The War for Late Night (45 page)

Morton had moved to LA after his ouster from Worldwide Pants, which made it convenient when Conan’s show moved west. As the waters deep beneath NBC’s entertainment division were just beginning to bubble and stir that holiday season, Morty and Jeff set a date to meet for dinner. Jeff said he would bring along Rick Rosen, who by that point had become much more Jeff’s intimate friend than merely Conan’s principal agent.

Much of the talk at that meal, as might be expected, centered on
The Tonight Show
. Ross expressed just a little sense of uneasiness about relations with the network. NBC’s notes didn’t seem onerous; he couldn’t quite put a finger on it, but something about the situation felt a bit weird to him.

That tripped a wire for Morty. Back in the days when the Letterman team had been haggling with NBC over their exit, much turned on whether NBC, which had retained the right to match any financial offer Dave had received, could really equal CBS’s terms if NBC didn’t guarantee Dave the 11:35 time period—which it couldn’t do, of course, as it had already filled that slot with Jay Leno. CBS and Dave’s representatives had hammered out a contract that stated in explicit detail that Dave would be programmed each night directly following the late local news on CBS’s stations. The time-period stipulation remained a standard part of Dave’s deals, and Morty knew Jay had the same guarantee.

“You guys got that for Conan, too, I’m sure,” Morton said.

He waited, while watching Rosen and Ross exchange a little look.

“You didn’t?” Morty asked, holding back his next thought, which was,
You’ve got to be kidding me
. He was stupefied by this revelation. Why on earth take a chance like that? No fully stipulated time-period protection?

Both Rosen and Ross indicated that they knew it could be a risky situation, but they didn’t dwell on it. Neither did Morton. But as he left the dinner that night he made a point to remember the conversation. There might be consequences down the road.

 

The end of the November sweep brought no relief for Jeff Gaspin—on the contrary, the gang with the torches and pitchforks gathering outside Jay Leno’s ten p.m. castle had grown larger and louder.

As the November sweep ratings books began arriving, the spate of affiliate calls became a slew. Now the messages began to carry a note of hysteria: “Oh my god, we were
killed
!ʺ

Gaspin, still promising something would be done, had to make his own plea to the station managers: Please do not go public. Several of the stations were threatening to open up to their local press about what a disaster Jay Leno had turned out to be at ten o’clock and how they would take action if NBC did not. The affiliate board urgently requested a conference call, which Gaspin joined in, accompanied by Rick Ludwin. The appeal from the board members was completely professional, but their stance was unequivocal: NBC needed to act on ten p.m., and whatever the new plan was going to be, it could not wait. The affiliates were demanding the action take place in January. They would not even wait for the natural break in the prime-time schedule that NBC had coming in February with the Winter Olympics from Vancouver. If something wasn’t done in January, the stations themselves would seek their own remedies. They would begin preempting Jay—either by moving their newscasts up to ten and pushing Jay back into late night or by acquiring some syndicated hour to stick in at ten—and they would go public with their plans.

Gaspin realized that it was one thing to fight the preemptions with threats to place NBC programming elsewhere, but once the complaints started getting aired in public, the situation would surely descend into nastiness. If the affiliates started bad-mouthing Jay and the decision to put him at ten, Leno would surely be damaged, perhaps irrevocably. Even if the protest started with only a few stations, as few as five or ten, the blood would be in the water. And battling your own partners? What kind of place was that to be in?

Gaspin appealed to Michael Fiorile, the board chairman, to keep the complaints inside the circle for just a little while longer while NBC pursued the alternatives. Fiorile promised to try to control the station bosses as best he could. He and the other board members were pleased that NBC had taken their concerns seriously enough to acknowledge that there was a crisis. But the answer had to come soon, he stressed: “From what I’m hearing, you could start losing stations any day.” What Fiorile had been hearing specifically was that stations might not dump Jay every night of the week, but they would certainly look at a few nights where they could find something higher rated.

Conan was hardly mentioned, but when the station leaders broached the idea of sliding Jay back to late night (some wanted to start him at eleven, after an hour of local news), they argued that one side benefit was that “Jay provided a better lead-out for our local news—more people stayed around after the news to hear his monologue.”

