Keeping the Tartikoff Name on the Credits

Brandon Tartikoff died last year, but his company--and through it, the executive’s love affair with television--goes on.

On Aug. 12, roughly two weeks before the first anniversary of Tartikoff’s death from treatment complications related to Hodgkin’s disease, the Fox network will televise “Blade Squad”--a futuristic TV movie representing one of the longtime NBC Entertainment chief’s last pet projects.

“Blade Squad” came to fruition through the efforts of Tartikoff’s widow, Lilly, who against the counsel of business advisors decided to continue producing television series and movies with which her husband had been involved.

Recently, the H. Beale Co.--the independent production entity Brandon Tartikoff formed upon leaving New World Television and named after the crazed anchorman Howard Beale in the movie “Network”--entered into an exclusive arrangement to produce TV programs in conjunction with Warner Bros. Television.

The first to air will be “Blade Squad,” which is known in television circles as a “backdoor pilot,” meaning that if the movie scores solid ratings and Fox likes the finished product, a regular series could follow later in the season.

Though she paid tribute to her husband by seeing that project through, Tartikoff wasn’t prepared to stop there; rather, she opted to keep the production company afloat and become a producer herself.

“It was probably my way of not letting go of Brandon,” Tartikoff said in an interview, pointing out that she was “married to television” throughout her 15-year marriage to Tartikoff, who headed NBC’s entertainment division for more than a decade.

Her partner in the company is Kim Fleary, a former ABC Entertainment executive who helped shepherd such popular sitcoms as “Roseanne,” “Home Improvement” and “The Drew Carey Show” before leaving in a management shift two years ago. Fleary began serving as a consultant to H. Beale before Tartikoff’s death.

Friends remember Brandon Tartikoff working to sell projects practically until the day he died, pitching network executives from his hospital bed even when weakened by chemotherapy. His enthusiasm regarding the entertainment industry was such that doctors treating him sought to curtail his phone privileges, usually with little success.

Once they elected to keep the company going, Lilly Tartikoff and Fleary targeted the production of “Blade Squad” as a top priority to prove they were serious about their intentions.

“We sort of made it our mission to make sure that it got made,” said Fleary, who stressed in regard to Lilly, “This is not just a hobby for her.”

After her husband’s death, Tartikoff discovered a library he had left behind containing more than 300 ideas for TV programs.

“Some of them we had to throw away,” she said with a laugh, alluding to Tartikoff’s penchant for out-there concepts. Though his oft-cited scribbling of the words “MTV cops” eventually spawned the hit NBC series “Miami Vice,” Tartikoff also championed such high-profile failures as “Manimal” and “Misfits of Science”--programs Tartikoff himself continued to ridicule long after canceling them.

Still, Fleary said, the library contains “an awful lot of things that we can package and present” to networks. Projects currently in the works, fittingly, include “Beggars & Choosers,” a dark comedy set at a network entertainment division being developed for the pay channel Showtime. There’s also hope of reviving an ABC comedy series Tartikoff had been planning with film director Spike Lee.

Fleary described “Blade Squad” as “a huge undertaking,” the sort of high-risk venture Tartikoff loved. Set “five minutes in the future,” the premise centers on a youthful team of beat cops who, because of near-impenetrable urban gridlock, jet around on in-line skates because doing so gets them to places faster.

“Brandon was famous for high-concept ideas,” Lilly Tartikoff noted. “We were in New Orleans when he described ‘Blade Squad,’ and I said, ‘Brandon Tartikoff, you’re back!’ ”

It was initially developed with Sony, and that studio and others passed on the project before Warner Bros. entered the picture. Fleary was well-acquainted with executives at the studio’s TV division, and Lilly Tartikoff has worked with Jane Semel (the wife of Terry Semel, Warner Bros. co-chairman) on the Fire & Ice Ball, an annual cancer fund-raiser.

According to Warner Bros. Television President Tony Jonas, Lilly Tartikoff demonstrated throughout development and production stages that she is by no means a dilettante, displaying a passion for and knowledge of the arcane workings of the television business.

Yet beyond the mere business side of the deal, Jonas suggested there is “not a person in town who won’t smile” at the realization Tartikoff’s vision will live on through his company, given the respect and affection the executive commanded among his colleagues.

“Brandon had a lot of unbelievable ideas, and our business runs on ideas, big and small,” Jonas said.

Despite her involvement with the production company, Lilly Tartikoff intends to remain extremely active in various charitable and fund-raising endeavors, especially those dedicated to fighting cancer.

“I have this obsession: I just can’t stop trying to save ovaries and breasts,” she joked.

Before taking steps to perpetuate the TV operation, however, she said she “made sure I did have the time for the things Brandon wanted me to do, which were family things”--especially the upbringing of daughters Elisabeth, 3, and Calla, 15, who continues to make progress after being seriously injured in a car accident with her father in 1991.

Even with the other commitments occupying her time, Lilly Tartikoff said keeping her husband’s legacy alive was, in the final analysis, an easy decision.

As she put it, “I just couldn’t let go of this.”