The War for Late Night (65 page)

But for all the top executives’ efforts to walk away from the wretched experience and move on to the next item on the network agenda, something about Conan’s departure hit NBC deep down where it lived—or at least where its self-image lived. Despite all its sorry, self-inflicted wounds of the past decade, NBC still seemed to stand for something distinctive in the television world, something a little hipper, cooler, more urban, and sophisticated than its rival networks. Could shows like
30 Rock
and
The Office
and even
SNL
, going on four decades old, exist anywhere but on NBC?

Conan, too, had belonged on that list—hip, urban, distinctive. Jeff Zucker and many others had always known that. Losing him was like losing another piece of NBC’s heritage, its DNA, much like losing Letterman had been.

Gaspin could not help but wonder how things might have been different: Perhaps if he had gone to Conan first, before approaching Jay with the late-night changes; perhaps if he had just been able to get more time with Conan himself, get him into a real negotiating session. Or maybe if Conan had really been able to shine a flashlight under his chin and really look into the future—like, later in the year 2010? Gaspin wondered if that might have altered the outcome.

“If he knew there was no Fox ...,” Gaspin mused. “If he knew he was going to end up on cable, do you think he would have done the same thing? The best you’re going to do is TBS? Do you think he would have swallowed hard and would have come to the table and just asked for a few things?”

Such as? Hadn’t NBC already offered him the big thing? Hadn’t they kept him around once with a promise he would move up in five years?

“A guarantee,” Gaspin suggested. “In three years, no question, you’ll get rid of the guy—you’ll shoot him; you’ll put an arrow through his head.”

But Gaspin already had the answer. “Who’s going to believe me, right? Who’s going to believe me after what we just did, right?”

Inevitably, the denouement involved dollars.

As NBC executives sorted through the impact and implications of the latest late-night tug-of-war, it was hard to find anyone who wasn’t either muddied or nursing a few rope burns. Those, at least, could be salved and bandaged.

The real cost, one that could be assessed accurately only over time, was in the damage that may have been exacted on what had been, for a generation, television’s most lucrative program. Soon after the pools of contract ink had dried, Jeff Gaspin offered a startling appraisal of where
The Tonight Show
stood financially.

To the charge from Conan’s people that, if their cheaper version was allegedly losing money, Jay’s
Tonight Show
surely must be, Gaspin had a forthright response: “Oh, we’re going to lose money—but what
don’t
we lose money on?”

The Tonight Show
, which once generated profits of more than $150 million a year, no longer made money? That was Gaspin’s honest admission in the first months after the Jay-Conan contretemps. By spring both he and Zucker were rescinding that analysis, noting that the television ad business had demonstrated a significant comeback, and upfront sales for NBC’s late night had come in far more robust than expected.

But Gaspin had also raised longer-term questions, including a most ominous one. He suggested that within five years NBC might not necessarily even be programming a
Tonight Show
, or anything else for that matter, in what the networks labeled the late-night day part. “While we have this heritage in the day part, you know, we also all used to be in daytime,” Gaspin said, recalling the days when networks filled the daytime hours with soap operas, fewer and fewer of which were surviving. “We all used to be in Saturday morning programming,” he added, referring to the days when the networks made money on children’s cartoons. “The broadcast business is changing.”

It was not hard to find others who shared Gaspin’s gloomy late-night forecast. Six months after the tempest over
The Tonight Show
, the ratings picture turned darker—and starker. Nobody was doing well; Leno’s winning numbers were down by about a million viewers—more than 20 percent, and both he and Letterman had dropped to their worst audience levels ever. None of the late-night shows demonstrated significant growth or even real traction. The culprit, in most evaluations, was the digital video recorder, the increasingly ubiquitous machine that allows viewers to record all their favorite shows with ease. Now viewers could watch any show they had recorded at any time they liked—and many seemed especially to like playing them back in the late-night time period.

