NBC Finds a Winner in "The Voice" The cellphone of NBCUniversal's chief executive, Stephen B. Burke, rang early the morning of April 28 last year. Alan Wurtzel, the company's president of research, was so excited that he had trouble speaking. "We got a 5.1," he finally said. Mr. Burke was at the gym, and given the background noise, he figured he wasn't hearing correctly. "I said, we got a 5.1 in the key demographic," Mr. Wurtzel repeated, which meant that Nielsen estimated that 11.8 million viewers in the all-important 18-to-49 demographic had tuned in - a breakout number for a new show. Even though it was just 4:15 a.m. in Los Angeles, Mr. Burke called his newly anointed chairman of NBC Entertainment, Robert Greenblatt. "This is the best day since the birth of my last child," Mr. Burke said. It's probably hard to overstate how bad things were at NBC last spring, just months into Mr. Burke's tenure as head of NBC, the perennial last-place network and the butt of jokes even on NBC's own shows. Then, on April 27, a new reality singing competition, "The Voice," started on the network, drawing the 5.1 rating. The show returned to the network schedule this year on Feb. 5, right after the Super Bowl. This week "The Voice" emerged as the unlikely winner of its own reality competition. With a 6 rating, it displaced Fox's long-running "American Idol" as America's top-rated television series. There was no official celebration at NBC, but "if you were in 30 Rock, every person felt great that day," Mr. Burke told me this week, a reference to NBC's headquarters at Rockefeller Center. There was an electricity in the building. A change of the guard at the pinnacle of network television presents a rare opportunity - and poses some major challenges - for any network, but especially NBC, which has been so far behind for so long. If its success continues, "The Voice" could join legendary reality-show hits like "American Idol," which propelled Fox to its eight-year run as the nation's top-ranked network; "Survivor," which helped catapult CBS to the top and is now almost 12 years old; and "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" on ABC, which spawned the modern reality-show genre and was the top-ranked show in the 1999-2000 season. And "The Voice" may well determine history's judgment on Comcast's $30 billion 2011 acquisition of 51 percent of NBCUniversal's assets from General Electric and the stewardship of Mr. Burke, who championed the deal and was Comcast's chief operating officer before taking over at NBC. "This is the only the beginning," Mr. Burke said of the success of "The Voice." This is great, but we don't want to get ahead of ourselves. We need three or four more great shows. We're not going to move to second place, let alone first, just on this show. But it can be the beginning of a new era. I don't find the time to watch much TV, and at my age I'm hardly the target demographic. But I saw some snippets of last season's "The Voice" and a few weeks ago found myself on an exercise bike watching one of this season's episodes. My exercise program ended before the show did. But I found myself so engrossed that I kept pedaling until the show ended. On Monday, I tuned in. What I like most is that no one gets humiliated. Even the losers seem to find the experience exhilarating and come off the show vowing to work harder and do better. A struggling NBC had been looking for a rival to "American Idol" for years when NBC's former entertainment president, Jeff Gaspin, brought an intriguing new concept from the Dutch television producer John de Mol to Jeff Zucker, then NBC's chief executive, in 2009. NBC had been outbid by Fox for "The X-Factor," Simon Cowell's new "Idol" rival, which it had desperately wanted. But the new show had been a big hit in the Netherlands, and it came with a twist: celebrity judges who didn't see the contestants until their chairs swiveled around. In the Dutch version, the chairs were red. The catch was the cost: more than $2 million an episode. Mr. Zucker, acting largely on impulse, gave it the go-ahead. Mr. Zucker never saw a finished episode. In January last year, after the Comcast deal closed, Mr. Burke replaced Mr. Zucker and tapped Mr. Greenblatt, a former entertainment president at the Showtime cable network. "Bob called me and said, "The way to do this is bigger and better: bigger sets, better coaches, spend more money," " Mr. Burke recalled this week. At the time, spending more money was the last thing Mr. Burke wanted to hear. But "the show felt interesting, with very broad appeal," he said. And it was all we had between then and the fall. I figured this was our one chance. So I backed Bob and we bet big on it.