“What if we cut Jay back to three days?” Gaspin proposed.

“No,” Fiorile said. “Maybe two days.”

“I can’t convince Jay to do just two days,” Gaspin replied, repeating his plea for a little more patience.

Several nights after the call with the station managers, Ludwin dropped by Leno’s stage and ran into Jay. “What are you hearing about our show?” Jay asked.

“Well, since you asked me a direct question,” Ludwin said, “I’m hearing that the affiliates are not happy. They are making noises about their poor lead-ins.”

Jay took it in, looked resolved, and said he would call a few of the affiliates himself to try to win them over.

Meanwhile, still looking for any kind of answer, Gaspin had a wild thought about offering Jay four days a week, but making Saturday and Sunday two of them. He had no idea how the network would sell a package like that. It felt like a mess. Besides, all this desperate scrambling didn’t constitute a creative solution. Instead, it had come to seem to Gaspin like nothing so much as maneuvering to satisfy Jay’s contract, rather than actually solving NBCʹs problems.

Consulting on phone calls with Zucker about the imminent affiliate revolt they had on their hands, Gaspin ran down what he now saw as the range of options he had left: Jay cuts down to a couple of nights a week; he gets canceled and leaves altogether; or they somehow find a way to move him back into late night.

“We haven’t given them enough time,” Zucker protested.

“I know,” Gaspin replied. But it looked as if time had run out anyway.

The alternative Gaspin did not present was canceling Conan and simply returning Jay to
The Tonight Show
. He did contemplate the possibility of the two hosts somehow sharing the time period. Alternating nights? Alternating weeks? The notions started getting crazy.

When Zucker, eager for another opinion, called Ludwin, Ludwin went right to the recommendation of pulling back Jay to just one night a week—maybe two, at most. Slot the night on Tuesday, when Jay benefited from that
Biggest Loser
lead-in, and if necessary, maybe add Friday at ten, where he could follow a stable show, the newsmagazine
Dateline NBC
.

Again the obvious question arose: Would Jay be likely to accept so dramatic a reduction in the routine he loved so much—shows five days a week, year round? Ludwin had his doubts, but, then, he had never believed Jay would accept the ten p.m. idea. He didn’t think they should just rule the possibility out.

Two prominent network employees were not consulted for input or ideas on NBCʹs problem: Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien. No one at NBC thought it wise to tip either host that a high-speed train might be hurtling toward him. What sense did it make to spook them with these still-unsettled proposals?

So both shows continued to churn out their comedy bits and interview segments every weeknight. Debbie Vickers, now convinced more than ever that NBC should never have let the affiliate managers in the door, decided to flout the stations’ wishes and go with what she believed was best for the show. She moved Jay’s stronger comedy departments up into act two, where they belonged. Most of the correspondents bit the dust; the stronger ones got slots deeper into the show. She moved the “10 at 10” segment back to the caboose, leading into the local news—at least the stations would have some name celebrity on the air just before they reported the traffic accidents on the local interstate.

At
The Tonight Show
, meanwhile, Sarah Palin finally made her appearance, on December 11—five months after her feud with Letterman, but she was on. The show had found a way to include her that was consistent with Conan’s style—not at the desk for an interview, but instead as a participant (and a rather good one) in a comedy bit. And her guest spot was a walk-on—there had been no advance publicity.

William Shatner, a Conan regular, came out for act two, to do a dramatic, poetry-style reading of Palin’s words, as he had several times before. Accompanied by a beatnik combo featuring bass and bongos, the actor read a selection from her recent autobiography,
Going Rogue
—including the line “I looked down to see the moose’s eyeballs lying in his palm, still warm from the critter’s head.”

Then Palin strode out to wild applause and countered with an excerpt from Shatner’s memoir,
Up Till Now
, a rich trove of funny lines: “As I finished ‘Mr. Tambourine Man,’ I glanced over at Johnny Carson, who had a look of astonishment on his face, vaguely similar to the look on Spock’s face when his brain was missing.”

The ratings needle barely twitched.

