ratings this season? -- are largely ignored," notes one TV exec.

One reason could be that Paul Lee, ABC Entertainment Group's genteel Brit president, maintains a low profile, and his misses -- there are many -- have not been as spectacular as, say, Greenblatt's megaflop Smash (snarky tweeters still were making Smash jokes Dec. 5 even as 18.5 million watched the Sound of Music telecast). Plus, NBC's Thursday night, middling as ever this season with Sean Saves the World and The Michael J. Fox Show, serves as a painful reminder of the block's fall from the boom years of Seinfeld, Friends and ER.

CBS, which celebrated its first season atop the demo heap in 20 years in 2013, indeed is down by the same measure as ABC this season. Butthe steady tenures of CBS Corp. president and CEO Leslie Moonves and entertainment chief Nina Tassler and what is regarded as the most defined brand in broadcast largely keeps them out of the debate. Fox entertainment chief Kevin Reilly is well-liked and is able to deflect the brunt of criticism for his network's dramatic drops (22 percent last season) to its ailing flagship American Idol.

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Some suggest ABC has received its own executive pass thanks to Disney's Iger. The parent company CEO appears to inspire an appreciation for the bigger picture he's trying to paint. Iger's sprawling TV strategy, after all, in many ways sets up ABC for a certain amount of failure. The network lost Monday Night Football in 2006 to Disney