The War for Late Night (40 page)

Another move made to enforce the distinction from
The Tonight Show
was limiting the guest interviews to one each night—on the set, in any case. The staff then came up with another idea, “10 at 10,” in which Jay would interview some celebrity by satellite from a remote location with ten questions intended to evoke humorous replies and sparkling repartee. And then there was “The Green Car Challenge,” designed to play off Jay’s automotive avocation. Guests would be invited to take a spin in an electric-powered Ford Focus around a racetrack laid out in the area behind the studio, each recording a time. The idea was to create some competitive fun among the celebrities—while simultaneously killing some minutes on the show.

From the start Vickers fretted about how to fill this newly constructed hour five nights a week. It could not be like late night, which formatted itself easily: monologue; second comedy bit; lead guest for two segments; secondary guest; music act; “Stay tuned for Conan—good night, everybody!”

For one thing, NBC did not want much music in prime time, if any at all. The reason musical acts were always exiled to the closing minutes of late-night shows was that they rarely pulled in viewers and more often drove away those who preferred a different style. And with just one guest onstage for a single segment, the other chunks of time seemed to Vickers like massive hungry mouths waiting to be fed.

In interviews Jay adamantly described the ten p.m. entry as a “comedy show” and not—horror of horrors—a “variety show.” The “variety” designation, Jay explained, “just has a bad connotation.” But he acknowledged that sticking to comedy meant he would likely have to commit to producing something like three times as much comedy as he had on
The Tonight Show
—most of it generated by the host himself.

In selling the creative breakthrough of the ten p.m. idea, NBC touted the originality of offering viewers an hour of comedy rather than the standard murder investigations and doctors having sex at ten p.m. In fact, television had had plenty of history with hour-long comedy shows, many of which ranked among the all-time classics: Jackie Gleason, Red Skelton, Carol Burnett,
Your Show of Shows
(that one somehow filled ninety minutes). Of course, all those shows were on once a week, and none had been seen since the late seventies. The challenge for Jay was to produce prime-time-worthy comedy on five consecutive nights, week in, week out.

The key to success, both NBC and Jay’s staff agreed, was to get the show up and running and strong enough to weather the early storm of new episodes of
CSI: Miami
on CBS and
Private Practice
on ABC; to reach December, when the dramas would go into repeats for about a month; to show what Jay could do as an alternative to repeats; and then to hang on until summer, when he would likely start to crush the all-rerun lineups he would face.

Jay promoted the logic behind NBC’s strategy almost as vigorously as the network executives did. More people were going to bed these days before late night started; fans were telling him they looked forward to a chance to see him earlier; surely there was a market at ten for something lighter than tales of lurid murders and rapes. He did have reluctance about the title, though, preferring “Weeknight with Jay Leno,” which NBC thought sounded like a news hour. Jay, again citing his mom’s discomfort with ostentation, shrank from sticking his name out there too prominently with “The Jay Leno Show.” Or maybe he remembered the one from 1986 with the same name.

But in the summer of 2009, as he made his preparations for his new show-business life, Jay Leno declared himself a realist. “It’s going to be different,” he said. “The key will be holding the audience through the second half of the show. That’s going to be tricky.”

 

Jeff Zucker also retained a realistic assessment of his late-night handiwork. Though he proclaimed the evident economic rationale for his move of Jay to ten o’clock, citing the desperate need for broadcast networks to reduce costs, increase revenues, or face the evolutionary grim reaper, that amounted to a bit of after-the-fact rationalizing. The plan made sense; it played perfectly to the doomed-networks scenario that prevailed in cable television circles and many places on the Internet. It even induced one remaining standard-bearer of “old media,”
Time
magazine, to produce a cover story featuring a mischievous-looking Jay leaning into the frame under a headline: “Jay Leno Is the Future of Television. Seriously!”

But none of that was the dominant reason why Jeff Zucker had installed Jay Leno at ten. Privately he conceded, “I didn’t make this move for economic reasons; I made this move to keep Jay from going to ABC.”

