Hilarious, actually.
When was the last time a network executive had an original idea, I wonder.
They don't call them "suits" for nothing...
I worked on CBS's anniversary special in '78. The celebration went on for a week, with a special every night, ending with a three-hour epic on Saturday. The capper for that show was a wonderful monologue about past and future narrated by 'uncle Walt'. They'd hired Leonard Bernstein to do the music, and he came up with a score that was absolutely amazing, tracking the narration perfectly, full of swells at the crucial moment, just a special piece of work. I did the mix between the dialogue and music and played it for half a dozen folks, and every time they, and I choked up at the end. Major emotional moment.
So, a half dozen of the network suits showed up to view the piece, and I played it to them. There wasn't a dry eye in the house. Then, the senior executive in the room turned to the guy alongside him and said, 'what do you think?' That guy turned to the guy next to him and asked the same question, and at that point I realized two things:
1. The question was going down the line in reverse order by price of suit.
2. Nobody wanted to go on record as expressing an opinion, so they were going to dump it on the lowest ranking guy.
And.... sure enough... they got down to the guy who'd been in the mail room two weeks before, and he... after frantically looking around to see if there was somebody else he could pass the decision off to, finally said, 'I think the music's too loud'. Having gotten that crisis solved, they all trooped out.
And the show aired with Bernstein's music mixed as background instead of as a score. All the drama was lost, all the magic was lost, but somewhere an 'executive in charge of lunch fetching' was happy because they'd taken his suggestion and the rest of them were happy because they hadn't had to take the risk of expressing an opinion.
That's my suit story. Saw it happen a lot.