The War for Late Night (2 page)

In 2008 NBC staged the infront more than a month before its competitors’ week of upfronts. But in 2009, after another year of dismal results with new programs, the network decided to schedule the process closer to upfront week, holding it in New York on May 4, only two weeks prior. Zucker had added the Comedy Showcase event (again, minus the party) after deciding NBC needed to be a presence during the upfront, what with all those buyers, affiliate managers, and studio heads in town. “It’s another way to reinforce our brand,” NBC’s entertainment division chief Ben Silverman said.

Zucker turned to a man he trusted—and loved like a brother—to put together his comedy night, or as several NBC executives had taken to calling it, the “chuckle-front.” Michael Bass had opened doors for Zucker when both men were at Harvard, and later at NBC; the two had been roommates for a time in New York; both had been producers at NBC’s
Today
show. (Zucker, as all of television knew, ignited his career there as executive producer during the strongest era in
Today
’s history.) After a stint running the CBS morning show Bass had returned to the NBC fold, at Zucker’s invitation, to take charge of special events—like hastily arranged comedy nights.

Bass assembled the Town Hall event from familiar NBC parts: He called on Rainn Wilson from
The Office
, Tracy Morgan from
30 Rock
, and Seth Meyers and Amy Poehler from
Saturday Night Live
, all for brief appearances. Bass had prevailed on one of the network’s greatest stars, Jerry Seinfeld, to drop by as an unannounced guest to toss five minutes of surefire stand-up into the mix.

But the headliners were not in doubt. NBC was eager to show off its new weeknight comedy triumvirate: Conan O’Brien, the incoming host of
The Tonight Show
; Jimmy Fallon, Conan’s successor as host of the 12:35 a.m.
Late Night
franchise; and of course, Jay Leno, the centerpiece of the showcase—and the network’s future.

To emcee the festivities, Bass reached out to one of NBC’s most reliable go-to guys, a man who had done so well fronting formal dinners and other special occasions that his name had actually been kicked around in some quarters as a player talented and funny enough to be a potential late-night host himself. This, even though he still filled a rather important day job for the network: anchoring
NBC Nightly News
.

Brian Williams didn’t mind being part of an NBC Comedy Showcase because he had no problem proving he was funny in front of crowds. He had already scored a coup hosting
Saturday Night Live
, to widespread praise. Williams had agreed to take that leap only after much concern about whether being in goofy comedy sketches might undermine his credibility as the face of NBC News. By all accounts, it had actually helped his image with viewers, some of whom had previously read his body language on newscasts to mean that he was overly stiff and sober. That hurdle cleared, Williams was now free to let his comedy freak flag fly with abandon, which he did during guest spots in late night, with Leno, O’Brien, David Letterman on CBS, and especially Jon Stewart on cable’s Comedy Central.

When Michael Bass, after clearing the request with Zucker, approached Williams about serving as onstage host for the Comedy Showcase, Brian had the impression the producer was a bundle of nerves, which he took to mean this event was clearly of high importance to Jeff Zucker. Bass warned Williams that this was going to be a different role than playing tuxedoed toastmaster at the Waldorf.

Bass didn’t much doubt what answer he would get. Like everyone else at NBC, he had observed how much Williams enjoyed invading the world of comedy.

“I’ll do as good a job for you as I possibly can,” Williams assured him with anchorman earnestness.

So Williams was backstage hanging with the comedy crowd as the ticketholders filed in to Town Hall, taking their limited-legroom seats inside the eighty-eight-year-old theater while being warmed up by the infectious beat of the Roots, the smoking-hot house band for the Fallon show. The comics themselves were squeezed into an uncomfortable, dimly lit twenty-by-twenty space equipped with some cold drinks, snacks, and a large video screen. The star power was considerable, but even with the formidable Seinfeld on hand, most of those backstage knew who would be playing the top cats on this night: Jay and Conan.

