The War for Late Night (41 page)

Only two years earlier the GE CEO had made a statement to the company’s shareholders to tamp down rumors that the company wanted to unload NBC, perhaps sometime before the massive outlay that would be required to cover the 2008 Olympics from Beijing. “Should we sell NBCU? The answer is no!” Immelt wrote in GE’s 2007 annual report. “I just don’t see it happening. Not before the Olympics, not after the Olympics. It doesn’t make sense.”

It did start to make sense soon after, though, when Brian Roberts, the Comcast CEO, began his pursuit. GE suddenly saw what had been bruited about forever in terms of its relationship with NBC: the limited synergies between its core industrial business and a media company—one with valuable cable assets but a limping flagship, the NBC network.

For a while Zucker believed GE was trying to arrange a sale to Comcast only of the 20 percent stake in NBC Universal still held by the French company Vivendi. When he finally got a clear message from Immelt of GE’s intentions, Zucker faced the obvious question: What did it mean for him?

GE promised a contract extension, which would cover Zucker financially. But even with that concession he would still be cast as a lame-duck manager until Comcast won regulatory approval for the acquisition. Zucker accordingly set out to thwart that characterization by securing assurance from the incoming Comcast executives that he would continue as NBCU’s CEO.

Comcast could not officially comment, but that didnʹt stop many executives claiming inside knowledge of that company from suggesting Zucker was headed for an executive trapdoor as soon as Comcast took charge. As he usually did, Zucker took to shrugging off those rumors with the same confident “We’ll see” attitude that he applied to most efforts to marginalize him. The regulatory process was likely to extend through 2010, giving Zucker, in essence, a year to prove to Comcast’s management that he was a leader they ought to retain.

In the shorter term, Zucker had tried to initiate yet another fix in NBC’s chronically stalled-out entertainment division. In late July, conceding what others in the company—and throughout much of Hollywood—had long before identified as a mismatch made far from heaven, Zucker found a way to part from Ben Silverman, the onetime “rock star” executive he had chosen in 2007 to revivify NBC’s pulseless prime-time schedule. After a couple years of announcements of new directions and much cost cutting, but no real hits, the relationship finally came to the end that outsiders had been forecasting—sometimes in extravagantly vituperative terms—from the beginning. In the end each man quietly acknowledged this particular partnership had been a mistake for both parties.

In place of Silverman’s flash and sizzle, Zucker opted for competence and solidity. Rather than picking anyone new, he simply added to the duties he had already piled on to one of his longest-serving lieutenants, Jeff Gaspin. No other executive at NBC possessed a more successful portfolio than Gaspin, who was in charge of NBC’s entertainment cable channels, like USA, Bravo, Syfy, and Oxygen, which generated by far the largest share of NBC’s earnings.

No one at NBC would ever mistake Gaspin for Ben Silverman; he did not, for example, throw parties accompanied by models in bikinis and white tigers in cages. Even though he had once worked at MTV Networks, running programming for the VH1 channel (where he introduced signature concepts like
Behind the Music
and
Pop-Up Videos
), Gaspin personally exuded conventionality more than dynamism.

But his results were invariably impressive—so much so that Gaspin believed he had deserved the job running NBC Entertainment on both previous occasions when Zucker had hired someone else (first Kevin Reilly, then Silverman). Gaspin’s low-key demeanor and somewhat awkward manner held him back at times. He did not always make a strong first impression. But his apparent diffidence masked consuming ambition and drive, a match for anyone else’s at NBC, or the rest of the TV business, for that matter.

Gaspin looked far younger than forty-eight; of medium height, he was thin but fit, with boyish features and shortish, carefully composed dark hair. His face and hairline had seemed unchanged for so long that some colleagues joked that he must have a nasty self-portrait hanging somewhere.

For the most part, Gaspin got high marks from those under him for his leadership skills. It was true that some noted a shifty quality to his narrow eyes and tight smile, and even some of his body language, which they thought suggested he was always calculating his next move or next word. But in interviews he fired straight and without apparent guile or pretense.

