The War for Late Night (24 page)

Early on in Conan’s then tenuous tenure, Michaels, whom Ebersol loved like a professional brother, approached him and explained, “Conan is under siege. He needs friends. Will you talk to him?” Ebersol did, mostly advising Conan to listen to Lorne as much as he could and to trust himself. When Conan asked if there was anything about the show he would change, Ebersol said there was just one thing: Andy Richter. Playing around too much with Andy was preventing Conan from connecting with the audience. He should dump him. Conan had obviously not taken that advice, and Andy emerged as a fan favorite later. But Ebersol came away generally thinking Conan was a terrific kid, smart and hardworking.

At his lunch with Ross, Dick had some other advice he wanted to impart. “You’ve really got to be careful at eleven thirty,” Ebersol told him. “You don’t want to have him dancing around, flopping the hair, and touching the nipple and all that stuff.” Of course, the “string dance,” which Conan performed many nights, shifting side to side and then cutting an imaginary string on one hip while touching a finger to a nipple with a sizzle sound, amounted to his signature move on the
Late Night
show.

“This is the time to experiment,” Ebersol said. “The twelve thirty audience is never going to desert him. They adore him. But eleven thirty is a whole other game.”

To illustrate his point, Ebersol launched into a story about the starting days of
Saturday Night Live
. Because the show would be sitting in a time period owned by Carson during the week, he and Michaels were summoned to meet the King.

In Burbank, in the same cavelike office that became Leno’s dungeon, Carson greeted them, not yet dressed for the night’s show—he was in a sleeveless white undershirt of the kind Brando wore as Stanley Kowalski. Carson mainly wanted to feel out these two kids to make sure they weren’t planning something too radical. But Johnny had words of advice that Ebersol wanted to repeat for Ross.

Johnny urged that whatever else
SNL
did, the guest host should come out early and have something funny to say. And he emphasized that playing at eleven thirty you had to always be aware that in the center of the country the show would come on at ten thirty. More viewers would be awake and available, and so “you better be able to play in Chicago and St. Louis or you won’t have a chance.”

What Conan should take from this story, Ebersol explained, was to emphasize the opening monologue and make sure he pitched his show to appeal to middle America.

Ross received the advice equably. He said that everyone on the show knew they had to adjust when they got to eleven thirty and predicted Conan would adapt organically, cutting back on the jumping around because he would recognize this was new territory. “Did you have a problem with how he did the Emmys?” Ross asked.

Ebersol said he hadn’t, but Ross wondered if Dick had actually seen Conan that night. In the end, the men felt the lunch had gone just fine. It was completely friendly. Like everyone else, Ebersol found Ross open, smart, and generous of spirit. They both went back to work.

 

That spring, on one of his usual trips out to the West Coast, Jeff Zucker called Jay Leno and said, “Hey, I’m coming out and I want to come by.”

By now Zucker knew two things for certain: Jay was being fervidly wooed by ABC and Fox, and time was starting to get short if he was going to dredge up that brilliant idea that might induce Jay to stay. Not that Jeff lacked confidence that he could do so; he just had to find a way to breach Jay’s resistance to any kind of change in his life or routine.

What Zucker meant to propose that spring was actually a relic from his trunkful of unused notions. As early as 2002 Zucker had stood on the sidelines of Letterman’s negotiations for a new contract, looking for an opportunity to spring if Dave showed the slightest sign of being willing to bolt CBS. When he did, with ABC entering the picture, Zucker leapt into back-channel action and logged in a call to Rob Burnett at Letterman’s shop.

Zucker pitched an intriguing concept: a comeback for Dave to NBC—only not in late night. What Zucker proposed for Dave was an hour each night of prime time, at eight p.m. (except for Thursday, because in 2002 NBC still had the hit
Friends
there). The plan had several beautiful angles for Zucker. Besides removing Letterman as a late-night competitor, it would address what had become one of Zucker’s bêtes noires since taking over the entertainment side of NBC: the network’s chronic issue with finding eight p.m. shows.
Friends
, he had to admit, had little life left, and after that it was a lot of questions for NBC at eight.