“I really think it’s done,” said one important late-night player. “I think late night is done. Everything we know it to be is over.”

If the doomsaying sounded a bit like a demented prophet wearing a sign reading “The End Is Near,” the speaker, having made a living off late-night for two decades, had apparently legitimate evidence to justify the sentiment.

Besides the DVR, whose impact was only likely to get worse as its penetration spread from under 40 percent of households to the more than 60 percent projected for just a few years down the road, the late-night shows were also seeing their relevance undercut by hyperavailability. “YouTube is like the icing on a horrible cake,” the late-night hand-wringer said. “You always have a firm sense that if something great happens on one of these shows, you’ll see it anyway.” Recent examples included the actor Joaquin Phoenix’s apparent freak-out on Letterman or Sarah Silverman’s much-talked-about “I’m Fucking Matt Damon” music video on Kimmel’s show. Everybody was talking about those moments, the late-night veteran said, “but they’re on YouTube; why sit through the whole show to see them?”

Kimmel, for one, believed the time had come for the shows to address the threat posed by the easy availability of their best material online—an opinion he advanced even though his show generated its most buzz when its clips got passed around digitally. It especially distressed Kimmel because he was convinced his show had more impact online than anyone else’s in late night. While the response to great clips was always huge, he noted, his ratings were still challenged. Kimmel thought it might be time for the late-night shows to get together and say, “We’re not putting anything online anymore. You want to see it? You better fucking watch it.”

To many executives at the networks, taking a stand against technology didn’t seem a logical response, but threatened only to become one more way to turn late night into the equivalent of rest-home entertainment. Cutting young viewers off from their lifeline of clips of every kind, available at fingertips, would almost surely stir up some kind of organized protest and encourage them to write these network shows off as hopelessly moth-ball infested. Already NBC had begun exploring the notion that instead of selling late-night shows to advertisers on the basis of ratings for viewers between the ages of eighteen and forty-nine, it should consider raising the sales demo for late night to the group twenty-five to fifty-four, the same sales target used by—
gasp
—news shows, the hoariest genre in the medium.

A more reasonable response, said the longtime late-night figure, was a drastic change in how late-night shows got produced. “In a way, these shows are doomed and protected at the same time,” the player said. “They’re doomed for all these reasons; protected because what else can you put on television that’s cheaper than this? But for sure the days of the $30 million salary for a host are gone forever. The days of the twelve-, thirteen-, fourteen-person writing staff are gone forever. Frankly, the days when there are house bands might come to a close.”

The models for how to produce late-night shows for much less money were certainly out there. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert had smaller writing staffs and no house bands. Then there was
Live with Regis and Kelly
, ABC’s morning entry. As the late-night participant put it, “They come out. They talk. They interview guests. There’s your show. It costs a nickel.”

But would a show like that ever seize the attention of the nation, the way Letterman had during his sex scandal? Or the way Conan had after he told the people of earth he was cutting the cord with NBC? No, said the late-night principal. “I think all the important and cultural relevance of these shows is done.”

Maybe not yet. Another late-night leader of long significance, Lorne Michaels, refused to capitulate to the notion of inevitable extinction—or diminution. “They’re wrong,” Michaels said of the late-night eschatologists. “Of course these shows can still make money.” Michaels could hardly believe anything less, having just thrust Jimmy Fallon upon the world. Lorne was convinced that Fallon had the rare talent to establish an audience, build it, and then emerge as their personal star, the way Letterman had, the way Conan had.

If nothing else, Michaels pointed out, the events of January 2010 had proved the continued relevance and impact of late night. They accomplished something for Conan that he had not quite been able to do for himself. “The big thing this did, at the end of the day, was make Conan O’Brien truly famous,” Michaels said. “He wasn’t famous before.” It was the Hugh Grant comparison expressed a different way. But of course Jay Leno had been able to ride his Hugh Grant moment to long-term triumph. Conan had ridden his right out of NBC. And that was unfortunate, as Michaels saw it. Justified, perhaps, but still unfortunate.

