The War for Late Night (27 page)

And it wasn’t as if Jay was going to reinvent his show. Take away the
Tonight
title, adjust the network designation, and what else would change? Not the performance. One executive who had worked with Jay in the past laughed off the notion that a network transfer would set him back months, saying, “Jay would probably be ready to go after a weekend.”

His close associates knew the truth: Jay would do almost anything to avoid the prolonged nightmare of going without nightly monologues to prepare and deliver to millions on TV. Boiled down, Jay’s philosophy was: “Anytime you’re on the air, you’re winning.” Even a short absence increased the chances that people might forget about you and drift away. In Jay’s view, attention spans were simply too short to gamble with.

Debbie Vickers knew Jay best of all, and she had her own back-channel connection to Zucker. Her quiet message: Jay is a creature of habit. If anything tempts him at all, he will stay where he is most comfortable.

 

Jeff Zucker was known within NBC to be research friendly. He didn’t make calls strictly based on what the research department predicted the outcome would be, but he certainly wanted all the data he could get his hands on before he made those calls.

In support of his original idea of moving Jay to eight p.m. Zucker had commissioned research head Alan Wurtzel to answer one big question: Was the idea of Jay Leno in prime time something the audience would dismiss out of hand? Questions like that defied simple analysis. All Wurtzel could reasonably determine was if the notion would raise any flaming red flags, such as viewers indicating that they would simply have no interest at all in such a proposition.

What he found, in fact, was the opposite: An alternative to the traditional prime-time fare, like a new comedy show with Jay Leno, came across as intriguing and appealing when suggested to focus groups.

In March of 2008 Zucker had dispatched Wurtzel to try to sell Jay on the idea of the prime-time half hour at eight. Jay had been polite as always but direct. “Alan, I go into late night and I’m number one. That’s what I do. I don’t know how to do prime time.”

Wurtzel worked him as best he could. “Look, one of the reasons this makes sense to us is you really are iconic. And when people are in a surfing environment and go by and see Jay Leno, they know exactly who he is. They stop; they know where he comes from. If anybody could do this in prime time it would be you.”

Jay appreciated the flattery. But prime time didn’t look like it was going to be the temptation Debbie Vickers had prescribed.

When Wurtzel got back from Burbank, Zucker had some other questions for him to work on. A big one: What will happen if Jay is at ABC?

That was a concrete concept that Wurtzel’s department could quantify. The number they came up with looked very good for Jay. If he landed at ABC, he was still going to win. But more than anything, the research suggested, a three-way network pileup in late night would likely produce mutually assured destruction: diluted numbers, diluted profits. NBC might be left with the show with the youngest appeal—but perhaps also the least overall appeal.

When one of his top lieutenants kicked the situation around with Zucker, he came away convinced that Jeff’s goal now was two-pronged: find a way to retain Leno, yes, but also find a way to protect Conan. Of course, the executive concluded, Zucker’s protecting Conan translated to Zucker’s protecting himself. He was the father of the five-year plan, after all. If it all went wrong it would set up one easy—and unpleasant—paternity test.

So there was that daunting possibility to confront. There was also a raft of other information from Alan Wurtzel for Zucker to digest—information that could make the prospect of having to drag that last option out of his pocket a little more tolerable.

If Zucker solicited private advice, he usually went to Dick Ebersol, the man he had looked to for career counseling since his earliest days at NBC. They had a regular routine, if Dick happened to be in New York. Very early, seven thirty or so, Ebersol would turn up at Zucker’s sprawling, always overheated office (they could never take the Miami totally out of Jeff Zucker) on the fifty-second floor. There they would discuss anything having to do with NBC. Not just NBC Sports, Ebersol’s main purview, but everything. On a morning in mid-2008, when Dick sat down on Jeff’s big pillow-packed couch to hash things out as usual, the NBC boss gave him the word: It looked like he had to go for broke with Leno.

“The only thing left in my drawer is ten o’clock,” Zucker told him.