Both Leno and O’Brien had flown in from LA—separately—for this gig, and neither was especially enthused about it. Conan was exactly thirteen days away from his opening night as
Tonight
host and would have preferred to keep focused on his increasingly intense preparations, which had only recently included the first of four practice shows in his newly constructed studio. But he had put the trip east to good use. With access to the jet NBC had chartered, Conan and his team had touched down in a couple of locations—including Wrigley Field in Chicago—that they planned to use in the elaborate opening of Conan’s
Tonight Show
: Conan running across the country through various highly American locales. Leno, for his part, didn’t particularly see the need to have to throw a repeat on the air—Jay had always despised going into repeats, for any reason—just so he could cross the continent and do stand-up in front of a group he expected would be largely the same crowd he had worked only three months earlier, when he had been the featured entertainment at a different NBC party. The network had thrown one in February for its affiliate board and some big ad clients prior to its coverage of the Super Bowl, in Tampa, Florida. Conan had been present at that gathering as well, and though he had not performed, he and his entourage had the same reaction as the rest of the audience that evening. As Conan’s executive producer and closest adviser, Jeff Ross, put it, “Jay killed; he did twenty minutes and he destroyed.”

Pressed to come east for this new comedy event, the reluctant Leno asked Bass, “Is this the affiliates again?” He was told that this would be a significantly different group, though, yes, some affiliates would again be present. From his conversation with Bass, Leno took away the fundamental message: “It’s a night of stand-ups; I want you to do your stand-up act.” So after finishing his
Tonight Show
taping on Monday night, Jay had gotten up before dawn the next morning, driven to the Burbank airport, and jumped on a private jet for New York—to be, as he saw it, the closing act on a “night of stand-ups.”

As Jay arrived backstage, he was greeted warmly by the assembled comedy talent, including O’Brien, who said a quick hello; the two late-night stars had already seen each other briefly at four that afternoon at rehearsal. One of the other performers was a bit surprised by Jay’s somewhat ragged appearance: “He looked kind of fat, with his hair out of control.” When the makeup artist hired for the night approached Jay and asked if he wanted some work done before he went on, he declined. The performer, who had seen the
Tonight
host work in clubs many times before, was equally concerned by Jay’s demeanor. “It was striking that he was just sort of showing up and hadn’t bothered to put a comb through his hair,” the showcase participant said, adding, “In his defense, he had just flown across the country.”

In fact, Jay had been in Manhattan for just a few hours by that point. Arriving at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey at about 3:30, Jay had rushed into town for his first appointment. NBC had brought him to a meet and greet with some of the affiliate board managers in the afternoon. Jay had no issue with that assignment, because he appreciated the importance of the affiliated stations as much as or more than any other star—or even executive—at NBC. His committed courtship of the station guys had been a key factor, after all, in his campaign to land the
Tonight
job back in the early nineties, when he won the fierce competition with David Letterman to succeed that show’s comedy colossus, Johnny Carson.

Jay had long held an almost Willy Loman-like belief in the power of the personal sales pitch. “Clean shirt, handshake” was one of his mantras for the process. “You come in, shake hands, meet the local news team. It’s just serving the customers—basic Dale Carnegie stuff.”

Leno knew some of the customers were uneasy about NBC’s ten p.m. gambit. He had already worked to douse a brushfire sparked when Ed Ansin, the owner of WHDH—NBC’s affiliated station in Boston (Jay’s home city, no less)—announced in April that he simply wasn’t going to run the new Leno show at ten p.m., supplanting it with an hour-long local newscast. “We don’t think the Leno show is going to be effective in prime time,” Ansin said. “It will be detrimental to our eleven o’clock news. It will be very adverse to our finances.”

NBC had every reason to fear such a move could lead to further defections from local stations fed up with the network’s abysmal performance in prime time for much of the previous decade, and so it had moved a howitzer into position in response: NBC threatened to yank
all
the network’s programs from the Boston station if it dared take that step with the Leno show. Jay himself stepped up, calling Ansin personally and telling him, “I’ll do what I always do: I’ll do local promos, whatever it takes.” The promise—and the howitzer—did the trick. Ansin backed down.