Lorne looked at the situation from the truly long view, the view of the hardened, occasionally scarred veteran of many network conflicts. “The fact that the network behaved badly?” Michaels said. “If you read the charter, that’s what they do. Their thing is, they behave badly, and you can’t go, ‘Really? They did this?’ Because they’re the network. That’s what they do.”

Resigning in the face of network ingratitude, Lorne said, does not provide the anticipated satisfaction—an experience, he stressed, he knew well. In 1979 Michaels quit
Saturday Night Live
and NBC. He was unhappy with his treatment at that point, tired of battles with the network over things Lorne knew far better than they did would only improve the show. At the time, the executive in charge of NBC Entertainment was Irwin Segelstein, a small bear of a man, a generation older than Michaels, who was then not yet thirty-five. Lorne walked into Segelstein’s office, sat down, and laid out all the reasons he had decided to resign. And Segelstein, who had a sardonic streak, listened patiently, not uttering a word until Michaels had finished. Then he launched into a story, a parable of sorts, one that touched on the religion of television.

“Let me just take you through what will happen when you leave,” Segelstein began. “When you leave, the show will get worse. But not all of a sudden—gradually. And it will take the audience a while to figure that out. Maybe two, maybe three years. And when it gets to be, you know, awful, and the audience has abandoned it, then we will cancel it. And the show will be gone, but we will still be here, because we’re the network and we are eternal. If you read your contract closely, it says that the show is to be ninety minutes in length. It is to cost X. That’s the budget. Nowhere in that do we ever say that it has to be good. And if you are so robotic and driven that you feel the pressure to push yourself in that way to make it good, don’t come to us and say you’ve been treated unfairly, because you’re trying hard to make it good and we’re getting in your way. Because at no point did we ask for it to be good. That you’re neurotic is a bonus to us. Our job is to lie, cheat, and steal—and your job is to do the show.”

Lorne’s reaction had been a solitary word: “Whoa.” The speech had left him mostly speechless because he realized that Segelstein was exactly right. Being in charge of
Saturday Night Live
or
The Tonight Show
or the
Nightly News
, Michaels concluded, was not an entitlement—it was a job. That got confused at times because the people involved in these shows put so much emotion and passion into them—and it was these very qualities that made the shows so good.

With that insight and all his own experience behind him, Lorne Michaels did his best to stand back and survey the television landscape after all the action on the late-night field from late 2004 to the middle of 2010. He saw the plans that had been laid, decisions that had been made, moves that had been played.

As he worked through it, breaking it all down, he believed he had a grasp of exactly what had transpired, and why. But then a piece wouldn’t quite fit. Where did that piece come from? Did it make sense? For a time, Lorne thought he really had it, but then he realized he clearly didn’t. Finally, he decided, it was probably time to shrug it off and just walk away.

“It’s Chinatown,” he said.

 

On September 24, 2010, just as the fall television season got under way, Jeff Zucker announced that he was stepping down; the new corporate owners at Comcast were inclined, after all, to install their own boss. No one should have been surprised, Zucker said; yet he knew that many inside NBC would be. Comcast offered no specific reason, and Zucker resigned himself to the fact that “ninety-nine times out of a hundred, when a company spends billions to buy another company, they want to put their own team in place.” He certainly didn’t believe that the late-night crisis of 2010 had played a hand. “That was just a risk that didn’t work out,” he concluded. Whatever the rationale, the departure removed Zucker from the only employer he had ever worked for, the only building he had ever worked in. “It’s all I’ve ever known,” Jeff said. “I met my wife here. My four kids were born while I was here. I endured colon cancer twice here.” The pain of separation from an institution he had devoted his professional life to stirred “gut-wrenching” emotions in Jeff Zucker; it was something he suddenly had in common with a late-night host of his previous acquaintance. That, and Harvard.