He did seem to have a bit of a jones for the glamour side of the television business, though. One NBC colleague said, “Gaspin coveted the NBC job because it’s a high-profile job and it seemed like he wanted to have the town recognize him as a
macher
. He seemed to always resent that cable was considered a nice little business but never got the same press attention or attention in Hollywood. It always made him crazy.”

Gaspin arrived at NBC Entertainment on July 27, 2009. By then the fall schedule was in place, of course, and he didn’t hesitate to cite the highest priority for the network: “All attention is going to be on Jay.” All through the months since Zucker had set in motion his ten p.m. plan for Leno, Gaspin had been busy with his cable responsibilities and had paid little attention to the new show, other than to be impressed that Zucker had found a way to keep both his late-night stars again. Now that the Jay-at-ten issue was on his own plate, Gaspin had the general conviction that it represented a perfectly reasonable attempt to try something new.

As for what might happen if it didn’t work, Gaspin simply avoided discussing the subject. In his mind he knew what moves he might make if Jay’s show simply cratered, but he kept them to himself. When he analyzed the possibilities for Jay, Gaspin focused on the upside. The financial part could work with a really minimal rating; it certainly seemed like a more creative solution than trying to slam five more dramas on the air when the rest of NBCʹs schedule was bloodied and bowed.

At the same time, Gaspin did not spend much time worrying about the condition of Conan O’Brien’s
Tonight Show
. As July came to a close, the pattern seemed to be holding, with Letterman winning almost every night in terms of total viewers and Conan prevailing in the younger demographics, though his margins had narrowed a bit. For the last three weeks in July, Conan’s weekly margin in the audience between eighteen to forty-nine was .2 of a rating point (about 260,000 people), and each week he trailed Dave by around 750,000 to 800,000 total viewers.

There was certainly reason for some of the concern Gaspin was hearing from New York, but not enough to panic. Early on in his new tenure, he made a point to visit with Conan and have a couple of lunches with Jeff Ross. The conversations went well, from Gaspin’s point of view. Conan seemed to have a firm grasp of the situation. He told Gaspin he knew the show needed to be somewhat broader in appeal, but he assured him he was a “good Irish Catholic boy,” and when the audience came to realize that about him they would join the party.

At lunch with Ross, Gaspin was impressed, as everyone always was, with the friendly, levelheaded, and unflappable producer—and, in this case, with how in touch he was with the issues concerning the show. The numbers had come down, but they were still OK. Ross underscored his belief that what mattered most was doing good shows. Gaspin had no argument with that.

Nor did he dispute Ross’s other observation, that as August headed to a close he and the Conan guys were looking forward to Jay’s arriving at ten. That might actually help in the numbers.

 

In the weeks before his ten p.m. show premiered, Jay Leno would occasionally check in with Conan OʹBrien, just a call here or there to see how he was doing. They would exchange the usual pleasantries. Jay mentioned some plans for his show; they discussed a few guests. Nice to talk to you.

Conan thought nothing much of the conversations. He wasn’t wasting time worrying about Jay’s show. He was supremely focused on his own windscreen, where the view ahead looked sunny and clear. Overall he was well pleased with his team’s early efforts. The shows felt strong; he was proud of them. Of course, he didn’t expect to ease right into the groove, but they were getting there. Conan could see where the show was going and how it was growing. He had enormous fun playing with two wax figures of Tom Cruise and Henry Winkler the staff had found, placing them around the studio in various creepy poses. On August 6, outside the studio, Conan lined up a couple of the cannons that Ringling Brothers used to shoot people across the circus ring. He loaded up Tom and Henry and fired them across the broad driveway leading in from the gate to the lot. The wax figures paid the ultimate price, but Conan scored some big laughs with their explosive demise. The next day the Web site Gawker posted about the bit, calling it “awesome” and “one of the funniest sketches you’ll ever see on a television show.”

All seemed good.

But Rick Ludwin was still hearing from New York.

Ludwin, so long experienced in late night, always kept close tabs on his shows. With Jay yet to go on, Conan dominated his days and nights. Every day the numbers arrived; Letterman, surprisingly, was winning the viewer battle by margins that were on par with the edge Jay used to have over Dave. And most of the press—maddeningly, as far as NBC was concerned—continued to call Dave the winner every night, ignoring the category that really counted, the one where the money was made. NBC PR executives quietly decried many TV journalists for not being sophisticated enough about the business to understand the advantage of securing the younger viewers every night, and the relative worthlessness of Dave’s dominating the fifty-plus category.

