Inside ER's Record $13M-Per-Episode NBC Deal — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- NBC agreed to pay Warner Bros. $13 million per episode for ER in 1998—totaling $286 million annually for 22 episodes—after initially paying roughly $3 million per episode when the show launched in 1994
- Leslie Moonves, then CBS entertainment president, tried to poach ER with an offer he pegged at $12 million per episode, which Bob Daly said 'shifted the dynamics' and forced NBC into the deal
- Warner Bros. Chairman Bob Daly extracted two conditions he said 'never been put on a television show': ER must remain locked in NBC's Thursday 10 p.m. slot, and NBC surrendered all creative control over the show's talent
- George Clooney, Julianna Margulies, Noah Wyle, Eriq La Salle, and Anthony Edwards each received $1 million checks from the windfall, while Laura Innes, Gloria Reuben, and Alex Kingston each got $500,000
- Executive producers John Wells, Michael Crichton, and Steven Spielberg pooled $6 million of their profit participation and gave it to ER's crew, prompting one editor to tell Jack Orman, 'I can buy a house now'
- Jerry Seinfeld's December 1997 call to NBC West Coast president Don Ohlmeyer announcing he wanted to end the show 'shifted the dynamics,' per Ohlmeyer, making NBC more desperate to lock down ER
- Warren Littlefield, NBC's former entertainment president, said the network had 'made a billion dollars before the renegotiation began'—yet still had to surrender unprecedented contract terms
Why it matters: The ER renegotiation shows how a serialized drama becomes a network's biggest profit center and biggest liability once the original contract expires: NBC had been netting roughly $500 million annually from ER yet still conceded conditions—fixed timeslot and full talent control—that Daly himself said 'never been put on a television show.' When a hit becomes a rental rather than an owned one, the studio captures nearly all the upside on the back end.
Ask SkimNews
