The War for Late Night (44 page)

Jay swore he meant to send no signal with the comment. But a signal was received all the same.

Conan OʹBrien read the interview—and the widespread coverage it received—and could only shake his head. The line didn’t worry or intimidate him but made him reflect on how different he was from Jay. In the same situation, Conan was convinced he would never have said anything like that. He didn’t hear from Leno about it and simply decided to go about his business.

A short while later, though, Jay’s remark came up again during an interview Andy Richter gave to the online magazine TV Squad. Andy generally had pleasant things to say about Jay in the interview until that business about taking 11:35 back came up. “That was a weird answer,” Richter said. “Because nobody actually asked him if it was offered, the question was just sort of like, ‘Would you like to be back on?’ And he was the one who went on to say, ‘If they asked me, would I take it?’ That’s certainly not the classy answer to that question. The classy answer is, ‘Oh, well, that’s a silly question to ask, because somebody already has that job.ʹ That’s what you say if you’re classy.”

Richter’s comment attracted none of the attention that Jay’s had—except from Jay himself. Displeased at being called “unclassy,” he called Rick Ludwin to complain. Ludwin took the issue up with Jeff Ross, to see if Andy would call Jay to work it out. Richter hardly relished a chat with Jay on this particular subject, but Jeff Ross asked so he complied. Richter called Jay, who, as always, made an effort to be lighthearted and pleasant. Andy explained that he had said what he did because the job was important to him, and that Jay’s remarks about going back to 11:35 made it seem his job was being threatened. Jay took it equably and told Andy it had been a good idea to call and work things like this out.

Andy agreed and then, turning Jay’s observation around, asked him if he had called Conan to clear up his intentions in the
B&C
interview. Jay indicated he had spoken to Conan to smooth things over.

Richter, of course, checked in with Conan almost the moment he got off the phone. Conan had still received not a single call from Jay since the start of the ten p.m. show. Jay’s attempt at deflection didn’t really surprise Conan; people on the spot often said things like that. But not to realize Andy would immediately run the conversation by him? How does that happen, Conan wondered.

When Debbie Vickers heard later that the Conan side had taken offense at Jay’s “I’d take it” comment, she had her first small moment of disappointment with the
Tonight Show
team. To blow that comment up into some kind of sign indicating that Jay was trying to push Conan out seemed to her to be the showbiz equivalent of rabbit ears in baseball: paranoid ears. She believed she knew Jay as thoroughly as any other human being could, and she did not detect a manipulative motive in what he he had said in the interview. If she had perceived he was engaging in any kind of Machiavellian maneuver, she would not have backed it for a second.

In the wake of the interview a cold front began to descend midway on the 134 freeway between Burbank and Universal City.

On Jeff Gaspin’s plate, 11:35 remained an untouched side dish. The ten p.m. problem was already so pressing that Gaspin simply couldn’t have cared less about 11:35. His message to the anxious affiliates was: We’re going to give Jay November and then see where we are. That was a risky position to take, because November was a sweep month, one of four annual ratings periods when all the television markets in the country, down to the very smallest, get measured by the Nielsen company. Even with vastly improved techniques for achieving reach, some national advertisers still paid special attention to sweep-month numbers and bought the local markets based on those results. The local station owners considered them vital to their economic survival.

NBC didn’t really get the breathing space through early November that it had wanted, in any case. The stations that were receiving daily numbers were still there, questioning the network—having noticed, for example, that Leno had played against some repeats during the last week in October, but the ratings hadn’t budged. By now the affiliate noise level was growing loud enough that Zucker started hearing it in New York.

As Gaspin’s anxiety level began to tick up, he checked his development slate. What did he have? One drama,
Parenthood
, was ready and looked kind of promising. It could fill one night at ten. But what else? He began to contemplate alternatives. Could Jay go down to four days a week? Three? Would the affiliates accept that?

Inside
The Jay Leno Show
the messages were coming fast and confusing. NBC had guaranteed them two years at the start, but Jay and his staff realized that really meant just one for sure. So the show’s strategy, based on advice from the network, had been geared toward getting through the expected rough early patch and into summer, when they could flex some muscle competing against repeats. Then, after the faltering start, the advice had shifted: Focus all your big guns on December. You can score then because the ten p.m. shows would go to several straight weeks of reruns during the holidays.