The risk involved, had that happened, would not have merely made a serious dent in NBC’s late-night dominance—and profits. A defection by Jay would link back directly to Zucker’s 2004 move to ask the top dog in late night to step aside so NBC could guarantee Conan
The Tonight Show
. Jeff was still on the hook for however that call was going to turn out. But besides that, by almost every external evaluation in 2008, a Jay Leno at ABC figured to more than dent NBC; it looked like he would T-bone them like one of his Duesenbergs ramming a Mini Cooper.

NBC’s own research department had come up with much the same results. At ABC, Jay would do very well, and probably win.

That summer Zucker presented a different argument. With Jay at ABC, Conan still would have won, he said,or at least he would have beaten Jay where it most counted for NBC, in the young demo. Rick Ludwin had assertively made that point to Zucker: Conan was going to take away the younger viewers, while Jay and Dave would be left to divvy up an audience that was largely above fifty years old.

But the idea of slicing the late-night pizza again, with Jay eating up a sizable portion of the advertising dough—which was already being doled out among Letterman, Conan, Kimmel, Stewart, Colbert, Ferguson, etc.—gave Zucker long pause. By NBCʹs calculations, a number of the late-night players already faced diminishing financial futures. The network didn’t think Jimmy Kimmel’s show made money at all, and Craig Ferguson’s, maybe a pittance—a couple of million a year, they guessed. (CBS begged to differ, without offering specifics.) NBC figured that even Jimmy Fallon, who had started up amid diminished expectations, would do no better than OK.

Of course, some measure of Fallon’s fate would depend on how Conan did in the hour preceding. The 11:35 shows were still where the big advertising money gravitated, but they were no longer a source of big earnings.
The Tonight Show
, a $150 million profit machine less than a decade earlier, had begun to fall below a third of that annual total. NBC believed Conan could keep that level up if he cornered the younger adult viewers. As one senior network executive observed, “We don’t believe Letterman is strong enough to take any advertising money away.”

The real financial opportunity still rested with Jay. NBC concocted all kinds of story angles to put the move in the best possible light—and many did sound valid. For the cost of only one hour-long ten p.m. drama—$3 million an episode—NBC could pay for an entire week of
The Jay Leno Show.
That didn’t even take account of all the money the network would save by not having to develop new shows for the ten o’clock slot, most of which would fail miserably anyway at a cost of tens of millions. It did mean, however, that NBC would have far fewer at-bats with which to attempt to hit one out of the park, as CBS had done with shows like
CSI
and
NCIS
, both of which generated hundreds of millions in syndication sales. There would be no syndication aftermarket for Jay. Still, NBC hadn’t hit one of those grand slam shows in what seemed like eons—and with GE contracting the costs down to the barest of bones, nobody foresaw a slugger-savior popping up any time soon.

Zucker started to like his chances a bit—and his strategic plan even more. In one respect, the play could be seen as something of a coup. The goal all along had been to retain both Conan and Jay, to avoid any replays of the Letterman-Leno fiasco. Here it was, five years after the big dive into the future, and NBC still had both stars. And in a curious twist, both had signed on at significant risk, which could impact their future plans to flee for other pastures. If the ten p.m. plan worked, NBC would get credit for transforming the fundamental economics of the industry; if it didn’t, the network had at least prevented Jay Leno from going up against them—and now he might never be able to.

As one of Zucker’s close associates put it privately, “I do think Jeff made a master stroke here. He’s positioned it so that if Leno goes down, no one will want him anymore. ABC will have moved on. Conan, meanwhile has a chance to take root.”

Even if that didn’t happen, if Conan flopped, then it would be Conan trying to reenter the late-night market as a diminished thing. And if Jay actually did succeed at ten? “Jeff solves the ten p.m. problem,” the Zucker associate said, “and all his costs go down.”

One of television programming’s legendary names, Fred Silverman, who led first CBS, then ABC, then NBC, provided serious cover for Zucker’s plan. “If the Leno show works,” Silverman remarked, “it will be the most significant thing to happen in broadcast television in the last decade.”

