The War for Late Night

by Carter, Bill

  One outside—but familiar—voice checked in almost immediately with both Debbie and Jay. Don Ohlmeyer, now five years out of his leadership position over the network’s entertainment division, had developed close working relationships with both the Tonight star and producer during his time at NBC’s Burbank headquarters. While he no longer had authority over any decisions at NBC, Ohlmeyer certainly had opinions.

  He got to Debbie first—and she had no doubt about where he stood. He was furious.

  Ohlmeyer put NBC’s decision in some historical television context. In the mid-eighties a top programmer at ABC named Lew Erlicht had gained everlasting fame (or infamy) for having turned down a proposal from a couple of producers named Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner for a new sitcom starring Bill Cosby. (Later, Erlicht became the subject of one of the most lasting and likely apocryphal stories in TV lore. Supposedly he was approached in the street years afterward by a homeless guy looking for a handout and said, “Hey, don’t give me your sob story; I’m the guy who passed on The Cosby Show.”) “I think this is a bigger mistake than Lew Erlicht passing on Cosby,ʺ Ohlmeyer declared. ʺWhy do they want to force out the guy with the first or second most profitable show on the network?”

  And the way the situation had been handled made Ohlmeyer livid. Compelling Jay to announce the Conan deal on his own show, he believed, was the most demeaning thing he had ever seen done in the television business. Ohlmeyer had a characteristically colorful metaphor for it: “It’s one thing to stick a knife in a guy’s heart. It’s another thing to stick it up his ass and then stick it in his heart.”

  Ohlmeyer did not even believe NBC’s motivation had any credibility. He suggested that the supposedly imminent offer for Conan from Fox was a fantasy—just Ari Emanuel conning gullible executives. In that view he had some supporters inside NBC, including one major one: Dick Ebersol, the president of NBC Sports and longtime close friend of Don’s from their early days as protégés of the great ABC sports impresario Roone Arledge.

  Though Ebersol was by this point serving as mentor to Jeff Zucker, Zucker had not consulted him on the Jay move, but Dick didn’t like it. Don, crazed about the decision, called Dick to kick it around. Ebersol’s sense was that Conan and Jeff Ross, whom he knew to be savvy guys, would surely perceive Fox as the wrong place for them. And he wished Zucker had asked him or somebody else—like maybe Lorne Michaels—about the decision.

  Ohlmeyer also called Jay directly, basically to tell him, lovingly, that he was an idiot—that he should never have accepted this affront from NBC. He was dominant in late night; nobody should be telling him when to leave the stage.

  However much Jay appreciated the sentiments, it still seemed to him that resistance would have been futile—“You serve at the pleasure of the king,” as he put it—not to mention out of character.

  Jay’s public image had always been that of the blue-collar, work-hard, don’t-expect-much regular guy, so that had to be his for-the-record stance in the wake of NBC’s move. When the topic was raised, he would say things like “There’s nothing worse than whining in show business,” which he frequently compared to the lowest form of commercial enterprise: “You don’t fall in love with a hooker.”

  Love was a prevailing theme of these shrugged-off remarks, and he mockingly equated NBC’s decision with being dumped romantically. “I’ve never been one of those guys, when the girl says, ‘I don’t think we should see each other anymore,’ who says”—and here the vocal pitch would reach a falsetto of mock anguish—ʺʹWhy? Why not? What can I do?’ No”—with his voice returning to its usual register—“I don’t do that. It’s ‘OK, babe, I’m gone.’ ”

  The relationship metaphor had not popped into Jay’s head by chance. Even in his private conversations with Debbie Vickers and others, Leno came off sounding a bit like the jilted lover. He’d been loyal; he’d been true. And yet NBC had picked somebody else. Jay was, by his own description, “brokenhearted.” He sat in his dungeon thinking, We could not have been doing better. We were the only show making money after eight o’clock at night. It doesn’t make any sense.

