The War for Late Night (60 page)

Ebersol knew from Debbie that Jay felt Ludwin had betrayed him: not just by pushing for Conan to get the 11:35 job, but also because he thought Ludwin had disappeared on him during the ten o’clock mess at a time when they were so vulnerable.

It made for an uncomfortable position for Ludwin. Jay had returned as the centerpiece of NBC’s late night and he was no longer speaking to the network executive in charge of late night. Ludwin, brutally aware he was being iced out, decided to give Jay space and hope they would eventually get back to their old interaction.

In the meantime, Dick Ebersol had become the network’s main conduit to
The Tonight Show
. The night before he was due to fly to Burbank to meet with Jay and Debbie, Dick sat down to a dinner with the managers of the NBC affiliate board, finally in town for their long-delayed semiannual conference with the network. Now that all had been resolved in late night, the mood among the affiliates was warm, especially toward Ebersol, whom the station managers credited with providing some of the biggest, most reliable numbers NBC still attracted: NFL games on Sunday night and the Olympics, now right around the corner.

But Ebersol had more on his mind than receiving congratulations. As he sat down with the board, he told them, “The one thing I want to say about all this is that this has all worked out the way you guys wanted it to. I understand all that. But you have to remember that you’re complicit in why Jay’s show didn’t work. We are, too. We put so many restrictions on what his show could be that it had no chance in hell to be what the audience expected it to be.”

He lectured them on the wrongheadedness of the demand that Jay save his second-best comedy element until the end of the show. He acknowledged that NBC had fumbled with the idea that Jay could have only one guest each night because somehow that wouldn’t be fair to
The Tonight Show
. Ebersol then returned to the unreasonable insistence on burying the established comedy bits—“Headlines,” “Jaywalking,” etc.—at the back, because it destroyed the rhythm of the show and forced Jay to put on what he called “unknown comedy” right in the second act.

“Let’s not lose sight of that,” Ebersol concluded. “Because when he gets back to his old show in his old time period, Jay’s gonna be successful again.”

 

Jay took his own first step to push the rehabilitation effort. Possibly out of the tradition of host logrolling—you come on my show, I come on yours—Jay agreed to sit down for his first big post-blowup interview with Oprah Winfrey. As she often did, Oprah skillfully combined chumminess with a somewhat pressing interrogation.

Jay went through his account of the events that had led to the shake-up of that fall, including how NBC’s decision to oust him “broke my heart.” He admitted to telling “a white lie on the air” when he said he’d retire at the end of the five-year waiting period. And he professed no hard feelings toward Conan, whom he said he “very much” considered a friend.

But he also bluntly denied any responsibility for Conan’s disappointment. “It had nothing to do with me,” Jay said. He also repeated NBC’s claim that Conan’s show was going to lose money for the first time in
Tonight Show
history. And he fired off his most direct and pointed response when Oprah cited Conan’s assertion that moving to 12:05 would be destructive to the franchise. “If you look at what the ratings were,” Jay said, “it was already destructive to the franchise.”

When Oprah chided Jay about the joke about Letterman and his wife, saying it was “beneath him,” Jay defended it as funny and characterized the back-and-forth between the comics as “big-time wrestling.”

He also speculated that almost anything NBC could have done would have been better than the eventual outcome. “If they’d come in and shot everybody—I mean, it would have been people murdered. But at least it would have been a two-day story. I mean, yes, NBC could not have handled it worse, from 2004 onward. This whole thing was a huge mess.”

Seeking further advice, Jay also reached out in a much more unexpected direction: He called Lorne Michaels.

No one at NBC had a longer or deeper connection to Conan than Michaels, but Jay had reason—possibly as a result of his and Debbie’s conversations with Ebersol—to suspect Lorne had not bought a ticket on the Jay’s-to-blame train. He was right about that.

Leno and Michaels had interacted little over the years; Jay’s style of comedy hardly matched Michaels’s sensibilities. Lorne saw him as more of a Bob Hope-like figure—a safety valve for viewers. And while Jay’s brand of setup-punch line humor would never have landed him in the cast of
Saturday Night Live
, Michaels realized that people in America tended to admire and accept a “well-made one-of-those, even if it isn’t a one-of-those that they liked.” And Jay had obviously been making a good one-of-those for a long time.