Conan, meanwhile, had passed much of the three months between the end of his run on
Late Night
in February and his arrival in Los Angeles to start work on
The Tonight Show
hopscotching the country making nice with affiliated stations, doing the same glad-handing of news anchors and smiling through the same promotional copy urging viewers to watch Phil and Denise on Channel 13 or Frank and Diane on Channel 5 that Jay had made de rigueur for
Tonight
hosts. In January Conan spent a morning in Detroit, visiting an auto show with reporters from WDIV, and an afternoon in Chicago, cutting promos with the anchors for WMAQ. “This is old-school television,” O’Brien told the
Chicago Tribune
. “You actually go into America and you talk to these people who put your television show on. I really find it fascinating.” By May, after visiting about fifty cities, exhausting had all but replaced fascinating. When he arrived in New York on May 18, O’Brien had been off television for the longest period of time since he had started on
Late Night
in 1993, but he had had little time for relaxation. He concluded that between the preparation for the new show and the affiliate tour, “It may be the hardest I’ve ever worked.”

But at least O’Brien’s day in New York would not be taxing: He was doing only the Town Hall gig. NBC, meanwhile, was wringing all it could out of Jay’s drop-in to the city. Besides the affiliate meetings, Jay had been asked to spend an hour or so with another constituency of likely ten p.m. skeptics: the press. At about six that evening, a phalanx of NBC publicity executives, accompanied by many of the network generals, including Jeff Zucker, ushered Jay into a suite at Hotel Mela, where a group of about a dozen reporters was waiting for him.

Jay arrived looking relaxed and in good spirits, if a little puffy faced, dispensing his usual greeting—“Hello, everybody”—to the room and offering shout-outs to several of the reporters by name. He sprawled his blocky frame into an armchair chair behind a coffee table, settling in for the session with no discernible signs of concern—not even when the first question carried an implied shot about NBC’s decision to try him out at ten.

Stephen Battaglio, a reporter for
TV Guide
, wanted to know if Jay had heard what one of his late-night rivals, Jimmy Kimmel of ABC, had said in his comedy monologue at the ABC upfront that afternoon. Jay hadn’t, so Battaglio explained it to him. Kimmel had referenced his fear, before NBC announced the ten p.m. plan, that ABC was going to lure Leno away, place him at 11:35 p.m., and knock Kimmel back from his perch in the midnight hour to a start time of 12:35 a.m. “ ‘But NBC said we will not let Jay go to ABC,’ ” Battaglio quoted the ABC star, “ ‘even if we have to destroy our network to keep him.’ ”

As the reporters laughed, Jay rolled with it. “As long as it’s funny!” he bellowed in his best punch line voice. “That’s the rule.”

Most of the subsequent questions covered the obvious territory:

What would the new show be like? Jay offered few details because he hadn’t started planning it yet.

Why did he believe this idea might work? “I thought: There’s no comedy at ten o’clock. Maybe we’ll try that,” Leno said, with his characteristic no-big-deal insouciance, as if he were discussing a dinner order rather than a career change. And, as usual, how much of that detachment was real and how much was calculated was impossible for anyone in the room to read.

How could he compete against expensive dramas like
CSI: Miami
on CBS and
Private Practice
on ABC? “Hopefully when they’re in reruns, we’ll catch them,” Jay said, turning to familiar ground: a car metaphor. “We may not get them in the straights. We’ll catch them in the corners.”

Didn’t he worry about tarnishing his legacy as the longtime winner on
Tonight
? “I’m not much of a legacy guy,” he said, tossing a scoff. “I hosted the
Tonight
show for seventeen years. It’s like the America’s Cup. I didn’t screw it up. I passed it off to the next guy—whew! Everything else now is gravy. If this is a success—wonderful. If it’s a huge bomb . . . Well, I hope not.” Jay’s tone rang more with confidence than mere hope.

What about the notion that staying at NBC and moving to ten amounted to stealing Conan’s thunder? “No, I don’t think so,” Jay said, quickly locating his familiar Conan take. “Conan is terrific. We’ve been friends for a long time. This will be a smooth transition.”

Then Jay, who at various times in his career had enjoyed performing the role of analyst of other comics’ acts, became expansive on the subject of Conan. “He’s a very funny guy. Conan is all about the material, and that’s what I like about him. When he started, obviously the critics went after him a little bit. He always had a solid writing and comedy foundation. He just needed to learn how to perform a little bit better.” Those first few months, Jay continued, “Conan was a little awkward. But if you thought he was awkward, he still had good jokes. We’d go, ‘That was a funny joke. He didn’t tell it quite right.’ But he’s learned to become a master at it and, obviously, that’s why he’s doing the show.”