NBC

LOS ANGELES -- A week of wild network spending continued yesterday with NBC agreeing to pay Warner Bros. Television a record $13 million an episode for the rights to air "ER" through the 2000-2001 television season.The ensemble drama about a hospital emergency room has been the most popular show on television the past three seasons. And with NBC losing high-rated "Seinfeld" and rights to carry professional football games, the network had little choice but to pay the price: $286 million a year for the rights to 22 episodes, which is more than 6 1/2 times the $1.9 million per episode it now pays.

Over the past three decades, some of the greatest moments in pro football history have aired on NBC.From the New York Jets' startling upset of the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III, to the Dolphins' dramatic overtime win over Kansas City on Christmas Day in the 1971 playoffs, to perhaps the greatest game in league history, the 1981 AFC divisional playoff match between San Diego and Miami, when a gimpy Kellen Winslow seemingly willed San Diego to a 41-38...

LOS ANGELES -- If money changes everything, as the saying goes, how will the unprecedented $13 million an episode that NBC agreed to pay for the hit series "ER" alter television?That's the question being asked by almost everyone here in the network and television production community, the day after NBC and Warner Bros. Television, which owns "ER," announced a deal worth $858 million over the next three years.The math is staggering. NBC will pay Warner Bros. $286 million a year for the right to air 22 episodes of the medical drama each season, starting next fall and continuing through the 2000-2001 television season.

Is there a person in America who could claim to be honestly surprised that NBC would sever its ties to Marv Albert after his guilty plea yesterday in an Arlington, Va., courtroom to assault and battery charges?How could television executives, who are as concerned with image and public perception as any people in society, have allowed Albert, one of NBC's most visible sports announcers, to go back on the air, particularly after Wednesday's proceedings -- during which a woman testified that Albert had bitten her, lending authenticity to the story of his original accuser, who claimed that Albert had bitten her and forced her to have sex?

"Seinfeld," the most popular television comedy of the 1990s and the centerpiece of the most profitable night in television history, will stop production at the end of this season, Jerry Seinfeld, the show's creator and star, said yesterday.The loss of "Seinfeld," which made the country laugh at the soup Nazi, close-talkers, chip double-dippers and loaves of marble rye is a serious blow to NBC, which has already seen its prime-time strength begin to weaken this season.The show has anchored NBC's big Thursday night since 1993, leading the network to its No. 1 position and to record-making profits, approaching $1 billion this year.

What a touching milieu was to be presented Sunday during NBC's NFL pre-game show when Jim "Warrior Quarterback" Harbaugh and Jim Kelly, he of the armor-piercing tongue, kissed and made nice before the nation.There were just two problems with the scene. The first was that Harbaugh -- who broke a bone in his right hand after supposedly taking a poke at Kelly the weekend before for remarks the former Buffalo quarterback-turned-commentator made about Harbaugh's toughness -- had the good sense not to show up for the staged event.

The end of "Seinfeld" means more than just the loss of a great sitcom for NBC.It marks the end of a brilliant programming strategy -- forged in the early 1980s by NBC's programming director Brandon Tartikoff and his boss, NBC chairman Grant Tinker -- that made NBC billions of dollars as America's favorite prime-time network.NBC has been riding that train for more than a decade, with "Seinfeld" as its engine since 1993. But, with Jerry Seinfeld's decision this week to end the series come May, it looks as if that era of golden comedy programming and ratings dominance could be coming to end."

We'll know later tonight whether Carl Lewis will get his 10th official gold medal, which would be an Olympic record, but whether he does or not, Lewis already has copped the award for these Games for the most shameless manipulation of the media.After winning a surprise gold earlier this week in the long jump, Lewis immediately began a disingenuous campaign to get onto the 4x100 meter relay team tonight, in spite of the fact that he ran last in the Olympic trials and wouldn't participate in a pre-Olympic camp.

So, let's say, you've drifted home from the late showing of "Independence Day" next Monday and you missed NBC's telecast of the finals of the women's 400-meter freestyle swimming race at the Olympics.No problem, you figure. You'll just catch the highlights on the late news that night on channels 45, 2 or 13, right?Wrong.NBC's $456 million purchase of the American television rights to the Summer Olympics means that, unless you're willing to stay up late or to wait until the next day, it will be impossible to see same-day footage of the Games anywhere but NBC, which in Baltimore means Channel 11."

In a provocative interview in the current New Yorker, NBC Sports researcher Nicholas Schiavone reveals that the old "nature vs. nurture" argument is what fuels the network's Olympics coverage.In more than 10,000 interviews over six years that helped NBC mold the kind of coverage people want, the network found that while what Schiavone considers the three elements of human nature -- "think, feel, do" -- apply to both sexes, men and women use them in different ways."I think it's partly the genetic code, but I think that society also encourages the two different perspectives, because they are complementary -- the emotional dimension and the rational dimension," said Schiavone.