Lorne had made no secret to Jeff Zucker what he would have done with the late-night plan had it been his decision to make. He was the one whispering in Zucker’s ear to let Jay go, because the ten o’clock show was so awful. Everyone would understand the move in that context, Lorne had told Zucker, and now you put your bet on the younger guy, give him a full run, and stand behind him.

But when it didn’t fall that way, Michaels understood the rationale: Jay would still make a good one-of-those. As much as he understood the facile comparisons of Conan and Jay as Harvard versus the garage, Lorne recognized that, every once in a while, Jay was not quite the garage and Conan not quite Harvard. Jay did smart jokes as well as dumb ones. He just did a lot of jokes because, well, that’s what he did. Conan remained, like Letterman, more of an attitude comedian, as Lorne saw it.

Lorne also understood on a personal level Jay’s mind-set about wanting to keep working until either he dropped or they changed the locks. That was Lorne’s intention as well. As long as NBC continued to pay the electricity bill for 30 Rock, Lorne would produce
Saturday Night Live
.

More than anything else, Michaels dismissed as nonsense any suggestion that the actions of recent years and months had been driven by Jay’s Machiavellian genius. Lorne did not believe in the puppets moving the strings.

So he gave Jay some counsel, listened patiently as Leno laid the blame for the decision at Ludwin’s door, and told him that was silly because surely Jay realized a move of this magnitude could not emanate from Rick Ludwin’s pay grade.

One thing he did not discuss with Jay, but which staggered him when he finally got convincing evidence that it was true, was the fact that Jay had won a pay-
and
-play commitment. Michaels continued to be baffled by the implications of that deal and what role it actually played in the way the drama eventually unfolded.

 

Mostly based on what he’d gleaned from his conversation with Zucker, but also from what his representatives continued to tell him, Conan believed that Jay’s pay-and-play contract had been impossibly forbidding for NBC. Polone suggested that the network had looked at the cost of extricating itself from the deal and blanched: It could ultimately have cost as much as $100 million to pay Jay off. Whatever the price, it had to be a consideration in the decision to retain him and let Conan hit the street.

Without taking a public stand on the matter, NBC’s executives begged to differ. They apparently decided it was necessary to clarify that their decision was based on programming and not financial considerations—especially after Conan went public in a
60 Minutes
interview seeming to endorse the suggestion that NBC was on the hook with Jay for about $150 million. (Though Conan himself did not bring up the figure, the reporter, Steve Kroft, did, citing other reports.)

NBC argued that Jay’s deal for ten p.m., while admittedly unusual, did not constitute a burden so onerous that the network could not countenance trying to pay him off. NBC’s legal department stressed that the entertainment side was free to make the smartest decision, with no regard to contract implications. The reason, they said, was that the pay-and-play would have become relevant only in a situation where the talent demanded the right to stay on the air or pressed to sue for liquidated damages based on the impact a cancelation might have on a career. Neither case would likely have ever applied to Jay Leno, NBC argued, because suing would mean a bitter, drawn-out fight during which he wouldn’t be on television telling jokes. And would Jay really want to stay on the air in a show the affiliates were abandoning, guaranteeing failure?

The easy answer was that Jay and his lawyer didn’t have to think much about either prospect, because NBC had come to them promising to slide Jay right back into late night, thus satisfying his need to keep telling jokes on television.

Had NBC decided Conan truly was the future and bid Jay a fond fare-thee-well, resolving his contract would have been a relatively standard procedure, according to the NBC legal department’s analysis. Not that it would have been cheap—certainly it would have cost more than paying off Conan. But that was principally because Jay’s salary was more than double Conan’s, they explained.

