by Carter, Bill
Of course it was near impossible not to start out rooting for a guy who seemed to have been pulled off the subway and handed a television show. Conan’s other early advantage was his relatively low profile in what had become a barroom brawl between the leading men in late night. Letterman stormed onto the air on CBS—as NBC suspected he would—and was already battering a reeling Leno. A bit later in September, Chevy Chase’s much anticipated new effort on Fox hit the air, but it was accompanied more by a thud than an explosion. A disaster that made for easy skeet-shooting for the critics, it helped keep the spotlight away from the new show on NBC.
Conan had the predictable growing pains—the learning curve was proving expectedly steep. But it occurred to him that even on the nights when the show seemed to be spinning out of his control—or else lying there like a beached tuna—something happened, one little moment, a witty remark or a shtick he tried with the camera—and the promise flashed through. To make Conan more comfortable they had installed one of the show’s new writers, Andy Richter, as a sidekick. It came about organically. The two of them had hit it off screwing around before the test shows. Jeff Ross saw that and guessed having somebody on set who Conan could “fuck around with” would help steady his jittery host. What they were all trying to do was different, even breakthrough, and some nights they did push it too far. “We were cocky,” Smigel said. “We really set out to do weird stuff. We just wanted to blow people away with how different the show was.” To Ross the whole show seemed to be “flying by the seat of our pants.”
In October, after only five weeks on the air, the Chevy Chase show was canceled. One of the writers broke the news to Conan, with a note of glee in his voice: They had already outlasted one of the big guys. Conan didn’t see it that way. “Oh, shit,” he said. “They’re going to reload.”
The mocking fusillade did begin soon after—not in a concentrated way, but more with a random shot here and there. The most persistent assault was coming from a high-profile voice. Tom Shales, the TV critic of The Washington Post, who had gained a reputation as the wittiest (if sometimes most purposefully astringent) assessor of the medium, with a special interest in the late-night arena, had already fired a few salvos toward Conan. He was one critic who had hated the opening night, having labeled Conan “a living collage of nervous habits—he giggles and titters, jiggles about and fiddles with his cuffs. He has dark, beady eyes like a rabbit.”
But five weeks later, Shales had poured a new store of powder into his cannon, and Conan was about to walk headfirst into the line of fire.
Looking to capitalize on the demise of Chevy Chase, NBC had set up a round of interviews for Conan, with Charlie Rose of PBS and a host of morning-drive radio DJs, which he would do from a studio in a single marathon session. Blissfully unaware of what had been printed that morning in Washington, he arrived for the round of publicity and discovered that every one of the questioners had seen Shales’s latest commentary about the show, and every one of them opted to read selections from it.
Such as: “Chevy Chase has done the honorable thing. Now Conan O’Brien should follow him off the cliff. . . . Let the host resume his previous identity: Conan O’Blivion. Hey you, Conan O’Brien! Get the heck off TV.”
The piece also managed to brand Andy Richter a “nitwit sidekick” and declared the show “as lifeless and messy as a road kill.” Shales suggested that Conan was “out of his head if he thinks the show is working” and had a firm recommendation for NBC: “Cancel O’Brien now.”
All Conan could do was pretend to find some humor in this drubbing, making as many self-deprecating jokes as possible. For hours worth of interviews the pummeling went on. When it was over, O’Brien walked outside in the rain to a waiting car. It was a weekday; he had a show to do. He slouched into 30 Rock, and in the Late Night offices the staff watched him slink past, afraid to say anything. O’Brien, the man who could fly high on comic inspiration, was also capable of the deepest of lows when he spiraled all the way down. He walked into his office, passed his assistant, and closed the inner door behind him. He made his way behind his desk, stood there for a second, then bent, went to his knees, and crawled down under it.
He rolled on his back and just lay there until after a while he heard the door creak open a crack. The door closed, and a few minutes later—Conan still hadn’t moved—it opened again. He recognized the shoes: Ross.
“Are you OK?” Jeff asked, masking the concern with a little touch of playful rue.