Zucker believed that NBC’s core audience of young professionals brought with them certain limitations—namely, they weren’t really available to watch much television at eight p.m. (seven p.m. central). Instead they were just getting home from work, or having a late dinner in town, or putting kiddies to bed. What was needed, Zucker decided in one of his first potential game-changing solutions for network television, was a less expensive show that could be slotted in at eight p.m. multiple nights of the week. But it had to be a reliable show that would generate steady if not necessarily spectacular ratings at that hour. Zucker might have publicly written off Letterman as an old-hat loser in late night, but he wasn’t blind to his talent, or to his smart, sophisticated following, which had always fit NBC’s profile better than it had CBS’s.

Had he studied Dave closely, Zucker might have also discovered that Letterman had a lifelong aversion to prime time, believing his act was strictly a late-night animal. Some forays in prime for anniversary shows at NBC had done well, but not so well that Dave was likely to risk his career on so great a gamble at age fifty-five.

Still, Burnett listened to the pitch with interest. At the time he was in business with Zucker on a side project, a prime-time hour-long comedy drama he had cocreated called
Ed
—which, ironically enough, was then parked at eight p.m. on NBC’s Wednesday night schedule. Burnett knew the economics of trying to survive at eight as a costly hour-long series, so he could have been convinced that moving elsewhere was better in the long run for
Ed
, which was close to his heart. Burnett concluded that Zucker had come up with “a very smart idea” and was impressed by the NBC boss’s “outside the box” thinking.

But he couldn’t help tweaking Zucker with a little counterproposal: Suppose NBC moved Jay to eight; then surely Dave would come back and take over
The Tonight Show
. Zucker dismissed that idea as the joke both men knew it really was.

A short time later Burnett did run the NBC proposal by Letterman, and they discussed it briefly. Mostly, Burnett reported, “Dave had a good laugh over it.”

Zucker had never completely abandoned the eight p.m. strip idea. He later even ran it by Oprah Winfrey, trying to lure her away from syndication and onto NBC. She hadn’t been tempted, either, though she let Zucker down gently, telling him that if the offer had come ten years earlier in her career she might well have jumped at it.

Now it was Jay’s turn.

When Zucker sat down with Leno in Burbank, he started out with an earnest expression of the network’s undying commitment to keep their biggest star in the NBC family.

“Why do you want to keep me?” a skeptical Jay replied. “I already got canned.”

Zucker had heard that kneejerk response before, whenever he had casually suggested to Jay that NBC still loved him and wanted him to stay in the family; he regarded it no more seriously than he did the jokes Jay was telling about NBC every night on the air. Zucker plowed on, telling Jay the network would come up with something right for him, something that would keep him happy.

“I mean, why?” Jay shrugged off the solicitous words. “You should have kept me before.”

Zucker assured him that NBC still had big plans for Jay. He pitched Jay his new wrinkle on the five-night-a-week show at eight: not an hour-long show, but a half-hour one. Jay could do his monologue every night, maybe even a slightly longer one, then go to commercials, then a second comedy piece, another commercial, followed by a short piece, either an interview or, even better (since the interview portions were not Jay’s strong suit), something with a corps of comedy correspondents, and then—we’re out. Done. No forced chat with some starlet hawking one of those movies Jay didn’t like having to see anyway; no music act that never pulled in viewers because music tastes had become so stratified.

Jay listened politely; even though still carrying a grudge for what NBC had done to him, he was unfailingly polite to management. But his instant reaction to the eight p.m. idea was that it was “way wrong.” The idea of just doing the monologue and a second comedy bit may have seemed to play to Jay’s predilection for those parts of the show, but Jay actually did worry about trying to make each individual show stand out. That’s what the guests were really for. You brought in different people on different nights because audiences wanted to see the hot young actor, or the latest
American Idol
winner (or loser). On a guestless show there would be no chance for a Hugh Grant moment, that famous guest appearance in 1995, right after the British film star’s arrest for doing business with a prostitute. Grant’s willingness to show up for his long-scheduled appearance and take Jay’s questions—most famously, “What the hell were you thinking?”—turned things around in one big night for Leno.

