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NBC has mopped up its late-night mess. The network now faces a more challenging task: rebuilding its evening hours after years of cost cuts and creative missteps.

NBC executives are saying they plan to spend at least 30% more than last year to develop TV series for the fall, and 20% more to market the shows, although they didn't attach a dollar figure to the estimate. The General Electric Co. network, which has seen its ratings and profit slide since 2005, is working on 18 to 20 pilot episodes for new shows, up from 11 last spring.

"Fixing it is crucial," NBC Universal Chief Executive Jeffrey Zucker said of NBC's prime evening hours in an interview this week. "We haven't been able to succeed in the last five years in doing that. That's become a real problem for us. And that's incredibly disappointing."

The possible new series include remakes of the 1970s private-eye show "The Rockford Files" and British crime drama "Prime Suspect," along with a show from "Lost" creator J.J. Abrams about a husband-and-wife team of CIA agents.

NBC hopes the bigger crop of possible series will give it more chances to find a handful that succeed. Whichever series it chooses to make would likely not air before fall.

The doubling down comes as NBC plans to end late-night comedian Jay Leno's brief stint during prime time on weeknights at 10 p.m. Eastern time. Mr. Zucker had publicly touted Mr. Leno's inexpensive show, which made its debut in September, as a clever two-fer: It kept Mr. Leno from jumping to a competing network last year, while cutting costs to cope with declining broadcast-TV viewership.

But Mr. Leno's low ratings upset local television stations, and Mr. Leno is now heading back to "The Tonight Show" at 11:35 p.m., displacing new host Conan O'Brien. The failed experiment became the butt of jokes and the fix was a costly one. Mr. O'Brien agreed Thursday to walk away from NBC, getting about $45 million for himself and his staff in the deal.

Mr. Zucker said putting Mr. Leno in prime time had been "the right call" at the time. "We tried to see if we could work on the economics of network television, and in the end it didn't work," Mr. Zucker said. "There's no shame in trying things. The only shame is in trying things and not acknowledging when they don't work. That would be the bigger mistake."

NBC's entertainment operations -- including prime-time, late night and its television production studio -- represent only about 5% of the profit at GE's NBC Universal unit, but Mr. Zucker said that the performance of its namesake reflects on the entire company.

Jeffrey Gaspin, a longtime NBC Universal executive who took charge of NBC's entertainment programming last summer, said the network had suffered from having its budget squeezed too much. "We as a management team made the decision we were going to invest more in cable than in broadcasting," said Mr. Gaspin, who also runs NBC Universal's stable of entertainment-cable networks. "I think we did that for too many years in a row. And we didn't generate enough hits. So now we're going to open the spigot a little bit and come up with more choices and hopefully have more hits as a result."

Messrs. Zucker and Gaspin are trying to revive NBC's evening shows at the same time as they prepare to navigate new office politics. Cable operator Comcast Corp. is hoping to complete an agreement it announced in December to take over NBC Universal from GE and minority owner Vivendi SA, in a deal that at its core represents an investment in content.

While Comcast executives have received updates from NBC on its plans, the cable operator hasn't played a role in the decision-making, according to people familiar with the situation.

The late-night debacle has shined a spotlight on Mr. Zucker, who has moved through various executives and strategies to fix NBC's prime time in the past few years.

In 2007, soon after becoming chief executive, he fired NBC's head programmer and replaced him with Ben Silverman, an energetic young producer behind some popular shows, only to let him go after two years of flops.

In 2008, NBC said it would abandon the traditional May presentation of new shows to advertisers, calling the shift "innovative" and "unprecedented." NBC announced last week that it would return to the old method so it could have enough time to select among its pilots.

Meanwhile, overall prime-time TV viewing on broadcast networks continues to decline. NBC trails slightly behind its three biggest rivals in viewer rankings among viewers ages 18 to 49, and is down 6.3% in that category this season compared to a year earlier, Nielsen Co. says.

"We have taken many bold swings in the last several years because we were struggling at NBC," Mr. Gaspin said. "Taking bold swings when we were struggling at NBC turned out to be a little too high a hill to climb."

Marc Guggenheim, a TV producer who recently worked on ABC's "Flash Forward," said there could be an opportunity for NBC.

"When networks are in bad shape, they take more creative chances. That's what the Jay Leno experiment was -- it was a gamble; they rolled the dice, it just didn't pay off," he said.

Mr. Zucker acknowledged that NBC could also benefit from dialing back rhetoric about changing the TV industry. "The fact is, we should just put our heads down, do our jobs and get better results," Mr Zucker said. "We shouldn't say anything other than all we're looking for is better programming."