 

Rick Rosen had a more than cordial relationship with Jeff Zucker. He liked the guy, even given Jeff’s hostility to Hollywood, where Rick happily lived and worked. Zucker was bright and winning and could parry and thrust in conversation in ways that Rosen—who engaged in plenty of that as a high-end agent—could not help but enjoy. The two men bumped heads on occasion, but not often. That was more Ari Emanuel’s job (though he liked Zucker, too).

A few days after the Comcast deal closed, Zucker signed a three-year contract extension with GE—with the promise of its being carried over to Comcast—and Rosen called to congratulate him. He hadn’t spoken to Zucker in several weeks. When he picked up the phone, Zucker said, a little tweak in his voice, “Oh, now you’re calling. I don’t hear from you for weeks. I consider you my friend. I don’t hear from you.”

“Well, I know what it’s like to go through a merger,” Rick said. “I didn’t want to look like a gossip. So, congratulations.”

“Oh, sure,” Zucker said. “You’re calling because Conan’s ratings aren’t good. That’s why you didn’t want to call.”

Rosen didn’t take the bait. “Conan’s ratings are actually good, in the eighteen to thirty-four and eighteen to forty-nine,” he said. When Zucker did not respond, he continued. “Seriously, I was calling because I know what it’s like when people are gossiping about a merger.”

“Look, we should get together,” Jeff said. “When will you be in town?”

Rick said he would be in the next week.

When Rosen dropped by 30 Rock a week later, he sat down with Zucker in his saunalike office, schmoozing for a while about the business until Zucker spontaneously brought up the subject both men knew would be the main topic of discussion. “Ten o’clock’s a problem,” Jeff said. “I have an affiliate problem.”

This came as no surprise to Rosen, who had seen what Jay’s lead-in numbers were doing to his client on
The Tonight Show
.

“Listen,” Zucker continued. “I’m going to be out in LA the second week of January to show the Comcast guys around. I’d like to get together with you and Conan and Jeff and just talk about the show. Because I want the show to be broader. I just want to talk about it.”

“Fine,” Rosen said, but his antennae were up. “Is there a message here? Is there something I need to be concerned about?”

“No,” Zucker replied, dismissing the worried look on Rick’s face. “I just want the show to be broader.”

Later, as he stepped outside into the refreshingly brisk Manhattan air, Rosen took stock of what he’d heard. Zucker had acknowledged his ten p.m. issue and revealed that the affiliates were up in arms. Rosen tried to guess what NBC might be up to: cutting Jay back to maybe two nights a week? That sounded just fine to Rick Rosen. Anything to get Conan some better lead-in numbers.

 

NBC had already postponed a long-scheduled semiannual affiliate meeting that had been set for December 10 in New York. Realizing it would be faced with nonstop questions about ten o’clock, and that it still had no answers to offer, the network opted to move the session to the second week of January. Jeff Gaspin took for granted that he would find the solution before that date—he had to. The affiliates would surely be canceling Jay with preemptions by then if NBC continued to dither.

All the conversations about the coming shake-up continued to be tightly held; Gaspin trembled at the thought of NBCʹs intentions leaking before anything was settled definitively—and before he had stepped up to inform the two big stars who would be affected. So far the secret was holding. Nobody in the press was even speculating that NBC had to make a change soon, which astonished Gaspin.

He remained open to suggestions and was getting a steady stream of them, most not remotely feasible. Then a New York sales executive contributed an idea—a question, really—and it rang a bell: Could you ever get Jay to do a half hour? Back at 11:35?

The notion that Gaspin had dismissed a month earlier—also from sales—suddenly seemed more worthy of consideration. In a half-hour show Jay could still deliver a monologue, which was what he most wanted to do, wasn’t it? How many times had he said it himself—“All I want to do is tell jokes at eleven thirty at night”? As for Conan, his mantra over the long months and years when he was the gentleman-in-waiting had been how hosting
The Tonight Show
was his ultimate dream. Maybe these two defining life choices could actually be put together. Gaspin started to work the idea out in his head: Jay back at 11:35, but only for a half hour, leading into Conan, still the star of
The Tonight Show
, now a half hour later. Jay would sacrifice a half hour but retain the essential daily ingredient of his life—telling jokes on national television every night. Conan would sacrifice his start time, but he would still have an hour-long show, still called
The Tonight Show
. Wouldn’t that be the fairest outcome for all concerned?