The War for Late Night

by Carter, Bill

  But they differed about what was likely to happen. Debbie was convinced Jay would end up at ABC; it was the only thing that made sense. Ross insisted, on more than one occasion, “I think he’s gonna retire.”

  And Vickers always had the same answer: “You’re out of your mind. I mean, you are out of your mind.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE TEN O’CLOCK SOLUTION

  Jimmy Kimmel had come to expect the calls, and throughout the early months of 2008, even after the strike had ended, they came in steadily on his personal line. Never in his life would Kimmel have suspected that it would have come to this, but Jay Leno seemed to be his new BFF. “You really need to do something about your start time,” Jay would tell Kimmel in a familiar line of helpful advice. “It’s killing you.”

  Jay had noticed that, despite its officially listed start time of 12:05 a.m., after the half-hour Nightline, Kimmel’s ABC show rarely ever began until 12:06, and sometimes as late as 12:08. Kimmel, who taped the show around seven p.m. in LA and then virtually never saw it on the air (it made him uncomfortable to watch himself), had not noticed how much the start time was sliding.

  “You need to press them on this,” Jay advised Kimmel. “The start time has to be consistent.” How would Jimmy’s viewers know what time to change channels, or even start their DVRs, if the start time contained that much variation?

  Kimmel never failed to be impressed with Leno’s thorough knowledge of late-night ratings across the board, and he was not a little flattered that Jay seemed to be including him in his comprehensive evaluation of the time period. Jay had also taken to complimenting Kimmel on how much his show had progressed, and how Jimmy himself was growing as a host—and a comic. With Jay, the quality of material always ranked as the highest priority, and he told Jimmy he was more and more impressed by how funny the show was night after night.

  But after the advice and the compliments, Jay had another message for Kimmel. He wanted to tell him how much better everything would be, including that start-time issue, if the two of them could get together—like back-to-back on ABC, with Jay at 11:35 and Jimmy at 12:35. It would be a late-night package, he said, just like what he and Conan had had at NBC.

  The unspoken implication, of course, was that Jay was far down the road in his consideration of jumping to ABC, and he knew one bit of fallout from a decision in that direction would involve Jimmy Kimmel Live: Jimmy would have to slide back a half hour to make this scenario work. More accurately, Jimmy would have to not make a stink about moving back a half hour. The last thing Jay needed was another displaced host pointing fingers at him for wanting to stay on the air at 11:35.

  As Jay pointed out, the 12:35 start time would be better in some ways than what Kimmel had now, both because of that variable in the start time that ABC was throwing in every night and because Jay would be providing a more compatible lead-in than Nightline. Having to follow some depressing or distressing news story was like sticking a knife in any comedy that was set up to open a show. This could really work, Leno insisted.

  Jay didn’t really know the terms of Kimmel’s deal with ABC, but a different outside party did: the management of the Fox network. The truth was, Kimmel could not simply be assigned the 12:35 show after Leno if ABC did sign the NBC star, because his deal contained time-period specificity. If ABC tried to move him backward, Kimmel would automatically become a free agent.

  Did it make sense, Kimmel wondered, to go backward a half hour after five years on the air? Wouldn’t that play like a demotion? Alternately, there might be a plus to pushing back against the shove to a later hour. Breaking off from ABC would make Kimmel fair game for Fox and the eleven p.m. spot on that network. Jimmy’s agent, James Dixon, had made sure Fox had all the information regarding that point.

  Kimmel believed he fit Fox even more snugly than Conan would have. His audience was also young, and more male than any other network’s late-night show. Kimmel also retained some of his connections from his days needling the Fox jocks on Sundays, including the most important one of all—David Hill, who ran Fox Sports and who had hired him for the Sunday football gig. Hill had once headed all of Fox television and still played a powerful role behind the scenes at the company. The welcome at Fox could be sweet.

  And maybe sweetly lucrative. Kimmel and Dixon had heard about the $20 million plus that Fox had offered to Conan in 2001. If the network was going to make Kimmel some crazy offer like $50 million over three years, sticking around for less than $5 million a year to play behind Jay Leno was not going to have much curb appeal. Still, none of these balls was going to be put in play unless and until Jay made his move to ABC.

  The bottom line for Kimmel was: Follow a guy likely to keep winning big in late night, or move on and roll the dice at another network. Kimmel realized the smart play was to stick around as the next act after the top guy; that path promised security and a steady paycheck. If Jay took 11:35, Kimmel didn’t foresee himself falling into the Conan role and asking, “When the fuck is this guy going to retire?” Sure, it might come to that someday, but there was an even bigger age gap between him and Leno: seventeen years.

  In their phone conversations Kimmel would try to press Jay on whether he really had committed to make the jump to ABC. Leno would not say—and couldn’t really, because no firm deal could even be discussed—but Kimmel always came away with the strong impression that Jay was either taking the ABC option seriously or at least pretending to do so.

