The War for Late Night (28 page)

“Don’t tell anyone this,” Zucker told the little group. “But Jay’s interested in ten o’clock—and we think we’re going to be able to make a deal.”

His listeners had to restrain their surprise. To one it seemed near incredible, virtually a 180 from what they had been hearing to that point: that Jay wouldn’t do prime time; that he wouldn’t know how to take on the cops or Dr. McDreamy or whoever else the other networks would throw at him.

Zucker seemed more than positive; he almost oozed self-satisfaction. But he repeated his warning. “We have to stay quiet about this until it’s done.”

Staying quiet clearly meant keeping this news to the tight circle Zucker had just informed—and not, say, leaking word to anyone connected to Conan O’Brien. No one was surprised by that stricture. They all knew there was reason to have concern about how Conan would react. But the deal had not been completed. Everyone in television knew of endless numbers of occasions when agreements hatched behind closed doors never came to fruition.

For Zucker, holding off on informing Conan of his intentions only made sense. This was his final play with Jay. Why disrupt Conan if, in the end, nothing would come of it?

Zucker had made his pilgrimage to Burbank several more times, armed with new research from Alan Wurtzel. Jay did not embrace even this idea without initial resistance. “I don’t need phony research,” Jay first told Zucker. “I have research that shows I was number one since 1994. My research shows over a billion dollars in sales.”

But over the course of several meetings, Zucker had been able to make an impression. The ten p.m. hour had become the place where dramas went to die, he argued. ABC kept shoveling show after show into ten p.m. holes—
October Road
,
Cashmere Mafia
,
Big Shots
,
Eli Stone
,
Life on Mars
, and on and on—succeeding only in digging the holes deeper and wasting tens of millions of dollars in the process.

Jay, of course, kept his own eye on the numbers, especially for the shows at ten, because they provided his network lead-in (and Dave’s). He could see what was happening at his own network. Its big new highly promoted entry,
My Own Worst Enemy
, starring Christian Slater, had been given the plum ten p.m. slot after NBCʹs one newish (though fading) hit,
Heroes
; but it had already caved in, with barely a 1.7 rating in the young-adult demo. Jay was averaging about a 1.4 running well past midnight, for a fraction of the cost.

Maybe, he finally concluded, he really could do some business at ten p.m.

 

By the late fall of 2008, down to his last three months as host of
Late Night
, Conan O’Brien felt the pull of history. Not so much from his own show, though the process of going back through highlights of more than twenty-five hundred programs certainly struck an emotional chord. No, what was hitting O’Brien hardest was his imminent change of venue. It had been the same for David Letterman when his days in 30 Rock were melting away. Saying good-bye to the most famous building in the history of broadcasting was more than sweet sorrow, it was gut-wrenching.

Conan responded by trying to absorb every moment he had left. For him that meant changing a routine he had followed from his first days at NBC, when he would grab a cab from the apartment he rented off the park near Tavern on the Green and jump out on Forty-ninth and Sixth. Close by the entrance was an auxiliary elevator bank that took him up to his office on the seventh floor.

Now eager to drink in all of 30 Rock that he could, he decided to start his days by wandering in slowly through the ornate entrance on the plaza side of the building. In December that meant weaving through the streams of tourists lined up to take pictures of the giant evergreen, just lit in all its glory in the annual celebration that NBC had turned into a holiday special.

Even in baseball cap and sunglasses, and with his head down, Conan was always recognized. That profile, the red hair, the storklike gait—who could miss him? “Hey, Conan!” The shouts were predictable: “Conan! What’s going on?” or “Conan! Love the show!”

OʹBrien always shouted back, “Thanks, great to see you.” He didn’t mind the notice; he still remembered when there hadn’t been any.

Conan walked into that grand art deco lobby because he wanted to see the murals every day he had remaining, the massive wraparound painting
American Progress
by Jose Maria Sert, depicting straining men and women building a nation. As he walked by, Conan looked up at the murals and found himself lost in scenes from the movies
Quiz Show
and
My Favorite Year
.

O’Brien, who probably knew more television history than anyone else who’d made a piece of it, could recite details about the 30 Rock-based inspirations for those films, the scandal of the rigged answers on the quiz show
Twenty-One
and the raucous nights of ninety minutes’ worth of live weekly comedy from Sid Caesar and Carl Reiner on
Your Show of Shows
that were the model for
My Favorite Year
.