Lorne Michaels used the “master stroke” analogy as well, on what he called “the chess-move level.” The ABC threat is over; cost savings could be massive. Lorne’s reservations had to do with the idea behind the show: Late-night guy moves to prime time. He was old enough to remember Jack Paar, who had been huge on
The Tonight Show
, trying to make a comeback in a prime-time hour. The show lasted only a couple of years. “I don’t know why it didn’t work,” Michaels said. “It didn’t feel right.” He harbored the same doubts about Leno, though he conceded, “Fortunes have been lost underestimating Jay Leno.”

Another longtime NBC executive saw Zucker’s familiar fingerprints all over the move. Recalling Zucker’s trademark when he ran NBC’s entertainment division—when, faced with a threat to the network’s dominant Thursday nights, he expanded the running time of the episodes of his strongest comedies—the executive said: “Jeff is supersizing late night.”

Competitors ripped the plan in public, though in private some nodded at the rationale. “If you look at it on one level, win-win,” one rival entertainment executive said. “They were stretched thin. They were failing. Nice Band-Aid.”

Out in Hollywood, where Zucker was still widely seen as an alien with hostile intent, the move incited pure rage—a lot of it highly personal. Especially among writers and producers who created ten p.m. shows, the Leno invasion was taken as a belligerent affront. At a gathering of show runners during the summer press tour in LA, NBC, Zucker, and Leno were excoriated for the damage they were inflicting on the television industry—and for betraying the legacy of NBC, established by such ten p.m. classics as
Hill Street Blues
,
Law & Order
,
L.A. Law
, and
ER
.

Shawn Ryan, who created the hit cable drama
The Shield
and worked on numerous network hours, including
The Unit
for CBS, said, “The reason you’re hearing a visceral backlash is specific to NBC. You have a generation of writers that grew up on their shows. It inspired them to write. That network used to stand for something better.” Kurt Sutter, a
Shield
writer who went on to create
Sons of Anarchy
for the cable channel FX, called NBC and Zucker “the bastards to hate.” And Peter Tolan, who skewered late night earlier in his career on
The Larry Sanders Show
and then found success in drama with
Rescue Me
, summed up the prevailing view: “I feel like they should take down the American flag from in front of their building and put up a white flag.”

One top studio executive, left to contemplate a business minus five hours of drama programming that an outside production unit could potentially fill, delivered a blunt opinion: “This has all the earmarks of a train wreck.” The executive zeroed in on the affiliate question. “The biggest issue is the affiliate lead-ins. So they’re putting the better comedy bits at the end. What do you do between 10:12 and 10:50? More comedy? All that comedy is impossible to write and rehearse.” Citing CBS head Leslie Moonves and Disney/ABC head Bob Iger, the executive said, “Les and Iger must figure they could finish off NBC with this.”

Even within NBC the Leno move did not win anywhere near unanimous consent. Something about the way the network had positioned it—the cost savings, writing off ever being able to find hit-level success at ten p.m., writing off
winning
—offended some of the network’s loyal veterans. One watched it all unfold and was consumed by unhappiness: “The news conference when the idea was announced was staggering. For the first time in network history, someone acted like we didn’t want to win. Someone said, ‘We have a number in mind.’ That really had a big impact in-house. People noticed that. It was a poor-mouthing of the network. We’re supposed to work in the magic department. We do things the public can only dream about. Yet here was a guy saying, ‘No, we just have to make a number and that’s all we’re doing.’ It was terribly depressing.”

Knowing how hard Zucker had tried to keep Jay with all the other proposals he had run by the comic, another of NBCʹs most influential players explained, “The ten o’clock idea was the worst idea of all. We all thought it was a disaster. Conan was going to get the wrong lead-in. He’d have no chance to succeed. It was a catastrophe waiting to happen.”

The doomsayers kept their concerns to themselves, of course, because what was done was done, and everyone had to pull together to try to make it work. The executive with likely the most influence on Zucker, Dick Ebersol, didn’t buy the doom-and-gloom talk anyway. Late that summer he said, “No one would be more shocked than I if Jay doesn’t work.”

 

Something did shock Dick Ebersol that summer—and Jeff Zucker, too. In late August they got word from Jeff Immelt that GE was in the process of negotiating the sale of a controlling interest in NBC Universal to the country’s biggest cable operator, Comcast. Serious talks had been under way since April. Immelt had deliberately kept Zucker out of the loop until late in the process.