  It made sense to Jeff Zucker. With Fox breathing down his neck, Zucker—who fully believed that the offer from Fox was real because his trusted friend Jeff Ross had told him so and Ross was no spinner of self-interest-based yarns—seemed to have little choice. If he wanted to preserve his late-night lineup intact for as long as possible, he had to summon up enticement for Conan while locking in Jay. This plan had done it—and, in the bargain, avoided a replay of the Leno-Letterman train wreck. So Zucker was more than pleased with how efficiently it had all gone down.

  But the strategy of “don’t lose Conan” also bred detractors. A veteran producer of entertainment series said, “Conan wasn’t Letterman. That was the difference. I don’t know if anybody looked at Conan and said: That’s the next host of The Tonight Show. He was hot, but, you know, the host of The Tonight Show? It was shocking.”

  So shocking that from the moment of the announcement this producer had doubts about whether Conan should count on it happening. “I wondered that. A lot of people did. I never thought Jay Leno would give up the chair so easily. Jay Leno is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. A big bad wolf.”

  Up in the Burbank offices of The Tonight Show, that was not the animal Debbie Vickers was seeing. She was looking at a guy who felt like a lame duck—and a wounded one.

  Jay was also angry—though he tried to keep that submerged. When Kevin Reilly, the new president of entertainment for NBC, came by asking if Jay wanted to talk about any of this, Leno suspected Reilly had been dispatched by the NBC hierarchy to massage his bruised ego. “Hey, I don’t want a therapist,” Jay told him.

  Vickers felt caught in the middle, serving as mediator between Jay and NBC. On the one hand, she got the network’s point, in theory at least. But she thoroughly understood Jay’s reaction. Why not wait until he at least showed signs of fading before stepping up to erase him?

  Debbie also knew shows had to get produced every night, no matter what was going on inside Jay’s head—and heart. So day after day she did what she could to keep Leno from going to a bad place. And when he questioned again why all this had happened, she would tell him, “Jay, look. It’s about transitions.”

  Jeff Zucker had always emphasized the importance of the transition process at NBC and took pride in how he handled each one. When he ran the Today show, he steered the onetime dominant anchor of the morning, Bryant Gumbel, to the sidelines, replacing him with Matt Lauer, who became even more dominant. More prominently, he helped smooth the reset in an area long afflicted with contentious changes of ownership: the evening news anchor chair. Brian Williams bloodlessly took over for Tom Brokaw on the NBC Nightly News in December 2004, with Tom still ruling in the ratings.

  The success of those decisions reinforced Zucker’s philosophy on big changeovers: You didn’t wait until the incumbent leader had slid into second place; you made your moves when he was on top. The Tonight Show should be no different.

  By 2005, transitions were much on Zucker’s mind, because he had every reason to expect he himself would be part of one. The long and hugely successful tenure of Bob Wright as chief executive of NBC Universal—Wright had skillfully orchestrated NBC’s acquisition of Universal in 2003—was winding down. Zucker, now president of the NBC Universal Television Group, clearly sat in the successor seat. This, despite a record in his previous posting as chief of the entertainment division that even friends labeled mixed and detractors labeled mucked. While it was true that with Zucker at the helm NBCʹs prime-time fortunes collapsed after a long run at the top, his defenders cited his efforts to shore up what had already been a sinking sand castle of programs when he arrived in Burbank in December of 2000. Still, by his own acknowledgment, Zucker had not won any congeniality awards in Hollywood while he was there. With his journalism background he simply didn’t take to the place, its pretensions, its posturing, its moguls, its agents, or its style; and Hollywood retu
rned the sentiments. Still, Zucker retained the respect and support of the only mogul that counted, Jeff Immelt, the chairman of GE, NBC’s corporate boss.

  The network entered 2005, however, beset by a precipitous downturn in its prime-time ratings and profits. Having tumbled from first place to last in the space of one season, NBC’s take in that year’s annual upfront ad sales, which determine the bulk of revenues for each network, would plunge by a staggering $1 billion.