“I’m gonna be fine,” the voice from under the desk said. “I just need to be under here for a little bit and just lie here.”
For the most part, all of them—Michaels, Polone, Ross—tried to shield Conan. Not from the press; that was impossible. What they worried about was his getting wind of the building dissatisfaction at the network. The numbers weren’t very good—not awful yet, but clearly a concern. Worse was the network’s assessment of the show. The executives wasted few chances in ripping it in private conversations; Conan was getting no better. The comedy was more weird than funny. He didn’t listen to the guests in the interviews. And Andy . . . He was like an affront to the concept of entertainment. Polone got a call from Warren Littlefield excoriating the show and Conan. “And get that fat, fucking dildo off the couch!” he demanded. Most everybody on the show loved Andy; so, apparently, did the studio audiences. But Polone had little ammunition to fire back. The ratings showed no growth, and the critics were annihilating Conan.
For that, OʹBrien could not fully blame them. He could feel the show coming together in little ways, but he knew it wasn’t there yet—or even close. How could he blame anyone, viewers or critics, who had been accustomed to seeing someone like Letterman at that hour? It struck him that the comparison might be one his dad would have made about the great Red Sox star of his generation: “Ted Williams has departed the field. But here to replace him, ladies and gentlemen, number seventeen and a half, Chip Whitley!” Conan pictured a kid running out onto the field in a diaper and saying in a high-pitched voice: “Hi, everybody! Gee, I’m gonna miss Mr. Williams too, but don’t you worry!” And then the kid would pop out.
The flaws were everywhere. The comedy might miss, and then the distraction would spill over into the guest interviews. About four months in, his old Chicago pal Jeff Garlin called with some advice. “I don’t know what anybody is telling you. You’re doing a great job. You’re funny. But in the interviews you’re just not listening to a word anybody says. You really need to get into listening.”
It was midway through the first year that Ross heard the serious rumblings begin. Affiliates were unhappy; what if they started to preempt? NBC had already hired a young hotshot named Greg Kinnear to succeed Costas as host of Later. Word was filtering out about how much the network loved the guy—and why the hell hadn’t they given him the 12:35 show in the first place?
In the spring of 1994 Conan was due for a twenty-six-week pickup—Conan had a one-year deal but the show had an original commitment of only twenty-six weeks. Polone dutifully called John Agoglia, the deal guy for NBC, who told him they were picking up Conan for the next six months. Polone said that was great, but the contract required he get the extension in writing.
“I can’t give it to you in writing right now,” Agoglia told him. “We’re having some affiliate problems. But don’t worry about it; you’re picked up.” He said he merely needed another month before committing the deal to writing.
“Well, if we’re picked up, what’s the difference?” Polone said. “You’re just giving me a piece of paper. I’m not sending it to The New York Times.”
Agoglia hedged again, assuring Polone that he needn’t worry about it. But Polone did, becoming suspicious that everything with NBC was not what it seemed. The Kinnear talk only made him more uncomfortable, but he had no juice to use against the network. They would simply have to wait for the paperwork.
As spring turned to early summer, Conan remained on the air, but without a document that made
his renewal official. Polone went off to Cancun on vacation, but on Friday of his week away he decided to call in to NBC; the time on the extension was up, and all was still quiet at the network.
“Yeah, we got a problem,” Agoglia finally admitted to Polone. “We’re going to be picking him up week to week.”
“Week to week!” Polone exploded. “You told me we were picked up for the twenty-six weeks. You lied to me!”
Agoglia, all business, never thrown by high emotion, shrugged that off. “What are you gonna do?”
Polone called in to New York and broke the news to Ross, who didn’t share it with Conan until after the show that night, honoring a fundamental rule of good show business: Don’t rattle your star before a performance. None of them could believe NBC was pulling this. Week-to-week renewals? No one had ever heard of such a thing. O’Brien, Ross, and Smigel met in Ross’s office after the show and put the speakerphone on the floor. The three of them—partly to hear better, partly just worn down from another week of shows and more disrespect from NBC—sprawled themselves on the rug surrounding the phone as they put in a call to Cancun.