Zucker saw the situation as a confluence of events, all coming together to compel him to move in a direction he had strenuously resisted. He needed something to offer Jay Leno that would keep him at NBC, while at the same time he had in front of him a ratings track for prime-time shows at ten p.m. dating back to the 2003-2004 television season. Its message seemed clear: Ten p.m. had become a graveyard for network series. Few or none qualified as real hits anymore. Where onetime giant hits like
Law & Order
and
ER
averaged audiences at ten that surpassed 25 million viewers, now few ten p.m. shows were topping 10 million. And the news was worse in that advertiser-preferred eighteen-to-forty-nine-year-old age group.

In 2004-2005, CBS’s ten p.m. shows had averaged a network-best 4.17 rating in the age group eighteen to forty-nine. The same year NBC’s ten p.m. shows had averaged a 3.9 rating and ABC’s a 2.82. Every year since, the numbers had dropped precipitously, to the point where Wurtzel’s department was projecting the ten p.m. shows in 2008-2009 to fall below a 2.0 rating for both NBC and ABC, with CBS at just 2.43. Those were massive falloffs of approaching 50 percent for each network. And this shrinkage was affecting shows generally among the most expensive in television, cop and medical dramas, with high-cost actors and writers and demanding production values.

It only figured to get worse. The widespread and increasing use of DVRs was wreaking havoc on network schedules, and nowhere more so than at ten p.m. Viewers had clearly developed the habit of playing back favored shows from earlier in the evening, or earlier in the week, at that hour instead of watching the offerings on the three networks (Fox being an eight-to-ten network only). The last real hit show airing at ten p.m. was CBS’s
CSI: Miami
, and that had been introduced in 2002. NBC had ridden those warhorses
ER
and
Law & Order
almost into the ground. It still had
Law & Order: SV U
, but beyond that it looked bleak for the new entries that first Kevin Reilly and then Ben Silverman had selected for ten p.m.

What the data suggested to Zucker was that he might be on the cusp of another paradigm shift. Maybe he could perceive the groundbreaking changes that would have to be made earlier than other network executives precisely because of NBC’s long travails in prime time. As he had often said before, “It’s sometimes easier to see the world when you’re flat on your back.”

The other flow feeding into the confluence came from Conan’s direction. Zucker had an unsettling nervous twitch regarding Conan. Nothing seemed drastically wrong and yet something felt unmistakably off. Conan had yet to show real signs of transforming his act into something more mainstream. And there were those more competitive numbers that continued to be put up by CBS’s Craig Ferguson, who was never far from Conan now in viewers. Conan always won easily in the contest for the young demos, but taking all these factors into account, it seemed to Zucker that signs were growing that the heat under Conan, so intense in 2004, had been turned down to a simmer.

Zucker certainly didn’t like continually getting reports from Ludwin that Conan and his team were resisting the notes he was giving them about breaking away from behind the desk, getting out into the audience. Was it arrogance, Zucker wondered, that fed the urge to reject the network’s suggestions? Or maybe just an inability to make the changes because Conan couldn’t perform any other way but the way he already knew?

Meanwhile, though the internal anxiety about the impending shift to Conan was only increasing, Rick Ludwin and Nick Bernstein, the two executives closest to NBC’s late-night lineup, never lost faith. Bernstein, in his early thirties, had watched Conan with a fan’s fervor beginning in high school. He supported
The Tonight Show
shift in a circle-of-life kind of way, though he deeply respected and admired Leno. For his part, Ludwin found the second-guessing of the move to Conan all too familiar, reminiscent of the last-minute hedging that went on in the nineties when NBC almost threw over Leno for Letterman. If the network had listened to some strident voices back then, Ludwin concluded, Jay would never have survived to be the dominant force he became. So Ludwin argued forcefully for sticking by the decision that had been so thoughtfully worked out.

Besides, Ludwin didn’t have any overall reservations about the content of Conan’s 12:35 show. To Ludwin, Conan had long since proved how inventive and creative he could be—and of course how damn smart he was. He knew that Conan considered everything carefully. The last thing that made sense to Ludwin was to try to force something on a host that he believed he wouldn’t execute well, which could easily lead to a performance without conviction.

