BEHIND THE CURTAIN BEHIND THE CURTAIN BEHIND THE CURTAIN (28 page)

Our conference room, where we booked guests, had a big glass window. Anyone could look in, or even come in, to see the 3x5 offer cards on the big cork boards that had the names of potential guests. It didn’t take long to discover the culprit, a production assistant, who wasn’t very good at covering his tracks. He soon became an ex-production assistant.

After that incident, booking the show became a covert operation. We covered the window with black paper and locked the conference room door at the end of the day. Nevertheless, big-name celebrities continued to stay away in droves. At least they weren’t being intimidated.

Our guest list, once primarily made up of stars, now consisted of animal acts, comedian Larry the Cable Guy, and just about every reporter and commentator at NBC News. Then there were the plate spinners, two guys on flame-throwing pogo sticks, and a pigeon lady who may have been a man. Our biggest celebrities were Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, and Ron Paul. Democratic presidential candidates would not cross the picket line. John Edwards even joined the striking writers on the line, but only while the news crews were there.

The producers also took over some of the writing duties. I came up with a bit called Priest, Rabbi, and Minister jokes, told by actual clergy. It was a big hit and led to lawyers telling lawyer jokes, doctors telling doctor jokes, and sales people telling sales jokes.

I also helped with Headlines. In this bit, Jay showed actual headlines, stories, and ads, submitted by viewers, that were unintentionally funny. Every weekend I brought home five bushel baskets of clippings to go through. That’s a lot of news! Fortunately, I had some help in this task from my adult Sunday school class, who willingly agreed to skip our Bible lesson. Maybe too willingly. And they were especially talented at spotting double entendres. Maybe too talented.

After one hundred days, the strike ended. During that time Jay continued to be the number-one late-night host, beating Letterman without any writers or Hollywood stars. Well, except for Larry the Cable Guy. Jay’s gutsy decision to put the show back on the air in defiance of the WGA probably saved the franchise. Of course, when our writers returned, we welcomed them with open arms. They were the best in the business, and we missed their immense talent.

We had been beset with so many crises threatening the existence of the show that we came to accept them as part of the job. As always, Jay turned to humor to help us get through such times: “Keep your enemies close and your friends closer,” he would say. I thought this twist on an old adage was great advice on the importance of eternal vigilance. But none of us, including Jay, was prepared for our next mishap.

Jeff Zucker, president of NBCUniversal, had always been a friend of the show—or so we thought. We had known him for many years, going back to his days as executive producer of the
Today
show when Katie Couric was the co-host. Whenever he traveled to Burbank from his office in New York, he would stop by to visit with Jay and the producers, spending at least ten or fifteen minutes with us. No company president had ever done this.

Then one day in March 2004, Zucker popped into the producers’ meeting, said “Hi,” and quickly left, heading toward Jay’s office. Normally an upbeat guy, Zucker seemed somber this time. We all sensed something was amiss. But we weren’t in suspense long, as Jay soon came into the room. He told us Zucker had just fired him. There was no hint of emotion in his almost-inaudible voice and his expressionless face as he explained that he would be keeping his job for another five years, at which point Conan O’Brien would be taking over.

We were angry, and we let Jay know it. How could Zucker be doing this to his most loyal employee, a man who also just happened to be the number-one late night guy for many years? We urged Jay to fight back, but he seemed resigned to his fate and said there was nothing he could do. “Once the girl says no, you just have to accept it and move on. She’ll never change her mind.” It was a very strange response for Jay, who wasn’t a quitter.

Over the next few days Jay was more forthcoming, telling us his meeting with Zucker was merely a formality. He had already made the deal with Conan because he was concerned the younger host would bolt from NBC without a succession plan that guaranteed him Jay’s job. Jay felt pressured to accept the deal. He had grown tired of being routinely portrayed by the press and Letterman as the underhanded sneak who had stolen a job that was David’s birthright, and he didn’t want to be subjected to further scorn when it came to Conan.

Jay said he would go along with the plan if NBC announced his five-year extension prior to and separate from Conan’s deal. That way it wouldn’t look like Jay was being pushed out the door. Zucker agreed. Shortly after that, NBC put out the announcement, which made no mention of Conan.