As Jay analyzed it, ʺIʹm not vain enough to believe that people want to watch a fifty-eight-year-old guy every single night. There have to be other elements in the show.”

At the end of this meeting and all his conversations where he expressed his commitment to finding a new place for Jay at NBC, Zucker would always ask if Jay had any suggestions for what might tempt him to stay with NBC; what else did he want to do? Jay always had the same reply: “I tell jokes at eleven thirty at night.”

Back in New York, Jeff Ross kept in touch as usual with his friendly counterpart on
The Tonight Show
, Debbie Vickers. Debbie would never go over any of the details of Jay’s meetings with Zucker, but both producers knew the NBC boss had begun his campaign to throw at Leno anything he could conjure up to see if Jay might bite. Neither of them could imagine a scenario where Jay would.

But they differed about what was likely to happen. Debbie was convinced Jay would end up at ABC; it was the only thing that made sense. Ross insisted, on more than one occasion, “I think he’s gonna retire.”

And Vickers always had the same answer: “You’re out of your mind. I mean, you are
out
of your mind.”

J
immy Kimmel had come to expect the calls, and throughout the early months of 2008, even after the strike had ended, they came in steadily on his personal line. Never in his life would Kimmel have suspected that it would have come to this, but Jay Leno seemed to be his new BFF. “You really need to do something about your start time,” Jay would tell Kimmel in a familiar line of helpful advice. “It’s killing you.”

Jay had noticed that, despite its officially listed start time of 12:05 a.m., after the half-hour
Nightline
, Kimmel’s ABC show rarely ever began until 12:06, and sometimes as late as 12:08. Kimmel, who taped the show around seven p.m. in LA and then virtually never saw it on the air (it made him uncomfortable to watch himself), had not noticed how much the start time was sliding.

“You need to press them on this,” Jay advised Kimmel. “The start time has to be consistent.” How would Jimmy’s viewers know what time to change channels, or even start their DVRs, if the start time contained that much variation?

Kimmel never failed to be impressed with Leno’s thorough knowledge of late-night ratings across the board, and he was not a little flattered that Jay seemed to be including him in his comprehensive evaluation of the time period. Jay had also taken to complimenting Kimmel on how much his show had progressed, and how Jimmy himself was growing as a host—and a comic. With Jay, the quality of material always ranked as the highest priority, and he told Jimmy he was more and more impressed by how funny the show was night after night.

But after the advice and the compliments, Jay had another message for Kimmel. He wanted to tell him how much better everything would be, including that start-time issue, if the two of them could get together—like back-to-back on ABC, with Jay at 11:35 and Jimmy at 12:35. It would be a late-night package, he said, just like what he and Conan had had at NBC.

The unspoken implication, of course, was that Jay was far down the road in his consideration of jumping to ABC, and he knew one bit of fallout from a decision in that direction would involve
Jimmy Kimmel Live
: Jimmy would have to slide back a half hour to make this scenario work. More accurately, Jimmy would have to not make a stink about moving back a half hour. The last thing Jay needed was another displaced host pointing fingers at him for wanting to stay on the air at 11:35.

As Jay pointed out, the 12:35 start time would be better in some ways than what Kimmel had now, both because of that variable in the start time that ABC was throwing in every night and because Jay would be providing a more compatible lead-in than
Nightline
. Having to follow some depressing or distressing news story was like sticking a knife in any comedy that was set up to open a show. This could really work, Leno insisted.

Jay didn’t really know the terms of Kimmel’s deal with ABC, but a different outside party did: the management of the Fox network. The truth was, Kimmel could not simply be assigned the 12:35 show after Leno if ABC did sign the NBC star, because his deal contained time-period specificity. If ABC tried to move him backward, Kimmel would automatically become a free agent.

Did it make sense, Kimmel wondered, to go backward a half hour after five years on the air? Wouldn’t that play like a demotion? Alternately, there might be a plus to pushing back against the shove to a later hour. Breaking off from ABC would make Kimmel fair game for Fox and the eleven p.m. spot on that network. Jimmy’s agent, James Dixon, had made sure Fox had all the information regarding that point.