It's Standard Equipment For Any TV-programming whiz: a giant scheduling board, with magnets bearing names of all prime-time shows. Execs spend hours moving magnets from slot to slot in search of the perfect line-up. Lately it seems that the brass at Disney, particularly president Robert Iger, could use a second board to keep track of the ever-changing lineup of bosses at Disney's ABC network. Last week Iger replaced the entire starring cast at fourth-ranked ABC with executives from Disney's successful cable- and TV-production units, the fourth teamsince Disney acquired ABC in l996. Yet many believe the problem isn't with ABC's prime-time lineup but with Disney's. The network's woes are am-munition for angry shareholders who want to unseat Disney CEO Michael Eisner. Cable giant Comcast Corp., which in February made a bid for Dis- ney, is telling Wall Street it can do a better job of running ABC. Eisner is wounded—stripped of his chairmanship last month—and Disney is promising shareholders an earnings jump of more than 40 percent this year. So the pressure is on Iger to take a cue from "Extreme Makeover," a rare ABC hit, and perform radical surgery on the network, which some analysts say lost Disney nearly $100 million in the most recent quarter alone.
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