  As usual Jay mostly kept his own counsel. Aside from his real counsel, Ken Ziffren, he had no hired help to kick the options around with. He had the general sense that ABC presented the best choice for him. It had, at least, a lineup of stations that competed hard in the late local news. But Jay didn’t swallow ABCʹs blandishments whole. While the network touted its potent lineup of prime-time hits, Jay knew that Desperate Housewives was on Sunday and of no help to him there, that Grey’s Anatomy played at nine, not ten, and that Lost was on the air for less than twenty weeks. The truth was, ABC’s ten p.m. lineup—his network lead-in—was barren. NBC, in its sorry state as the fourth-place network, had more strength at ten with the solid Law & Order: SVU on Tuesday and the ancient but still viable ER on Thursday.

  Fox was still out there with an offer as well, but even some Fox executives questioned whether Jay would be interested in a show that started at eleven p.m. Not only was that alien territory for him, but it meant he would not be facing off head-to-head with Dave and Conan on The Tonight Show. The ratings might get parsed; the leader might not be clear cut. At ABC he could win big and make NBC face the full consequences of the decision to evict him.

  As one of the top executives who was then chasing Jay put it, “I expect money will play a secondary role to revenge, and Jay will look to prove to everybody that NBC was wrong. In whatever deal Jay takes, there has to be a big, badass ‘fuck you’ to NBC.”

  Even as he leaned toward ABC and away from Fox, another possibility floated Jay’s way. Sony Pictures Television was looking for a big syndicated late-night franchise to match what it had in the daytime hours with Oprah, with whom the company had a distribution deal. Sony laid a goody-laden package under Jay’s nose: the biggest payday in late night, more than $40 million a year; ownership of his own show and a companion twelve thirty show (the match of Letterman’s deal with CBS); and a landmark new studio on Sony’s Culver City lot. “When he walks on the lot, there’ll be a Yellow Brick Road to the Jay Leno Theater,” said one Sony executive, adding that it would become “the centerpiece of the Sony lot.”

  Sony was even dangling connections to Sony’s music division—if Jay broke new artists on the show he might get cut in on a percentage of their sales. The company promised to think of ways to associate Jay with its PlayStation franchise, maybe promotions in the products, something to help Jay reach the young men obsessed with video games.

  Even with all the perks, Sony’s executives knew their proposal was a long shot, simply because it didn’t come with a
network attached. To make syndication work Sony would have to canvass the country to line up stations. And while entirely confident of success in that endeavor, the Sony representatives expected that Jay would squirm at the notion that his national station lineup was not instantly certain and secure.

  To make that kind of complicated sale, therefore, Sony needed an ally in Jay’s camp. But Jay was agentless, and no one could easily name even an intimate friend who ranked as a professional confidant. Then some Sony executives remembered Jerry Seinfeld’s long-professed friendship with Jay. Sony was in business with Jerry as distributor of the Seinfeld reruns and DVDs. Maybe Jerry was the influencer they needed.

  They approached Jerry’s longtime managers, George Shapiro and Howard West, and struck gold. Jay had already turned to Jerry for advice and he had brought George and Howard in as (quiet) consultants. Classic comic managers from the old school, Shapiro and West, both men in their seventies who seemed like the best sort of showbiz characters from a Woody Allen movie, could be counted on to do only what was in Jay’s best interests.

  One thing everybody involved knew was that, when the time came, Jay would not lack for offers. Of course, not all the bidders were convinced they would even get a crack at Leno, not if NBC blinked and wound up paying off Conan, as some strongly suspected they would. With that in mind, a negotiator for one of the suitors figured it made sense to make another move, purely as a hedge. The executive contacted Ari Emanuel with a message: “Not if but when NBC fucks Conan, we want you to know we’ve got a pile of money to offer your client.”

  When Jeff Zucker met with Rick Ludwin to thrash out the status of the effort to keep Jay in house, nobody fretted about Sony or any other syndication deal. All those people had to offer was money, but with Jay, it was never really about money. He wanted to count people more than bills. He wanted to work someplace where he could win. For Zucker, that had to mean ABC. It fit Jay’s needs, and ABC surely would want a shot at late-night entertainment after all these years on the sideline with Nightline.

  As the early months of 2008 rolled by, Zucker heard from Ludwin that Jay’s hints about taking that left off the freeway and heading over to the Disney lot were only growing louder. Leno gave an interview to USA Today about his auto collection and put an exclamation point on it, telling the reporter, “I am definitely done next year with NBC.” And when asked if he would head out for another network, he offered his version of a cocky comeback. “I’m not a beach guy, and the last time I was in my pool was to fix a light. Don’t worry. I’ll find a job somewhere.”

  This amounted to Jay’s waving a scimitar over Jeff Zucker’s head. Jeff’s calculation was simple: If—really, when—Jay refused all NBC’s various offers, he would take up residence at ABC, and money would surely follow him. Zucker had already received estimates from the network’s research and sales departments of what a Jay-at-ABC outcome would mean: NBC would take a monetary pasting. Despite that, Zucker clung, at least in what he was saying out loud, to the conviction that Conan could still win the young demos, figuring Leno and Letterman would then split the older crowd.

