TUBE TALK Big changes may be afoot in the executive suites at CBS and NBC. CBS parent company Viacom spent much of last week denying reports that friction between chairman Sumner Redstone and his No. 2, president Mel Karmazin, would lead to Karmazin's resignation. Observers saw their rumored feud as stemming from little more than ego (Redstone had supposedly grumbled about how Karmazin has handled CBS's sales of commercial time), sparking the kind of turmoil whose unpredictability depresses stock prices. Board members reportedly told the two to kiss and make up last week. Still, the New York Times reported that Redstone would not renew Karmazin's contract when it expires at the end of 2003, leading Viacom to issue a denial that any decision on Karmazin's future had been made or would be made befoe the end of this year.
At NBC, West Coast president Scott Sassa is the one with the uncertain future. Both the New York Times and New York Post have reported that he'll leave by June, though neither Sassa nor NBC have commented. Sassa has taken a back seat over the last year to the more media-omnipresent NBC entertainment president Jeff Zucker, who has taken credit for recent successes like ''Fear Factor'' and ''Scrubs'' while sloughing off criticism for failures like ''Inside Schwartz'' and ''Emeril.'' Aside from taking the flak for NBC's delay in jumping on the reality-show bandwagon and more recently for its failure to get Carson Daly to sign a contract before his late-night show premiered last month (leading to an embarrassing one-day delay of the much-hyped debut at the last minute), Sassa has kept a lower profile than Zucker. Even if he leaves in June, he's still got some unglamorous but necessary behind-the-scenes tasks to accomplish first: negotiating new deals for the ''Friends'' cast and for Conan O'Brien.
Speaking of ''Friends,'' the six stars' reported asking price to stay on for a ninth season is as much as $1.25 million per actor per episode. (According to a recent USA Today report, the actors turned down an offer of $800,000 per show, which is about what Ray Romano earns for ''Everybody Loves Raymond.'') A $1.25 million paycheck would be $500,000 more than each Friend earns now, and it would raise the cost of a season to north of $150 million. That would make it the most expensive sitcom in history, although syndication rights should help it zoom past ''Seinfeld'' to make ''Friends'' the most lucrative show in history as well....
The St. Louis Rams weren't the only ones Sunday night who didn't do as well as expected. Early Nielsen numbers show that Fox's Super Bowl XXXVI telecast averaged 86.8 million viewers, only about 2.5 million more than watched last year's championship on CBS, and less than the 87.9 million who watched the far less competitive match between the New England Patriots and the Green Bay Packers on Fox's Super Bowl broadcast in 1997. Thanks to a lengthy 42-minute post-game show, the hour-long ''Malcolm in the Middle'' episode that followed didn't start until nearly 11 p.m. EST and pulled in only 21.5 million viewers. That's the series' biggest audience ever, but far less than the 45.4 million who watched the post-Super Bowl premiere of ''Survivor'' last year. Still, Fox is taking pride in the estimates that as many as 132 million people watched at least some of the game, and that U2's patriotic halftime show drew 82.9 million viewers, while NBC's shamelessly pandering alternative, the Playboy playmate episode of ''Fear Factor,'' drew only 11.4 million.
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