Ross argued that Polone had to make a counter to NBC right away. “If they aren’t going to give us the six-month pickup, we can’t give them week to week. The blood’s in the water then. Everyone will take it that we’re being canceled.” How many people—writers, segment producers, publicists for the guests, anyone—would stick with a show that was on a weekly deathwatch? “We gotta get them to go up to thirteen-week renewals,” Ross insisted.
That was the plea that Gavin made to Don Ohlmeyer, appealing to Don’s sense of fairness. Polone had always been impressed that Ohlmeyer, who started in the business as a sports producer (most famously of Monday Night Football in its heyday), was not a typical network executive. “In the entertainment industry,” as Polone assessed it, “you very rarely sit down with someone and have a bacon cheeseburger and then light up a smoke afterward. You’re on a different planet when that happens.”
Ohlmeyer listened to Polone’s plea and granted a reprieve. NBC would extend Conan in thirteen-week increments. At the same time, he set some ratings targets Conan would have to reach. Instead of a vote of no confidence, they now had a vote of minuscule confidence.
To Ross, NBC’s moves felt cheesy—and personally shitty. Conan was making so little by late-night host standards—only about $1 million—that it would have been a minimal risk to NBC to extend him the full six months and pay him off if he didn’t cut it. To make them grovel like this had an edge of purposeful nastiness to it.
Now it was a matter of Conan’s putting in the hard work and somehow finding some magic—along with a dose of good luck—as he churned out shows night after night. Whether Conan had studied a little Samuel Johnson in a British Lit class at Harvard and knew the famous quote or not, he was certainly living it:
“Depend on it sir: When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”
Ross had good enough contacts inside the network to know that if Greg Kinnear decided he wanted a long-term career as a late-night star, they were toast. Then he heard Kinnear was reluctant. Maybe he wouldn’t do a test for a 12:35-style show; maybe he wanted to be a movie star instead. It could all be posturing, but whatever it was, it seemed to be buying them some time.
The ratings demand set by Ohlmeyer was the looming noose. Get there or they were done. Conan pictured himself as a farmer who had been told, “If it doesn’t rain within a month, we’re taking your farm.” So what was the farmer supposed to do? “Work hard and pray for rain.”
The drought went on, through late 1994 and into 1995. But good things were happening elsewhere, namely in Kinnear’s movie career. He won the third lead in a Harrison Ford movie, Sabrina, leaving NBC without another obvious option in late night. And there was luck on another front. Letterman, who in his CBS deal controlled the 12:35 time period as well, passed on choosing a young comer for the slot and decided on one of his personal favorites, Tom Snyder.
As good—and often unpredictable—as Snyder was as an interviewer, he was no comic. And he was twenty-seven years older than Conan O’Brien. Dave might have opened the trapdoor still trembling under Conan’s feet by selecting someone like Jon Stewart, who would have challenged him for young viewers. Instead he gave Conan free access to them. The under-forty-year-olds who watched Jay or Dave had little reason to watch Snyder. More and more of them tried out Conan—and if they did, they at least started to see some truly original and often bizarre comedy ideas.
Conan had a guy come on as “the Lenny Bruce of China,” a beat comic who told jokes in Chinese accompanied by a translator. Conan was given advice in a “Devil-Bear” sketch, which placed the devil on one shoulder and a bear (for no good reason) on the other, giving him useless opinions. Fulfilling another of his early promises to Ohlmeyer was “Polly, the NBC Peacock,” a puppet version of the NBC logo, who came on and trashed shows on the other networks in especially vituperative terms. And Conan found increasingly offbeat ways to involve just barely not-obscure showbiz vets like Nipsey Russell and Abe Vigoda.
A hint of favorable buzz began in mid-1995, but NBC wasn’t listening to the buzzing. Conan stayed in place, but he was still rolling over the absurd thirteen-week renewals.
And then, suddenly, it rained.