Looking through the sports media notebook while wondering when The Sun's Beijing correspondents are going to get an interview with General Tso: * Each time Michael Phelps gets near any water, NBC wants to be there. The network has announced plans for a reality series, Two Parts Hydrogen, One Part Oxygen, All Parts Phelps, featuring his encounters not only in the practice pool but also with showers, baths, sprinklers and even spilled glasses of water by clumsy waiters. No? What NBC really has announced is the network will carry swimming's world championships in Rome next year and the U.S. championships in 2009 through 2011.

Since the first telecast in 1960, the Olympics have been one of television's biggest productions, attracting tens of millions of viewers and making huge profits for the network that owned broadcast rights. But with audiences hopelessly fragmented, analysts are wondering whether there are any events large enough to rally viewers of all ages to watch a contest on TV in real time as the nation once did when the U.S. hockey team beat the Russians. NBC faces a host of major challenges as it prepares to offer a record 3,600 hours of coverage of the Beijing Olympics starting Friday.

Laying up more sports media notes while being thankful that no one tries to throttle me while I'm typing the way opposing players do to LeBron James when he drives to the basket: NBC really, really wants to see someone hit the ball into the water this weekend at The Players Championship (tomorrow and Sunday, 2 p.m., on WBAL/Channel 11 and WRC/Channel 4). How much? At a typical hole, the network would deploy four microphones. For No. 17 at TPC Sawgrass, with its famous island green, NBC has installed 21 microphones, including 15 designated as "Splash Mics," along with 10 cameras.

BLACKSBURG, Va. -- Aiming two black handguns at the camera and muttering rambling accusations, the college student who killed 32 people on the Virginia Tech campus Monday before killing himself made sure that his voice would be heard after the worst mass shooting in the nation's history. "This didn't have to happen," Cho Seung-Hui, 23, said in one clip from what anchorman Brian Williams described as a "multimedia manifesto" mailed to NBC News in the two hours between the bursts of gunfire that morning.

Good morning--NHL--Wow, a TV deal extension with NBC. Hold it, NBC carries hockey?

The Winter Olympics is almost over. But you knew that, because Baltimore rates in the top quarter of the nation's television markets for viewing NBC's prime-time Turin Games coverage. If you have friends in Washington, Atlanta or Houston, though, you may want to pass the news along, because they're likely not watching. Before the flame goes out and the NBC guys pack up their Armani, let's hand out a few of those doughnut-shaped (or given that the Games are in Italy, should that be zeppole-shaped?

A feature in which Sun writers and critics sound off about the movies. Thanksgiving is over, so it's time to start gearing up for Christmas. Which means, of course, that It's a Wonderful Life will be showing up on TV soon. It wasn't long ago that the 1946 movie - starring Jimmy Stewart as a small-town banker so despondent one Christmas Eve that he contemplates suicide, only to be stopped by an apprentice angel struggling to earn his wings - seemed to air nearly every day. Since the film had fallen into the public domain, any station could air it, whenever it wanted.

NEW YORK - When ABC's Peter Jennings was forced to leave the anchor chair in April to seek treatment for lung cancer, the already topsy-turvy world of network evening news seemed poised for more chaos. Dan Rather had retired from the CBS Evening News a month earlier, replaced temporarily by Bob Schieffer. And NBC had just gone through its own transition, when Brian Williams succeeded Tom Brokaw in December. The shift at ABC was more jarring. After announcing his diagnosis, Jennings immediately took a leave to begin chemotherapy.

Last March, NBC President Jeff Zucker stood on the Los Angeles set of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno after a meeting with advertisers and lamented the network's "disappointing season." This week, he gets his chance to convince them that next season won't be a repeat. Tomorrow in New York, Zucker will present the new series that he has hand-picked to help NBC climb back from fourth place in television rankings among young viewers: "We really need a home run," Zucker, 40, said. "We are missing the one breakout hit that will make the difference."

This is how it begins: Jerry Seinfeld and George Costanza sitting in a coffee shop talking about buttons. "That button is in the worst possible spot," Jerry tells George, who's wearing a purple shirt with a second button so high it appears to be choking him. "The second button literally makes or breaks the shirt. Look at it. It's too high. It's in no man's land. You look like you're living with your mother." That was it - the essence of the show that would become famous for being about nothing - so perhaps it's no wonder that NBC didn't have much faith at the beginning.