Six months later, on the 50th anniversary episode of
The Tonight Show,
Oprah made a “surprise” visit with a birthday cake, and Jay made a “surprise” announcement that Conan
would succeed him in 2009: “This show is like a dynasty. .
. . You hold it and then you hand it off to the next person . . . Conan, it’s yours. See you in five years, buddy.” It was important to Jay that he not only make the announcement but also give it the appearance of a personal blessing. But his words would come back to haunt him years later when the transition began unraveling.

As 2009 approached, Jay continued to be the champion of late-night ratings, and he was having second thoughts about retiring. He told
USA Today
he was looking elsewhere: “I’m not a beach guy, and the last time I was in my pool was to fix a light. Don’t worry. I’ll find a job somewhere.” These weren’t empty words. He had options.

Early in 2008, Hollywood trade publications reported that ABC, FOX, Sony Pictures Television, and others wanted to talk with Jay about late-night possibilities. But according to the terms of Jay’s contract with NBC, they couldn’t reach out to him until November 2009. ABC’s deal appealed to Jay the most because it was exactly what he wanted—the 11:30 p.m. slot on a broadcast network—which would allow him to go head-to-head with David and Conan. The alphabet network was willing to cancel its half-hour
Nightline
news program weeknights at 11:30 p.m. and move Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show from midnight to 12:30 a.m., which Jimmy agreed to do.

One day Jay called me into his office and asked me if I would be interested in working with him if something came up but said he couldn’t be specific. I said yes and thanked him. I was fairly certain he was talking about ABC. A well-connected friend who worked there had been keeping me in the loop about ABC’s plans to make a deal with Jay. My friend even gave me a tour of the studio and sets ABC was already designing for the show.

At a Beverly Hills press conference for television critics in July 2008, ABC’s entertainment president Steve McPherson openly welcomed Jay to his network if NBC did not find a new job for him. He took a question from Jimmy Kimmel, who was posing as a reporter. Kimmel asked about media reports that ABC was courting Leno. “I can’t believe they are going to let this guy go at the top of his game,” McPherson responded. “If that happens, I guess we’ll look at it and we will talk. And Jimmy will be involved in those discussions, and that will be that.” By using Jimmy to ask the set-up question, McPherson was signaling to Jay that Jimmy was aware of ABC’s interest in him and had embraced it.

Taking a cue from Jimmy, Jay showed up as a “reporter” the following week at an NBC news conference. Wearing a bald cap, fake goatee and glasses to disguise his identity, he asked, “When is Leno’s last show?” Ben Silverman and Marc Graboff, the NBC executives conducting the session, were in on the “joke” and answered his question as if he were a real reporter: Jay’s last night would be May 29, 2009, and Conan’s first would be June 1, 2009.

Then “reporter Jay” brought up a topic that had not been pre-arranged, referring to Brett Favre, the retired quarterback who wanted his job back with the Green Bay Packers. “Well, everyone’s entitled to change their mind, but I would imagine that puts management in an impossible situation,” Graboff said. Then he threw out an olive branch: “He’s [Leno] the hardest-working man in show business. He knew he was going to continue working. Our goal is to try to work with him to come up with an alternative to [
The Tonight Show
].”

Jeff Zucker offered these alternatives to Jay: a few Bob Hope-style specials a year, a nightly half-hour comedy show at 8 p.m., a nightly late-night show on the NBC-owned USA Network, and a Sunday late-night version of
Saturday Night Live.
Jay rejected all the ideas. He was only interested in a daily late-night, network entertainment show. In other words,
The Tonight Show.
Of course, that choice wasn’t available.

So Zucker went back to the drawing board and came up with something that got Jay’s attention: a nightly prime-time show at 10 that would have the look and feel of late-night but with more comedy. Jay resisted the idea at first, but he eventually agreed to do it. Zucker was thrilled he had figured out how to keep Jay. Sources at NBC reported executives there feared Conan would not have fared well going against Jay on ABC.

