The War for Late Night (62 page)

So amazed were viewers that hordes on Web sites and chat rooms immediately speculated that Leno had somehow been “green-screened” into the picture. Surely these two guys who had so recently ripped each other with such abandon had not sat down together for a gag promo?

They had indeed—and it delighted Jay Leno. The whole experience had been great fun, but also something else. Jay had been moved by it. For all the competition, the endless ratings measuring out their worths on a weekly basis, Jay had never really stopped holding out hope that he and Dave could one day just get together, be guys again. For Jay, the Super Bowl promo, as elaborate and secret as it had been, really came down to that: He had gotten together with Dave again. And the years, the jokes, and the animosity melted away in an instant.

Jay acknowledged that he may have been naive, but he thought maybe Dave sensed he had gone a little too far. Dave was never going to stop by, say he was sorry, and offer to shake hands; comics didn’t do that. Instead they did this: They appeared together in a bit. This was how you conducted a late-night feud. Jay decided to believe it was Dave offering an olive branch. It didn’t really matter to him whether that was true or not. It felt good to believe it was.

 

If Letterman had had his way, the bit might have been even better. Before he invited Jay, Dave had had Rob Burnett reach out to one other potential participant: But Conan didn’t get the joke. More precisely, he didn’t find anything funny in the situation. Jeff Ross got the call from Burnett and brought the idea to Conan, by now out of the show and already growing his scraggly red beard.

“So, Burnett called. Dave wants to know if you want to be in a Super Bowl ad with Jay and Dave.” Ross had little doubt what the answer would be.

Conan fired it back instantly. “No fucking way I’m doing that,” Conan said. “It’s not a joke to me—it’s real.”

Conan was sure that NBC—which, according to the release Conan had just signed, held the lock on his TV appearances until May—would have been only too happy to grant a onetime permit for this little foray with Jay. Of course NBC would be all for it, Conan guessed. It could only help rehabilitate Jay in the nation’s eyes: all the late-night warriors, cozying up. The message, Conan believed, would be:
See? It’s all just smoke and mirrors, folks
. Or, as Jay himself had put it, it would be “big-time wrestling”—all fake, all a game. Ross sent back word: Conan was a no.

One other late-night host strongly disapproved of the promo. Watching the game that night at a party at his house, Jimmy Kimmel couldn’t believe his eyes. Dave was throwing Jay a life preserver. He later went on Dave’s show as a guest and tweaked him about it, after Dave said how much fun he’d had bashing Jay. Jimmy said Jay had been drowning; they could have finished him off. The two of them had a laugh about it all.

Kimmel had thought about it a lot and realized the ad represented Dave sending a message:
This is still about two guys at the top; I don’t need these other hangers-on cluttering up the late-night stage.
When Letterman had slammed Jay with the joke comparing him to Americans stealing the Indians’ land, it had thrilled Kimmel; it was television with a real edge. Jimmy had even admired Jay for coming back with nasty stuff about Dave as well, though, as might be expected, he didn’t think it was as funny as Dave’s hits on Jay.

For Kimmel, the late-night war had been pure joy. There was something primally funny about it, something that played to his own instincts. His haranguing of Jay on Jay’s show had been, in his estimation, the best thing that had ever happened to his own show. He had broken through into a story being dominated by two other late-night network stars, with Dave guest-starring as the outside agitator. Thrusting himself into the discussion had made Jimmy a host of new fans. Previously, he knew, Conan’s fans had viewed him as something of a lummox: Conan was the smart guy; Jimmy was the jack-off. Now he was being flooded with messages and e-mails from Conan’s people. Writers on Conan’s show, on Letterman’s show, and on
The Simpsons
, congratulated him, as did big names like Will Ferrell, Martin Short, and even Paul Shaffer, Dave’s bandleader.

Kimmel at first denied Jay’s charge (to Oprah) that he had sucker-punched Jay with that “10 at 10” appearance. Then, to Dave, he acknowledged that, having checked the dictionary, yeah, he had sucker-punched him. But he had to quibble with Dave’s ultimate assessment that it was all fun and “nobody got hurt.”

“I think Conan might disagree,” Jimmy said.

 

In the days before his return to
The Tonight Show
on March 2, Jay Leno and his staff found themselves treading lightly. They were all feeling the heat of Team Coco and the blasts still coming over the Internet. Jay and Debbie Vickers both accepted the likelihood that they would face some damaged-goods issues. And they feared that Letterman had built up a wave of momentum that might be hard to break. Maybe it would take another eighteen months before Jay returned to the top—if he ever reached there.

Rebuilding the show seemed less challenging than rebuilding Jay’s image, because they all knew how to do a
Tonight Show
. Debbie had already returned the better comedy bits to act two. The guests would come back; the familiar routine would be reestablished.

During the three-week break for the Olympics, they fiddled with the set, brought in a desk and chairs for the old panel look. The studio still had the overall ambience of
The Jay Leno Show
, because there wasn’t time to make it look radically different.

One big question was how to play the return—obviously it had to be for laughs. The
Dallas
promo had been ditched, but they all kicked around that idea and eventually turned it into a
Wizard of Oz
parody: Jay would have hit his head and gone to a strange land—ten p.m.—but had now come home. It might be a screamingly obvious idea, but those were usually the kind that had the broadest appeal, and reinstalling Jay was all about recapturing that broad appeal.

Another question demanded to be addressed: Would Jay say anything in the first show about Conan, salute his efforts on the show, again toast him for being a good guy? Nick Bernstein, among others, pressed the case for some kind of mention of Conan. The issue had resonance for Jay, because one of the deepest regrets of his career had been not citing Carson on the first night when he assumed
The Tonight Show
in 1992. That had been his manager Helen’s demand, though of course Jay could have overruled it had he been willing to defy her. Not mentioning Johnny had invited immediate charges that Jay was an ungracious slug who didn’t deserve the job.

Jay certainly didn’t want to go through anything like that again, but this situation was clearly different. Conan at seven months obviously wasn’t Johnny at thirty years. But more than that, Jay was now facing a torrent of acrimony from Conan’s fans. To give Conan even a tiny nod of recognition would surely be seen by some as shameless pandering.

They felt damned either way, so they decided to pass.

Other than that bit of awkwardness, Jay slipped comfortably into his old seat at
Tonight
. In a real way, the show was his baby, his only baby. His family—other than Mavis—was the staff. His personal relationships outside the show remained minimal.

Just before he resumed his old position, Jay stepped back to consider the events of 2009. One rationalized way he looked at them: He had been off the air for eight months. That other show? Somehow, that didn’t constitute being on the air for Jay—not when matched against being on
The Tonight Show.
From that perspective, Jay realized he was back home in less than a year.

The numbers for the first night back reflected the continuing fascination with the rumble in late night. Jay pulled in 6.6 million viewers, a massive bump over Conan’s average (but nowhere near the 10.3 million who turned out to blow Conan a kiss good-bye in January). What was notable, of course, was how big Jay’s margin was over Letterman, who attracted 3.8 million that night. Of course, there was curiosity value in Jay’s return, but he won the week as well, with 5.58 million viewers to Dave’s 3.66. Jay cleaned up among those precious viewers eighteen to forty-nine as well, landing 1.94 million to 1.3 million for Dave.

As the weeks passed, Jay’s margin held. It looked a bit like a replay of two years earlier: Jay won every week and most every night. “It’s as if a collective erase button was pushed,” said Robert Thompson, professor of television at Syracuse University, “with the usual suspects back in their usual locations—except Conan is gone.”

Week by week Jay’s total audience numbers remained about 50 percent higher than what Conan had been scoring. But he was down sharply from his own previous performance on
Tonight
two years earlier, and the edge in the younger audience groups was far less impressive. The evidence was quickly overwhelming: NBC had exchanged a smaller, mostly younger audience for a larger, mostly older audience. The median age of the Jay viewer, just over fifty-six, represented growth, virtually overnight, of more than a decade over what it had been for the Conan viewer.

The results played more ominously for Letterman. In a flash, with Jay back as his chief rival, Dave lost the number one status he had enjoyed during Conan’s brief run. And a sizable slice of the additional audience he’d collected during Conan’s tenure seemed to drift away and not come back. The erase button had wiped out the short, happy reign of David Letterman in late night.

 

Conan O’Brien had once read a story about Lyndon Johnson. After he had decided not to run for reelection and was spending his days down at his ranch in Texas, the former leader shared a day with a journalist, who noticed almost immediately that Johnson had not been able to shake the mantle of the presidency. He was no longer tackling problems of poverty or ordering the carpet bombing of Cambodia; instead he was applying the same energy and authority to fixing a small water pump that filled a cattle trough.

Though he hardly qualified as an ex-president, Conan, in the first weeks after being untimely ripped from his
Tonight Show
womb, found himself similarly diminished. Accustomed to heading a staff of people all devoted to a single cause—getting a show on the air every day—he now found himself sitting outside, waiting for his daughter’s school bus, thinking in some instinctive, hostlike way:
Where is that bus?! I want nine people over here right now!

He had things do to, like taking care of remaining issues with the staff and, more than anything, planning the live tour that would get him back to doing what the fire in his blood demanded: standing in front of people and making them laugh. One small task, writing a daily Twitter feed, had come to amuse and inspire him a bit. Though initially dismissive of the trivial nature of most items on Twitter, O’Brien could not help but be impressed by the impact of its social connections, and he came to enjoy the discipline of writing something funny every day in 140 characters or less. As long as the tweets stuck to jokes, he was able to continue doing them; NBC monitored Conan’s daily messages to make sure he was not sprinkling them with anti-NBC or anti-Jay material, because its deal with him included no Internet presence for several months. But they weren’t going to enforce that for a stream of funny lines.

“I just celebrated the end of Lent by eating twenty-two sleeves of Peeps. My religion rocks!”

Conan needed to flex his comedy muscles because his psyche was still lacerated. It was too soon to have any perspective on what had just transpired in his life, but he had no uncertainty about the choices he had made, dating all the way back to his turning down Fox in 2001. Chasing
The Tonight Show
had been something he had to do. Giving it up had been the hardest thing he had ever done—or likely would ever do—professionally, but that sacrifice was better than holding on to a compromised version of it.

Fox remained on his mind, though, because, in terms of future moves, there was the tour and then . . . if not Fox, what? For the most part Conan left such considerations in the hands of his representatives. He had learned of a few possibilities: Did HBO have interest? That would be only once a week, though. Conan had also heard rumblings that Leslie Moonves, the head of CBS, had made a pitch for Showtime, the pay cable channel he also supervised. Rick Rosen thought it might be either Les’s way of parking a potential successor to Dave or else maybe just another move by Les to give Jeff Zucker a professional noogie.

While all that sounded mildly diverting, Conan still expected a push from Fox—though it was starting to feel awfully slow in coming.

In early April Conan began rehearsals for his tour show, which got his adrenalin pumping again. Jeff Ross was around supervising it all. Like everyone else on Team Conan, Ross assumed the Fox deal would get done. The process seemed slow and painful, but his impression was that it was far enough down the road that it was going to happen—the situation just wasn’t going to be great.

Unexpectedly, just after noon on one of the first rehearsal days, Ross got a call from an old friend. Richard Plepler, who had ascended to the post of copresident of HBO, went back years with Ross, who respected Plepler as a smart guy about the business, besides being a fun guy to hang with.

Plepler said he just wanted to make a little pitch on behalf of Steve Koonin. The name rang a bell with Ross, but not too loudly. “I know you guys are meeting with him today,” Plepler continued. “And I just want to urge you to take him seriously. He’s got good ideas. You may wind up at Fox and all that, but hear the guy out.”

The appointment had totally slipped Ross’s mind; they were scheduled to meet with Steve Koonin, the head of the cable channel TBS, that same afternoon. TBS shared a corporate parent, Time Warner, with HBO, which was why Plepler was touting Koonin. Ross now recalled that when the agents had initially told Conan and him about the TBS pitch, they had both kind of shrugged, lumping TBS in with the vague offers they had been getting from the syndication crowd.