  Fortunately its portfolio of cable networks was proving to be a cash fountain, and increasingly Zucker would point to them as the future—and even the present—of the company. Even with prime time in free fall, the big profit areas of morning and late night seemed secure because of the steps Zucker had taken to facilitate the big transitions. If the Tonight transfer of power worked as well as the Today one had, NBC would maintain ratings dominance even as a new face replaced the old. This strategy would also likely please GE, famous for its corporate personnel policy that demanded successors always be identified.

  As one of the midlevel executives under Zucker explained, “Jeff tends not to project very far into the future and he likes to be a can-do guy. He looked at late night and asked, ‘What’s a win-win scenario where I can put this off, but on paper it looks very smooth and I’m going to keep everybody locked in?ʹ GE loves transitions, so this was going to be a very big thing on the scorecard.”

  Another West Coast executive, unsurprised by Zucker’s heavy emphasis on transitions and lines of succession, described his policy as “Jeff always likes to carry a spare.”

  But moving executives in and out of position was one thing; playing chess with the future of performers was a completely different game. According to one experienced developer of entertainment programming, “Jeff got everyone signed on—it will be a baton handoff. On paper that sounds great, and it sounds very GE-like. Except there are human beings involved, and human beings who are talent, who never, ever go the way you want them to go.”

  Zucker, confident of his abilities in most areas of management, was especially convinced of his skill in talent relations. Throughout his history at Today, he exhibited a deft hand at massaging the egos of big players like Gumbel and Katie Couric (who didn’t much like each other) and later Matt Lauer. All of the stars of Today grew close to him, trusted him, relied on his counsel and advice. In Hollywood Jeff believed he had connected equally successfully with important NBC stars, like the cast of Friends.

  But as he climbed he seemed to tip toward talent himself, at least as some saw it. One NBC executive heard Zucker complain about how his contract situation had been handled, compared to what the network had done for Lorne Michaels in his latest Saturday Night Live deal. “I don’t think Jeff got it,” the executive said, “that Lorne is talent.”

  The executive, who liked Zucker generally, suggested that Jeff and other top leaders across the entertainment industry shared a common genetic trait: “They have narcissistic personalities. Almost every conversation will eventually be about them. But maybe that’s what it takes to be in jobs like that.”

  The personal quality most often cited by Zucker supporters and detractors alike was his high intelligence. But as much as that impressed many, it gave others more reason to question how effective he had actually been as CEO. The knock was that he didn’t delegate well, mainly because he always seemed certain he could do the job as well or better himself.

  “Sometimes it’s a curse to be too smart and think you can do too much,” said an NBC executive who worked closely with Zucker for a time.

  The area that clearly needed the most attention at NBC was its crumbling entertainment division in LA. When Zucker left Hollywood in 2003 to return to New York and his new corporate assignment, he had hired Kevin Reilly to rebuild the foundation of the prime-time lineup. But it wasn’t as though Reilly had free rein. “Jeff ran every scheduling meeting,” said one of the lower-level development executives. “Kevin didn’t handle Jeff well, and Jeff didn’t handle Kevin well.”

  Reilly and others in the entertainment division felt ping-ponged at times by Zucker’s rapidly changing assessments of shows, trends, the business in general. His strongest leadership quality, his total sense of confidence, had a downside in what staff members came to identify as “Zucklamations.” As one longtime NBC executive—and Zucker backer—acknowledged, “Jeff does have a thing for proclamations and pronouncements.”

  These could deal with smallish details, like the breakdown of a show’s format “It was like with the show Las Vegas,ʺ said the development executive, citing an NBC drama of this era that starred James Caan. “According to Jeff, that could be 85 percent self-contained and 15 percent serialized.” At other times the proclamations could affect weightier issues. At one point, several NBC executives recalled, Zucker decided that no single-camera comedy—shows like Scrubs or 30 Rock, which were shot on film like little movies with no laugh track—could ever be a hit. NBC should therefore lean toward three-camera comedies—shows like Two and a Half Men and Friends, shot on tape like little plays in front of studio audiences whose laughter accompanies the jokes.