He thought about watching Rob Petrie in
The Dick Van Dyke Show
, a writer for an ersatz Caesar (played by Reiner) whose fictive workplace would have been 30 Rock (though it was never expressly mentioned). And the birth of
Saturday Night Live
, so essential to his own career. It was from this location that breaking historic news had been broadcast to the nation since the 1930s. Of course, Steve Allen had begun
The Tonight Show
here, with Paar and Carson following, all commanding America’s attention every night. And this was where Letterman lit the fuse that turned Conan into a late-night host.

To O’Brien the place was ground zero—the place where television was invented. Walking in through that imposing lobby and looking all around, he could feel it. He was there.

Having worked sixteen years in the building, Conan felt that so much of his life had been gifted to him through his television show. He had, after all, met his wife because of the show, and now they had two children. In 2000 Elizabeth Ann (Liza) Powel had been working in advertising at the Foote, Cone & Belding agency in New York, at a time when Conan’s show had taken to mocking some truly preposterous local commercials. When they saw one in Houston featuring a store owner who brandished a whirring chain saw while promising to “slash prices,” they knew they had an ideal foil.

Their idea was to bring this guy to New York to a legitimate ad agency for a commercial makeover. On the segment, Conan walked into the agency with his Houston friend and started riffing with several of the ad execs about what they might be able do for him. Very quickly he noticed the stunning blonde behind one desk. She wound up featured in the bit and soon in his life. (Conan boasted that he was one father who truly could show his kids footage some day of “How I Met Your Mother.”)

Conan knew NBC was already deep into the construction of his new space in LA on the Universal lot, an investment of $50 million, which certainly spoke to their confidence in him. Given all that was happening to television, OʹBrien found himself wondering how long a building like 30 Rock would still be in use for television, whether within only a few years everyone would be doing television shows out of their own living rooms.

Even in the hallway outside his studio on the sixth floor, the resonance was unmistakable for Conan. He had only to look at the studio across the hall, 6B, where for years NBC’s local station, Channel 4 in New York, had produced its newscasts. (They had been relocated to NBC News’s state-of-the-art studios on the eleventh floor.) Now 6B was being remade back into a late-night studio, as it had once been for the young Johnny Carson, with new seats and a proscenium-style arch, all for the next tenant.

 

It was always going to be up to Lorne Michaels to pick Conan’s successor. Though his day-to-day connection with it had long since ended, he still had production rights to the 12:35 show (and still carried an executive producer credit on Conan’s show).

When NBC signed Jimmy Fallon to a holding deal in early 2007, speculation spread that Michaels, still close to Jimmy from his days as one of the most popular players on
SNL
, had made his choice. The sniping quickly followed. Fallon had gotten on the wrong side of some Internet snarkmeisters on sites like Gawker and Defamer, mainly for his penchant for breaking up during sketches and for his short-lived movie career.

But Michaels had supreme confidence in Fallon, mainly because he had a quality that could not be either manufactured or faked. “People really like him,” as Lorne put it. “When he was on
Saturday Night Live
, he had enormous appeal to young girls. That means young men are going to be a bit ambivalent. But they’ll come around.”

 

James Thomas Fallon Jr. was born in Brooklyn in 1974, a year before
Saturday Night Live
went on the air. Recognizing they had a funny kid on their hands (actually two, counting Jimmy’s sister Gloria), his accommodating parents, who enjoyed
SNL
themselves, taped segments of the show (the safer ones) in the mid-1980s to replay for their kids, who would try to re-create some of the sketches. The family, just as Irish Catholic as Conan’s (if more black Irish than red), had moved to the upstate New York town of Saugerties, just up the Hudson from Kingston, where Jimmy’s dad, James Sr., worked at the IBM plant. Fallon attended Catholic school (St. Mary of the Snow—not a joke) and was popular and clearly talented. He learned guitar quickly and demonstrated an early facility for voices and impressions.

His mother had heard Jimmy do killer knockoffs of enough celebrities to know that when the Bananas Comedy Club down the river in Poughkeepsie announced it was holding an impressions contest she had a potential winner in the family. Fallon got inspiration from a high school graduation gift of a troll doll. He put together a routine based on celebrity endorsers of troll dolls—and he killed. He won the contest, of course, and jumped right into a stand-up career, often accompanying himself on guitar, even as he was starting college.