One NBC executive did concede that NBC had signed a bad contract with Jay Leno, but insisted that the deal had not determined the network’s decision. Had Conan been tearing it up at 11:35, NBC would have stepped up and done what it had to. The advice given to Zucker and the others in New York had been simple, the executive said: Jay would not be able to get an injunction, even though it was a pay-and-play deal. Ultimately it would still come down to writing Jay a check. Yes, the check would have to be slightly bigger because of the unusual promises in the contract, but, in the end, NBC was going to have to write a guy a check—one guy or the other.

 

Kevin Reilly had begun Fox’s courtship of Conan O’Brien even before Conan was fully settled out at NBC; he used the customary back channel: Jeff Ross.

From his days at NBC Entertainment, Reilly had developed a warm relationship with Ross, concluding, as so many others did, that Jeff was a totally appealing guy with no artifice in him, no bullshit, as straight a shooter as you were likely to find in Hollywood.

Reilly was dead serious. He was hungry to break Fox into late night at last, and here was a performer who was not only an established star—and one whose name had lately dominated the news—but also a guy with a sensibility that was a perfect fit for Fox. He met Ross at Rick Rosen’s house.

“Could this be any more insane?” Reilly asked, opening the conversation. He laid his cards out quickly. Fox had an intense interest. But there were likely to be complications.

“Back of the envelope, my instinct is, I don’t know if we’re going to be able to clear the show,” Reilly said. By “clear,” he meant get the full complement—or close to it—of Fox stations to commit to carry a Conan O’Brien late-night show. “I’m gonna do the math and we’ll see where we end up.”

Reilly’s enthusiasm fell on welcoming ears. Team Conan knew that, in the current landscape, if they were going to find a new network home for their man, Fox represented the only real option. Polone had tried to argue that a new kind of deal made sense for Conan—maybe he didn’t need a network play at all, given how much of his audience found their entertainment choices online now. Many of Conan’s younger viewers already watched him only in highlights the following day on the Web (a factor that had hardly helped with the ratings impression he wanted to make with NBC). But others on Conan’s team leaned heavily toward locking up a base that was an actual television show and building the new media possibilities from there.

Back in his own jurisdiction, Reilly began his sales job. Chase Carey, who had replaced Peter Chernin as the top executive overseeing all of Fox’s entertainment operations, made it clear he simply didn’t get Conan, but he accepted that his was a business perspective more than a creative one, and he remained open to the idea. Reilly had the unqualified backing of Peter Rice, the chairman of Fox Entertainment. Rice, who had previously headed Fox Searchlight films, had forged a reputation as a keen evaluator of breakthrough material (
Bend It Like Beckham
,
Slumdog Millionaire
). Rice became Reilly’s partner in the pursuit of Conan.

Rice and Reilly had reason for their enthusiasm. A talent of Conan’s stature simply did not fall into a network’s lap so conveniently. On any checklist of qualities most appropriate for a late-night host on the Fox network, Conan would have filled in virtually every box: hip, creative, irreverent, youth oriented, special appeal to male viewers. It was no accident Conan had truly broken through as a writer on
The Simpsons
. He was all but the embodiment of the Fox comic sensibility.

As the Fox team saw it, Conan most definitely did
not
embody the
Tonight
sensibility. The fit was just off, in some fundamental way, beginning with that big Vegasy stage and the long, traditional monologue. He might have gotten there over time, but the whole traditional format didn’t seem built for the scrappy, off-the-wall Conan, in their view. But if he came to Fox, playing the underdog again, they were sure he would get the magic back, overnight.

Rice and Reilly were well aware of who represented the main impediment to a quick annexation of Conan: Roger Ailes. An imposing figure internally at the News Corp., Fox’s parent, given the spectacular financial results for his personal baby, the boisterous Fox News Channel, Ailes had added the portfolio of the stations owned by Fox Broadcasting. He could be expected to apply his customary aggressiveness to representing the interests of the stations, no matter how rapturous the network guys might be about Conan.

Reilly knew the easiest way to get Conan in the door at Fox. All it would take would be the ultimate voice at the network, News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch, delivering one simple message: “I don’t give a shit. This is another
Wall Street Journal
. I want it.” That always produced results at Fox. But Murdoch remained noncommittal on Conan. His position boiled down to: “If you can make it work.”