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Vacation Robo-Post: What Does NBC Mean to You?

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One thing that has struck me before, and struck me again a few weeks ago when Ben Silverman stepped down from NBC, is how personally TV fans take NBC’s screw-ups—in a way they don’t seem to with any other broadcast network.

If CBS puts on a goofy reality show, people will mock; but when NBC makes I’m a Celebrity or Momma’s Boys, it’s a betrayal of its tradition. When ABC put on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire four nights a week, people liked it or they snarked; but at NBC, giving five nights to Jay Leno (and taking them from five potential dramas) is treated like dancing on Capt. Furillo’s grave.

(With Fox, by the way, it’s the opposite: it can put on Arrested Development and Firefly—only to cancel them, yes, but shows that the Big Three probably never would have aired—and people still see it as the Temptation Island network.)

I mean, I get it. NBC has a history of scripted landmark shows, going from The West Wing back through Seinfeld and Cosby and Hill Street. But also I don’t get it: I get attached to shows, not to the networks they air on. (Cable networks are different, in the sense that you watch “HGTV” as much as you watch any particular show.)  

Is there some part of you that gets especially cheesed when NBC blows it? Do you not care? (Do you expect it, at this point?) And if not, is there another network you feel is your network? (MyNetwork TV doesn’t count. That’s just the branding talking.)