Early one June afternoon, Jeff Zucker tours the wreckage of a fire that destroyed a portion of the Universal Studios back lot a few days earlier. Tens of thousands of melted, twisted, and charred videocassettes and 35-­millimeter reels lay amid the cindered ruins, the black and brown magnetic tape unspooled and twisted. It is all that remains of a vault that once housed part of Universal Studios’ vast collection.

Zucker, the C.E.O. and president of NBC Universal, is visiting the site for the first time, accompanied by one of his top lieutenants, Universal Studios chief Ron Meyer. They stroll down what used to be the set of a New York street commonly used in television productions, their two pairs of brown loafers squishing through the ashy debris. The metaphor all around them is inescapable: all that analog tape, piled waist-high, partially burned but still fluttering—a ghastly tribute to a business that had been dying long before—a TV graveyard. (View slideshow.)

But Zucker does not dwell on the past. Looking at the mountains of burned videotape behind them, Zucker, whose NBC network still largely depends on the kinds of prime-time shows that went up in smoke here, says, “It’s tragic.”

It is a dutiful remark, because in many ways, Zucker moved on a long time ago. Despite overseeing NBC, the network of Cheers, Seinfeld, and Friends, Zucker is relentlessly focused on the future. He is unsparingly harsh about the prospects for broadcast television—gloomier than any other TV executive out there. In his view, the era of growth in network TV, the period of the megahit, is over. Growing his business, then, means investing in cable, digital video, mobile—anything other than network TV.

In cable, Zucker has gone on a multibillion dollar acquisition spree, buying Oxygen last year for $925 million, the Weather Channel in July for $3.5 billion and, moving into the international markets, a $150 million stake in India’s fast-growing NDTV network this year.

In digital media, he acknowledges that nobody is sure how digital content will be displayed, viewed, and, most important, monetized. So he’s trying just about anything to see what sticks. In March, he partnered with Fox to provide NBC content for free on a video-streaming site called Hulu. And he’s experimenting with all sorts of new distribution channels, with screens of all sizes in unexpected places—spooning out a few minutes of NBC content to video displays on gas pumps and in the back of taxicabs.

As he scrambles to do all this and to prepare for NBC’s Olympics coverage, Zucker is in a vise. Just as he needs to spend his way out of network TV’s crisis, he’s facing pressure from above, as his bosses at General Electric are demanding that he keep costs down and produce higher profits. To cut costs, Zucker has dramatically reduced the number of pilots that NBC produces each season—a move that hasn’t gone over well in hidebound and spendthrift Hollywood.

Whether it’s because of the outside pressure from G.E. or his own internal drive to counter critics who say he’s risen too quickly, Zucker is clearly the fastest-moving mogul in television. He has taken the lead in articulating the fears of many other media executives and stating candidly that he is not sure what will work. “I would rather be honest about the realities of this business, whereas so many people want to just sweep that under the rug and perpetuate what has been,” Zucker says. “Look, we don’t know what’s gonna work. Predicting what the media world is gonna look like in eight years is incredibly daunting. I defy anybody to do that.”

With so many brilliant and would-be brilliant minds working overtime to come up with a solution to the woes of network television, it would be fitting and ironic if Jeff Zucker, the man dismissed by so many as a precocious, hypercompetitive interloper, turned out to be the one who succeeds. Fitting, because who else but an obsessive, driven insomniac would be willing to put in the hours and try all the angles until stumbling on the formula for turning his company, and perhaps the whole industry, around? Ironic, because how many times has he been written off? What’s more, in order to succeed, he may have to dismantle the very business that made him.