Debbie Vickers pressed her booking department: Chase after every big name you can dredge up and confirm them for December.
The Jay Leno Show
would stand and fight in December.

On November 4 Rick Ludwin came to see her. The rules had changed again. “You have until the end of November,” he told her.

Vickers felt poleaxed. She had just moved every big name on their booking board to the following month, because she had been told it was going to be life or death for the show in December. Now they had concluded: Forget it—it’s all or nothing in November. This was bullshit, Vickers decided.

But it wasn’t as if she had any choice. Well, she did have one. She didn’t tell Jay that their show, less than two months in, had just had its yearlong guarantee reduced to four weeks.

 

On November 6, with some research analysis on the ten p.m. situation just starting to come in, Jeff Gaspin opened up an e-mail from the sales division and read a suggestion: What about cutting Jay back to a half hour, moving him to 11:35 again, and pushing Conan back?

At first blush this idea sounded far short of viable to Gaspin, not with all the complications it would entail. Would Jay even consider a half hour? Would that necessarily mean Conan also shrank to a half hour? And then what—an hour of Jimmy Fallon? That made no sense. What about forty-five minutes of Jay, forty-five minutes of Conan, and then a half hour of Fallon? Absurd. Gaspin quickly dismissed this wispy notion that somebody had floated out there with little thought.

In New York, meanwhile, Jeff Zucker was meeting for some private dinners with someone whose judgment he had long trusted: Lorne Michaels. The main topic of discussion: the ten p.m. problem. Zucker described the mounting pressure from affiliates to do something—as well as his ongoing concerns about Conan’s numbers and the show’s apparent unwillingness to listen to suggestions for changes.

Michaels knew Zucker came from a place of affection for Conan and Jeff Ross. The whole ten p.m. plan for Jay, gone so precipitately wrong, could be traced back to what Michaels saw as Zucker’s real motive: to protect Conan. Now, with the options to fix this overheating lemon narrowing to exclusively unpleasant ones, Lorne tried to shore up support for his guy. He made the case that if you were betting on intelligence and talent, you simply had to leave Conan alone. He would figure it out.

On the basis of these dinners, Michaels had no doubt that Zucker still stood with Conan.

One factor the internal analysts at NBC couldn’t quite get their heads around was where their future proprietors stood. Comcast, still awaiting regulatory approval, could provide no insight on their plans for NBC. Lorne Michaels, for one, expected a renewed commitment to the broadcast side, after the endless GE-influenced protestations that NBC was now a “cable company.” Comcast—itself a cable megacorp—had to be aware that every NBC affiliate had the ear of its Congress member; assurances that the local stations would remain vital to the enterprise were an essential part of Comcast’s pitch to Washington. Suddenly what the affiliates said or did about ten o’clock had real resonance. The impression Michaels took away from his conversations with Zucker was that Comcast had a simple goal: Get this ten p.m. business behind you before the official change of management.

By mid-November, the calls from affiliate executives were coming at Gaspin at an accelerating pace. Several station managers had set up their own information network and were exchanging panicky reactions based on what they were seeing happen day by day to the eleven p.m. newscasts at the big stations—during a sweep month. Some stations were down as much as 30 percent; others had seen their first-place newscast quickly fall into third place. In their calls to Gaspin, the station representatives had a consistent plea: “You have to do something!”

With no real answer to give them, Gaspin strung them along as best he could. “Let’s just get through the month,” he told them. “Let’s get to December. Let’s get to some repeats. Let’s see how it does during repeats.” But ensconced with his team he began to press for potential solutions. Could there be another play here? What about that old eight o’clock idea that Jay had rejected? Would he reconsider? Was there something else NBC could do to make ten p.m. palatable to the affiliates for the rest of the year? Was there some way to get Jay his fifty-two weeks?