Ludwin patiently countered the Conan doubters whenever the discussion drifted toward a suggestion that NBC not go through with the shift, though he knew he didn’t convince all of them. As one top NBC executive described the sentiment being expressed privately inside some offices in New York and Burbank, “I don’t know how with anyone still successful you can be creating a situation where there would be a finite end to that success. I mean, Barbara Walters stays on the air until she’s eighty. You gotta pay Conan off. But Jeff had that relationship with Conan and Jeff Ross.”

Zucker shrugged off all the under-the-breath questions about whether Conan should be paid off. His stance was simple: He’d made a commitment to O’Brien and he was going to stand by it. With any ousting-Conan option off the table, Zucker was left standing in the middle of his confluence. He decided to go with the flow; he pulled out the ten o’clock solution, ready at last to lay it at Jay’s feet.

 

Despite all the on-air jokes about running off to ABC and his serious private comments about how wounded he felt by NBC’s decision to point him toward the door, Jay Leno recoiled from what he saw as the potential consequences of a change of professional address.

As usual, he had a ready line for it: “The czar you have is always better than the czar you’re going to get.” A new place meant new camera operators, new pages, new everything. Worse, he foresaw an ugly scenario taking shape, with his long relationships at NBC turning hostile the moment he announced he was moving on. “Then the mysterious sandbag falls on your head,” he said. “I’m Italian. I know how this works.”

Jay elaborated: “Suddenly little stories appear in the papers: ‘The arrogant Mr. Leno refused to . . .’ Or ‘Jay took a private jet to go to . . .’ And you’re like, where did this come from?” Staff members who might have felt slighted by some little incident that had taken place fifteen years earlier would suddenly be out there peddling nasty stories. “You get fragged. Your own troops are shooting at you—that’s the worst thing.”

While he remained unhappy with what NBC had done, Jay never directed that unhappiness toward Conan. Conan might well become his competitor if he was forced to join ABC, but Jay had long argued that the late-night comics should all get along in spite of their competitiveness. It was all just show business. He wasn’t about to nullify that position now by making it openly personal with Conan, which was a primary reason why he turned down one extremely provocative offer.

Word got to him from the Letterman camp that a true television event could be set up after he ended his
Tonight Show
run: They invited Jay to come on the show as Dave’s guest. A chance to relive old times and to begin a rapprochement with Dave—that had great appeal for Jay. But then the Letterman people clarified the invitation: They wanted Jay to sit down with Dave on the very night that Conan premiered. They didn’t consider it a personal attack on Conan, whom all the Letterman people liked. It was simply business, a way to block a competitor right out of the starting gate. Conan would surely be swamped, his debut reduced to rubble by the monster late-night event over on CBS.

“I couldn’t insult Conan that way,” Jay said, in explaining how he had declined the Letterman bookers. But he made certain they knew he would love to do it any another time, when the damage to Conan—and the chances of igniting a PR backlash against himself—would be dissipated. After all, it looked as though he would be off television for months.

 

On October 18, 2008, NBC seized the attention of the nation with the biggest edition of
Saturday Night Live
in fourteen years: a guest appearance by vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, with Tina Fey on hand to perform her devastating impression of Palin. The show would attract 17 million viewers, a stunning number, far more than all but a few of the prime-time shows on all of television that week—or any week.

For an event of that magnitude, Jeff Zucker had to be a presence. He would often turn up backstage during the live broadcasts on Saturday night because of his close friendship with Lorne Michaels. For Zucker it was a fun diversion just to sit in on the production of a live show. But this was more like a command appearance. The event had national significance.

Many of NBCʹs top executives, some in from the West Coast, circulated in the long hallway that led back from Studio 8H. With security forces, Palin handlers, and VIP guests everywhere, the atmosphere crackled with tension and excitement. Zucker, however, floated through the scene with aplomb, greeting people, talking about the expectations for Palin’s appearance, acting the part of host. Shortly before the countdown to the live show, when Zucker intended to repair to his natural habitat, the control room, he gathered a few select executives for a private, hushed conversation.