Putting Jay on at 10 p.m. five nights a week also helped Zucker solve another problem. NBC was not performing well at that hour with scripted, highly-produced, expensive programs. Zucker didn’t expect Jay to bring in higher numbers, but he was hoping Jay’s show, which was going to cost much less to produce, would attract enough viewers to satisfy advertisers. This would actually improve NBC’s bottom line, which was more important to Zucker than the ratings.

A highly produced hour-long drama like
ER
costs $3.5 million per episode while five Leno shows would run only about $1.5 to $2 million. NBC’s financial experts estimated Jay would need a 1.5 rating point in the coveted eighteen to forty-nine age demographic (almost two-million viewers) to attract our target advertising revenue of $300 million. Since Jay was getting a 1.3 to 1.5 rating at 11:30, it seemed like a reasonable goal.

The new program, called
The Jay Leno Show,
was unveiled to the press in December 2008. Jay did some interviews, attempting to lower expectations. He told the
New York Times
he did not expect to beat ABC’s
Private Practice
or CBS’s CSI franchise: “I just want to do well enough to get established. I’m a realist. I know it’s going to be different.” He said he would be producing forty-six weeks of original programming while the competing dramas would be doing twenty to twenty-two originals. That was the essence of his competitive strategy: “Those are well-produced, slick shows,” he acknowledged. “But in the re-runs and other times, that’s when we catch up. The tortoise and the hare: that’s the key.” It seemed like a daring and bold idea at the time.

On the eve of the show’s September 2009 debut, the media was calling it a potential game-changer.
TIME
ran a cover story with this headline: “Jay Leno Is the Future of TV. Seriously.” It described the low-budget, prime-time experiment as the new way of doing business in network television, which was struggling to reach a big, homogeneous audience of tens of millions. Former NBC president Fred Silverman was also impressed: “If
The Jay Leno Show
works, it will be the most significant thing to happen in broadcast television in the last decade.”

Unfortunately, it didn’t work. Despite all the fanfare, the show was cancelled after four months of tepid ratings. This time there was no cover story from
TIME
offering profound insights into NBC’s noble but failed grand experiment. Instead, there was a story in
Entertainment Weekly
describing
The Jay Leno Show
as the biggest bomb in the history of television. On the cover, it featured a picture of Jay in tattered clothes, as if he had just survived a real bomb.

Some critics faulted the new show for being essentially the same as Jay’s old
Tonight Show,
but there were actually
numerous changes, imposed mostly by NBC executives. They pushed us to de-emphasize guests and to add more and different comedy in the second act following the monologue. We took on a whole stable of “young and hip” comedy correspondents who no one had ever heard of. They had a lot of attitude but few funny ideas. Most of the comedy was simply bad, and it would never have passed muster on the old show.

The funniest material continued to be Jay’s old standbys: Headlines and Jaywalking. At the request of the affiliate stations, we had to hold those bits for the last act so they led into the local stations’ newscasts. If we had been able to position our best comedy right after the monologue, we could have boosted our ratings. Contrary to what the critics said, I believe the show did badly because we didn’t continue with our old format.

Ironically, the show was actually hitting the target viewership numbers set for it by NBC management. We were only expected to match the ratings and demographics of the old show, and we did. But while NBC was satisfied with our performance, the affiliate stations were not. Jay’s weak lead-ins for local NBC newscasts were taking down their ratings. Some major markets were losing up to 50 percent of their audience, which begs the question: did anyone at NBC consult with the affiliates about this possibility before putting the show on the air?

The whole experience was demoralizing for Jay. I think he mentally checked out two months into the show as the ratings were plummeting and critics were relentlessly pummeling the program. He summed up his feelings in this monologue joke:

NBC said the show performed exactly as they expected it would, and then cancelled us. Don’t confuse this with when we were on at late night and performed better than expected and they cancelled us. That was totally different.

A guarded person by nature, Jay could be surprisingly candid on the air. During one of the last episodes of
The Jay Leno Show,
he calmly revealed his pent-up frustrations, referring to his fateful meeting with Jeff Zucker in 2004, though he didn’t mention Zucker by name: