NBC War Stories, Pelosi's Successor, & the Return of the Smiths
Welcome back to The Daily Courant. Here's a look at what's new at Puck:
First up, William D. Cohan looks back at Jeff Zucker's early years running NBCU in search of clues as to what the hyper-connected, recently deposed media executive will do next. (There's always the Smiths.)
Plus, below the fold: Teddy Schleifer handicaps the race to succeed Nancy Pelosi in San Francisco—including the rising odds of a nepotism scandal.
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Media and business gossips are already speculating about Jeff Zucker’s next move once the CNN imbroglio dies down. Zucker’s tenure atop NBCU may provide some clues. Amid all the extraordinary sturm und drang surrounding last week’s unceremonious defenestration of Jeff Zucker, it’s useful to remember that he has long been a source of fascination, envy, and schadenfreude. In 1993, nearly seven years after they graduated together from Harvard, my friend Michael Hirschorn, now an Emmy-award winning film producer, wrote a lengthy feature in Esquire, Zuck and Me, about his former classmate, then the 28-year-old executive producer of Today. “Jeff Zucker is the most successful person I know,” Hirschorn wrote. “...He looms as a living infomercial for what pure will to power will score you in the modern world.”
Nearly eight years later, writing in New York, Michael Wolff also weighed in on the topic of Zucker, then 35 and the survivor, by then, of two bouts of cancer. Zucker had just been named to head up the entertainment side of NBC, in Los Angeles, after his highly profitable stint running Today in New York. (Wolff estimated that the program made $500 million a year in profit for NBC.) In his inimitable way, Wolff described Zucker as “the boy genius of post-decline TV,” as “indisputably the most successful man in television,” and possibly “the only successful man in television.” He also insinuated that he was a detail-loving micro-manager whose talent and managerial skills engendered a nearly head-spinning loyalty among his colleagues.
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FOUR STORIES WE'RE TALKING ABOUT 
Now that Zucker is out, most people seem to think that Cuomo has lost his leverage. But the legal drama with CNN isn't so simple. MATTHEW BELLONI 
With Republicans expected to retake the House in November, could Pelosi’s congressional seat become a family dynasty? TEDDY SCHLEIFER 
Hollywood’s new and diminished definition of success is perhaps the most difficult and debated question of the streaming era. MATT BELLONI 
The inside conversation on Wall Street about Warner’s CNN headache, AMC’s meme-bond offering, and Dimon’s dream job. WILLIAM D. COHAN 
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