Tinker in television : from General Sarnoff to General Electric
(Book)

Tinker in Television is a vivid account of how the broadcasting business really runs - from sound stage to executive suite - and how to run it successfully.

The only person ever to have managed both a television production company (MTM) and a major network (NBC), Grant Tinker is uniquely qualified to explain the conflicts and priorities that determine how television programs are produced and how network decisions are made. In Tinker in Television, the story of his life in the business, he takes a hard look at the heroes and villains responsible for what Americans have watched for more than forty years and indicates the changes that should be made. The book is similarly unsparing about Tinker's personal life, including his eighteen-year, ultimately failed marriage to Mary Tyler Moore.

Grant Tinker joined NBC's first executive training program in 1949, moved on to stints at Radio Free Europe and a Manhattan-based production company, and then worked in the television departments of McCann Erickson and Benton & Bowles, just as the big advertising agencies were taking over network programming. In an era when job-hopping was thought to be a career-killer, he thrived on almost constant motion, and his timing was excellent. After a second round at NBC as head of programs in the early 1960s, he joined Universal when the Hollywood studios were becoming the major players in program production.

Tinker not only had a knack for being where the action was; time and time again he made the action. In 1970, he gave up his comfortable corporate post to start a production company, MTM Enterprises, with Mary Tyler Moore. Tinker quickly earned a reputation for spotting and nurturing talent - including Allan Burns, James Brooks, Steven Bochco, Gary David Goldberg, and Bruce Paltrow - and for creating an environment from which their best work could emerge. The success of programs such as Mary Tyler Moore, Lou Grant, and Hill Street Blues made MTM the stuff of television legend and disproved the notion that quality programming and high ratings are mutually exclusive.

In 1981, Tinker left MTM at the peak of its success to try something new and harder - saving NBC, which had fallen into an abyss of low profits and dismal programming. When he left five years later, NBC's profits had increased tenfold and its programs - including The Cosby Show, St. Elsewhere, and Cheers - were winning more Emmys than ABC and CBS combined. For all his success and self-deprecation, Tinker is a complicated character, restless and perpetually unfulfilled. His story unfolds alongside that of the powerful medium in which he came of age and made a spectacular career.