Of course, at the same time New York kept asking Ludwin why Conan wasn’t making the show broader to draw some of those older viewers back. While never wavering in his own faith in Conan, Ludwin did understand the frustration of Jeff Zucker and his other colleagues in New York. All Rick seemed to be doing was telling and retelling the same accounts of offering up notes to Conan’s team but not seeing any results.

“And they won’t say why they’re not taking notes?” the New York colleagues would ask, increasingly incredulous that Ludwin’s suggestions had been ignored. “What do you mean, they won’t do that?”

Ludwin was reminded of how Carson would describe trying to make adjustments to
The Tonight Show
: “It’s like trying to change a flat tire while the car is still in motion.”

Conan’s ratings performance, on every radar screen in New York, was also being closely scrutinized out in LA, in the offices where Jay Leno and his team were spending long days preparing for their prime-time debut. This was hardly a new activity; Jay and Debbie Vickers had studied the
Tonight Show
ratings over seventeen years, poring over them as if they were encrypted messages from the Enigma machine. They knew which guests spiked a number (Tim Allen, say) and which ones tanked (no names on the record). They knew which act two bits held the best percentage of the monologue audience. They knew the impact a week of repeats had on the following week’s numbers.

Debbie Vickers noticed, for example, that Conan’s numbers had taken a serious hit the week after his first break from the show. NBC, as the American network rights holder, had a commitment to present a late-night update show for the final full week of the Wimbledon tennis tournament, which would have delayed the start of
The Tonight Show
by fifteen minutes. Nobody wanted to skew Conan’s first-month numbers unfairly down as a result of delayed shows, so, though he had been doing
Tonight
for only a month, Conan took a dark week beginning on June 29.

Vickers noticed that for the week before the break Conan had hit a 1.4 rating in the eighteen-to-forty-nine demo—a still-massive .6 margin over Letterman—and he had beaten Dave for the week by about 227,000 total viewers. When Conan returned the week of July 6, his eighteen-to-forty-nine rating dropped precipitously, to a 1.1, and in so doing he lost exactly half his margin over Letterman in that category. The same week Dave swamped him in the total-viewer category, winning by 862,000 viewers. For the rest of the summer, as Vickers tracked it, Conan never got anything higher than a 1.2 rating among those young adults, and he hit that number only once. Every other week was either a 1.1 or a 1.0. Her conclusion: The Conan
Tonight Show
should not have taken a week off that early in its run, though she knew they were never offered that option.

She and Jay also examined in precise detail how Conan was doing minute by minute in his first half hour of the show. They knew from tracking their own show for so many years that the drop in the quarter hour between eleven forty-five and midnight—when the call of sleep grew insistent—should fall in a range of 18 percent to 23 percent. When Jay did “Headlines,” on Mondays, the falloff was minimal, only about 7 percent. Other bits lost a bigger percentage, but Vickers considered 24 percent high. (If a bit lost that much, it was in danger of being dumped from the regular lineup.)

Checking Conan’s numbers throughout July, Vickers detected drop-offs in the second quarter hour of the show of as high as 34 percent. His audience was still there for him at the top of each show, but they were checking out in alarmingly large numbers—at least as Vickers saw it. And she knew that, if she was seeing it, so were the number freaks in NBC’s research department.

When Jay was asked by reporters gathered at the NBC portion of the press tour that summer if he was following the ratings for his old show, he went big and boisterous: “It’s not my fault! I was happy where I was!” At other moments he did go out of his way to try to be reassuring, saying Conan would be fine—growing pains and all that.

Debbie still chatted frequently with Jeff Ross, as often as three times a week, and she enjoyed the exchanges. She had the impression Jeff was realistic about how the show was faring that summer—which, to her mind, thanks to those quarter-hour breakdowns, wasn’t all that well. More than once during those conversations, Ross, who liked Debbie enormously as well and was by nature a generous spirit, repeated to her his hope that Jay’s arrival at ten might stir up noise about NBC.