucker
Newsmakers of the week
More exits from Montreal’s political stage, the Pope tweets, and hockey fans finally catch a break
Showbiz executives fail upward
Jaime Weinman on the fall and rise of Jeff Zucker
Late night civil war
Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien have become a proxy for two different viewpoints in a divided country
Failing Upward
Jeff Zucker is a strangely fascinating figure. He’s like one of those baseball managers — Chuck Tanner, or someone like that — who takes a first-place team to the cellar, without damaging his reputation or his ability to get work. One of the running themes in the NBC saga is that Zucker has somehow managed to evade blame for taking a first-place network to last place, even though it’s directly attributable to his disastrous development record in the early ’00s, along with his lack of a strategy for dealing with the end of NBC’s 90s hits.