On June 18, 1996, Tom Shales officially recanted. With a headline that read, “So I Was Wrong,” Shales switched sides with a vengeance. Acknowledging that “some critics, present company included, were excessively mean,” Shales declared that OʹBrien had gone through “one of the most amazing transformations in television history.” He quoted Letterman’s recently fired executive producer, Robert Morton, saying that Conan was doing “the most innovative comedy in television,” and cited numerous recent O’Brien bits that had scored. In perhaps the most startling turnaround, Shales even revised his “nitwit sidekick” appraisal of Andy Richter, saying Andy now was a “key to the success of the show.”
The conclusion of Shales’s reassessment could not have resonated more plangently in the heart of a lifelong Dave worshipper. “Conan OʹBrien is more than just an adequate Letterman substitute,” he wrote. “He’s his own secret ingredient, and his show an inspired absurdist romp.”
Forever after, Conan would cite that piece as the moment that heralded the turnaround. By September he was on the cover of Rolling Stone, and then the cover of Entertainment Weekly. Ratings were climbing, to Ohlmeyer’s designated level and then well past. Among the young-adult audiences he began to soar, doubling the ratings Snyder was attracting in that group. Multiyear pickups—with actual raises for Conan and his staff—were on the way.
Warren Littlefield called and impressed Ross with how manfully he stepped up. “Guys, I want to apologize,” Warren told them. “I was wrong.”
The lesson seemed clear to Conan and his support group: When the network and the rest of the outside world step in to push you around, tell them what is best for them to hear, but don’t flinch. Just shut them out. They don’t get it, they never really would, and they don’t belong with those who do get it.
As Jeff Ross worked it out, “We learned at that point: You just ignore everybody and do your own show. Do the polite thing—and then you ignore them.”
CHAPTER FOUR
LANDSCAPE AT LATE NIGHT
In the days after Jay Leno’s September 27, 2004, announcement that he would be leaving The Tonight Show in five years’ time, Debbie Vickers knew the most important part of her job would be to calm her star down. Jay’s mood, always so unruffled by almost any real-life development, was darker than she could ever remember seeing it. She understood. NBC’s decision to designate Conan OʹBrien the official future of The Tonight Show had left Jay incredulous—and reeling. Within days of his announcement—on the air, no less—Jay was overcome with what one colleague labeled “postpurchase anxiety.”
One NBC executive, only slightly an acquaintance of Leno’s,
passed him in the hall just three days after the official word had gone out. Upon greeting him with a “Hey, Jay, how’re you doing?” the executive was met with a punch line response:
“I’m fine for a guy who’s gonna be out of work! Put out to seed!”
It didn’t help when guests came on the show and naturally made reference to the big recent news, almost always expressing shock that Jay, of all people, the man who considered vacations—or time off of any kind—even less appealing than green vegetables (which he never ate), had agreed to turn in his talk-show badge.
“Yeah, I’m retiring,” Jay would say, in a half-mocking, half-pained way. And then he would quickly change the subject. How could he discuss it? He didn’t really understand it.
Nor did other people. Around Hollywood, many in the industry found themselves mystified by NBC’s move, which just seemed inexplicably bizarre. Who in show business made calls five years in advance about anything? The status quo changed every five minutes. One agent with clients connected to late-night said, “Who the fuck let this happen? This guy is so proud that he doesn’t have an agent. Let me tell you something, any agent with a heartbeat would have told NBC, ‘Go fuck yourselves. This guy is winning. He’s going nowhere.’ Who makes a move like this?”
Another executive with long connections to late-night programming observed, “I thought they were out of their minds. Conan had to say yes if he had that drive that most comics have regarding The Tonight Show. I also thought it might explode in his face that he was gunning for Jay’s job. Jay’s politeness toward Conan seemed thin to me. But you don’t take someone who’s doing very well in the ratings off the air—I’m sorry. What is the life expectancy of an executive like Jeff Zucker? Five years? Seven? So he’s really worried what the company is going to be like in five years? Hell, he’d be lucky to be in that position in five years.”