Fallon started out majoring in computer science at the College of Saint Rose, a onetime girls’ school in Albany, and barely stayed above water in his grades, eventually abandoning the computer stuff for communications. That he could fake his way through while pursuing his comedy. Mostly Fallon was known in college for his obsessive viewing of
SNL
. No one who knew him doubted he would chase the dream of making the cast of the show that had all but defined his life.

Fallon was good enough in his stand-up by twenty-one that he secured an agent, got bookings, and eventually dropped out of college. He made his way to LA and, in the Conan pattern, took improv classes with the Groundlings. Only a year later he won an audition at one of the showcases that Lorne Michaels held for potential new talent for
SNL
. Fallon did some of his impressions, including a dynamite Jerry Seinfeld, but he didn’t make the cut. Grievously disappointed, he at least heard later that Lorne had kind of liked him and might take a second look when Jimmy got some of the green off him.

He worked his way back into an invitation to another showcase the following year. Now only twenty-three, not quite as tall as he seemed because of his gawky posture, but puckishly handsome, with the look of a choirboy who’d been sneaking sips of the altar wine, Fallon was convinced he was ready. Before the audition, one of the advance men, talking to all those trying out, offered some advice: Don’t look for Lorne in the audience. If you see him he won’t be laughing, and you may get thrown. It won’t mean he doesn’t like you; it’s just that he
never
laughs.

Fallon had no more than ten minutes to change his life. He came prepared; he even had some of his old troll material. But he couldn’t help checking out the audience, looking for Lorne. Fallon spotted him easily, sitting quietly in the dark a few rows back. Then Jimmy hit him with his Adam Sandler impression. It was undeniable: Lorne Michaels was laughing.

On the show Fallon scored early with his versatility and his infectious likeability. In Fallon’s first season, 1998-1999,
SNL
was entering one of its periodic upswings. Will Ferrell was emerging as a star; the cast also included Darrell Hammond, Tracy Morgan, Molly Shannon, Maya Rudolph, and Colin Quinn. Fallon broke out almost immediately, moving from feature player to regular cast member in one season, with characters like Jarret, the stoner with his own Internet show; Sully, the wiseass Boston high schooler who constantly makes out with Denise (Rachel Dratch) but mostly is in love with “No-mah” on the “Sawks”; and perhaps most memorably, a perpetually pissed-off, dead-on Barry Gibb, who hosted his own irrationally enraged talk show with his brother Robin (played with equally devastating accuracy by Justin Timberlake).

By his second year Fallon was among the busiest members of the cast, and was getting noticed—and not only by Lorne. One on of their trips to the show, Rick Ludwin and Nick Bernstein, always on the lookout for potential future late-night hosts, began to see real possibilities in Fallon. He was clearly a big young talent, immensely prepossessing. When Ludwin got into a conversation with Lorne about potential hosts for the “Weekend Update” segment to replace the departing Quinn, Ludwin recommended Fallon. Michaels, who was going to be in sole charge of this choice no matter what any late-night executive suggested, had been kicking around a notion of inserting the show’s head writer, Tina Fey, in that role. Now he saw intriguing potential in a male-female coanchor team, something the show had not had (under Lorne) since Jane Curtin matched up first with Dan Aykroyd, then with Bill Murray, in the late 1970s.

The following season, the team of Fey and Fallon became the hottest act on television. Writers reached for comparisons: Hepburn and Tracy, because she was so smart and he so everyman likeable; Nichols and May, because they were both so spontaneously funny; Astaire and Rogers, because “she gave him sex and he gave her class.” Michaels himself suggested the last one, though only the sex part seemed apt. Fallon provided more sass than class; he came across as kind of the cute-and-I-know-it bad boy of the act. What mostly worked was that the jokes—one part smart satire, one part ribaldry—had real bite. “After experiencing chest pains Monday, Vice President Dick Cheney was rushed to George Washington Medical Center,” Tina intoned one week in her mock-serious newsbabe voice. “When asked how Cheney’s angina would affect the administration, President Bush confidently told reporters, ‘Boys don’t have anginas!’ ”