Of course, any change for Jay would involve some alteration of his contract. Gaspin decided it was time to delve into that nettlesome issue. When he did, he was caught short by the deal’s salient, italicized, capitalized feature: NBC had committed to a pay-
and
-play arrangement with Jay.

Jeff Gaspin had never in his life heard of granting someone a pay-and-play promise in a contract. He tried to work out what it would mean in practice to have guaranteed not only to pay a performer but also to play him—for two years. This demanded serious legal interpretation, and the one Gaspin got from NBC’s legal team left him with little doubt: NBC faced risk—
big
risk. A strict reading of the contract presented the possibility that the network could be liable for damages in a suit brought by Jay’s very capable attorney. As crazy as it sounded, he could even seek an injunction that would force NBC to keep Jay on the air.

Neither outcome came close to being likely, but neither could they be automatically dismissed. From what Gaspin was hearing from the lawyers, it wasn’t going to be a pretty picture if they simply tried to yank Jay off the air. Gaspin grasped that before he took any action he needed to do one essential thing: get Jay on board with whatever NBC did.

Suddenly the choices narrowed. For the first time another option moved into focus: Cancel Conan, and put Jay back into
The Tonight Show
. The prime-time issue had spilled over into late night, despite Gaspin’s intentions not to mix the two. Conan’s performance, his numbers—all those things Gaspin had filed under “later”—became urgently relevant.

At the meeting he called to discuss the situation, Gaspin got some clarification on Conan’s ratings, but he wanted more information. His late-night executives were there, Rick Ludwin and Nick Bernstein, along with NBC’s chief deal man, Marc Graboff. Of course, the impact of the sharply diminished lead-ins—from Jay to the local news, the local news to Conan—was discussed. Ludwin, as always, praised Conan’s effort and long-term promise. But when asked how well Conan was adapting to the earlier hour, Ludwin was just as frank with Gaspin as he had been with Zucker: “They’re fighting us on some of the things we want to see happen.”

This sounded to Gaspin like a significant, but not critical, concern. He did not get the sense that Conan and his team were simply refusing to listen, only that some of Rick’s and Nick’s suggested changes had met with real resistance.

But the research department had some intriguing data for him, too. When they broke down Conan’s results in the key category of viewers between the ages of eighteen and forty-nine, they discovered an eye-catching statistic. Conan’s strength in that group was highly concentrated in the eighteen-to-thirty-four portion. (That was often broken out as a separate segment for advertising sales, especially for youth-oriented channels like MTV and Comedy Central.) Fully half of Conan’s audience in the large eighteen-to-forty-nine group fell within the eighteen-to-thirty-four segment.

Having the breakdown tip that way was highly unusual—50 percent was about twice the norm for a television show. Certainly this helped explain how Conan had so drastically reduced the median age for
The Tonight Show
, from fifty-six to forty-six. In big swaths of television that would have been considered a sensational development. NBCʹs research department didn’t think so. For them it only seemed to confirm the growing suspicion that Conan might be that dreaded item: a “niche” talent. At 12:35, that sort of hyperyoung profile was ideal. But coming in the earlier hour, it signaled to the researchers a weakness in the show’s breadth of appeal: People over thirty-five had significantly less interest in it.

One NBC executive floated a notion that some others had only whispered about to that point: Was a show-business version of the Peter Principle at work here? Had Conan been perfect at the 12:35 level and mistakenly pushed himself to a level where he couldn’t quite succeed?

Jeff Gaspin wasn’t buying that. He resisted any scenario that posited that Conan couldn’t be a winner on
The Tonight Show
and so they needed to go crawling back to Jay. NBC had designated Conan O’Brien the future of late night five years earlier, and Gaspin had no intention of reversing that decision now. There had to be a better way.

 

Robert Morton, long gone from the employ of David Letterman, retained many friends in the late-night world, but none closer than Jeff Ross. The two producers shared the short-hand of warriors who had been in the trenches and seen and heard things no one outside their tiny band of brothers would ever know. Morton had experienced the tumultuous ride from 12:35 to 11:35 when he was Letterman’s executive producer and close adviser in the 1990s. Now his good buddy Jeff was in the middle of the same bumpy transition with Conan; naturally, they had much to talk about.