  That decision almost cost NBC the one new breakout comedy of Zucker’s tenure, The Office, which Jeff did not initially embrace. After its first six episodes aired to minimal impact in the ratings, Zucker pushed for the show to be canceled, announcing during an NBC program strategy meeting, according to an executive who was there, “The audience has spoken—it’s outright rejection.” But Kevin Reilly liked the series a lot—as did Bob Wright (and even Jeff Immelt). The show hung on, and then took off, at which point Zucker, too, finally came around.

  In private conversations with colleagues and friends, Zucker would occasionally open up about the economic squeeze he was feeling from GE. What was clear from staff meetings was that he was under constant pressure to “make the quarter,” as he would put it. Somehow NBC’s balance sheet needed to tip upward for each three-month period, which led to budget-tightening measures aimed at tiding the network over for a quarter, but they only seemed to increase the problem in the following quarter. As one entertainment division executive explained, “It always involved cutting. ‘Maybe if we start this pilot later we can make the quarter. We gotta make the quarter.’ It seemed we were always shoving problems off to the next quarter.”

  In early 2005 one major financial decision in particular was generating significant fallout for the entertainment division. Ebersol had put NBC in position to grab the prime-time NFL package, and move it from Monday to Sunday night, where it would steer clear of interrupting NBC’s lucrative late-night lineup. But Ebersol gave it to Immelt straight: The deal, if the network could step up to it, would provide a huge, dependable audience that could be introduced to NBCʹs other shows, but it would mean a $150 million loss on the books every year.

  Immelt told Ebersol that wasn’t tolerable. But Dick said he had a way to account for $100 million of the annual loss. He explained that he had worked it out with Zucker that the entertainment division would give up $100 million a year out of its program development budget. The rationale: With twenty weeks worth of four-hour-long football coverage every Sunday in the fall, NBC would not need nearly as much money to develop shows for the rest of the week.

  Immelt agreed to accept the deal (and the loss of $50 million) as long as the entertainment division was audited every year to make sure it was cutting that $100 million from its budget. Although Zucker was thrilled to get a Sunday night of guaranteed huge ratings every week, some of his West Coast executives worried about how starved they were going to be for development funds, especially at a time when NBC desperately needed to find hits to drag itself out of the ratings basement.

  But by then Zucker was convinced that NBC wasn’t really a network-based company anyway. With a portfolio of assets that included the USA Network, Bravo, MSNBC, and CNBC, Zucker pushed for a new emphasis. “We’re a cable company,” he began to proclaim, with more and more frequency—and to more and more dismay among
those trying to revive that network business. Or star in it.

  Jay Leno certainly fit that description. To him only the network business really mattered. The game that ultimately counted was the daily comparison between network late-night shows. He knew he was number one; then came the other guys. Few if any other late-night hosts broke down the numbers—and every other clue to potential adjustments they might provide—the way Leno did. He knew what percentage of his audience stayed only for the monologue, when exactly they left, how many people he retained for each of the bits in act two (the comedy act after the monologue). He broke it all down to the minute.

  “He’s a real student of this stuff,” said one of the principals at a competing show, who marveled at the detailed analysis Leno could offer for every one of the network late-night shows. “He loves the game. He really understands the ratings. He knows the lead-ins and how they affect his audience.”

  Leno found it amazing that he was considered some kind of oddball or sellout for paying attention to the minutiae of the ratings. He had spoken to at least a half dozen hosts of late-night shows that had failed since he’d won the job in 1992, and invariably they told him the same thing: “We just do our shows. We don’t look at the ratings. We don’t even want to know.” To Jay that attitude meant you might be able to develop a niche audience, but there was no way you were going to grow to be widely popular.

  For years Leno brushed off the plaints coming from the camp of his main competitor, David Letterman, about how Dave was losing chiefly because he suffered under the handicap of dreadful lead-in ratings from CBS’s woeful lineup of shows at ten p.m., while Jay was able to bask in the reflected glory of ten p.m. NBC blockbusters like ER and Law & Order. But as NBC’s prime-time fortunes melted away in mid-decade, and CBS came on with a rush thanks to powerhouse ten p.m. shows like CSI: Miami, Leno pressed on, undiminished and (virtually) undefeated. The arguments for Dave’s secret superiority became muted.