  That might mitigate the financial hit a bit, but if Conan was finishing second—or, heaven forbid, third—among total viewers in late night, it would likely be viewed throughout most of the television world as a calamity for the institution of The Tonight Show. And, of course, a ratings quake like that would kick up a PR tsunami directed at NBC—and Zucker. Having to sell the notion that a Tonight Show attracting fewer viewers than either CBS or ABC was just fine, no problem at all, because NBC still had a .2 rating margin in men eighteen to thirty-four, while at the same time shrugging off finishing dead last in prime time again, might have required more spin than a tropical storm.

  Zucker had assumed the job of chief executive of NBC Universal a year earlier, when Bob Wright retired. GE’s chairman, Jeff Immelt, had said at the time that NBC’s struggles had actually enhanced Zucker’s reputation with the board of directors. “The board and I particularly liked the way that Jeff has handled tough times,” Immelt explained. “He never got down. He always drove the company harder, inspired the team to do better.”

  That was all well and good in 2007, before another year with the NBC network locked in the ratings cellar and before the best-laid late-night plan of 2004 for the seamless transition from Jay to Conan—all completely the inspiration and personal handiwork of Jeffrey Zucker, CEO—took a turn downhill and, in the nightmare scenario with Jay at ABC, headed for the edge of a ravine.

  It was time to run another scenario by Jay.

  Every three months or so Zucker was still making his pilgrimage out to the Burbank dungeon, shining up Jay as best he could, trotting out NBC’s latest version of an attractive alternative to hosting The Tonight Show.

  He offered him the Bob Hope deal: permanent employment with the network, high-profile specials—maybe even a road named after him in Burbank. Jay didn’t even think twice. A few times on TV a year, after being on every weeknight? Not happening.

  Zucker came back a short time later with what seemed like a more promising solution: a big show every Sunday night, in prime time or maybe in late night, like his own version of SNL—but with a different S.

  “Once a week is death,” Jay said. Not only would every good topical joke have been done on the other shows all week—anathema to Leno—but the process of making that kind of show would have made him go boing like an overwound watch.

  “The idea is you write jokes literally until it’s pencils down,” Jay said. “If you do it once a week, then you’re writing jokes twenty-four hours a day and you go batty. And every time you put your pencil down you feel incredibly guilty that you’re not doing a joke. It has to be every day.” For one thing the forced regularity of jokes delivered daily relieved some of the pressure to perform on some extraordinary level. “It’s a little like a newspaper versus a magazine,” Leno explained. “Your standard doesn’t have to be quite as high when you write a story every single day.”

  The answer really boiled down to what it had always boiled down to: “I tell jokes at eleven thirty at night—every night.”

  Back in his New York office, Zucker continued to play a game of Rubik’s Cube with the parts of the NBC Universal empire, looking for the key that would make the colors line up for Jay. There had to be a way, without reaching all the way to the bottom for that last trick in his bag. He was holding out as long as he could, hoping he would never have to unload that one.

  Zucker wasn’t surprised the first time the whispers circulating around the corners of NBCʹs Rock Center executive suite reached him—with no names attached. Would NBC consider, for even half a second, the outrageous? Pay off Conan, wish him well, and keep Jay? That was not the last trick in Zucker’s bag; and for many reasons—at least 45 million of them—he didn’t waste any time responding to the rumors.

  On his next trip west, Zucker tried to address Jay’s baseline concern of telling jokes every night in late night. He offered him a real weeknight late-night show—on cable TV. Jay could have a traditional comedy talk show on the USA Network (owned by NBC Universal, of course), which had the biggest audience in all of cable television. Zucker emphasized that there was only one catch—it would have to start at eleven, not eleven thirty, because they couldn’t undermine Conan by having Jay go on head-to-head with him.

  The NBC boss had arguments to marshal on behalf of this concept, but again, he never really got a chance. Jay did not see himself finishing out his career on cable television, which to him sounded like “living in the basement of your own house.” He was, by his own admission, an older guy who had grown up thinking network was the place to be. “Like my dad would say, ‘Cadillac is the Rolls-Royce of automobiles.’ ” The notion of relocating to cable at that point in his life “just seemed too weird.”

  Jay felt old enough that he figured he shouldn’t start all over in “new media.” He had carefully taken note of what had become of radio’s biggest comic, Howard Ste
rn, when he “sort of went to cable,” as Jay viewed it. Stern had accepted an enormous payday to abandon terrestrial radio in favor of the satellite company Sirius. To Jay, Stern had been a genuine populist—one of his highest compliments, because that was how Jay often identified his own appeal. “The truck driver, the average guy, would listen to Howard wherever, in the cafeteria, the car, the truck,” Jay said. “Then when he went to Sirius, I didn’t hear Howard quoted anymore. People don’t ever say, ‘Hey, did you hear what Howard said today?’ And I’m sure he’s still doing what he always did.”

  The difference, of course, was that in order to hear Stern now, the old truck-driving fan would have to cough up twelve dollars or whatever a month, which surely amounted to a mighty investment for the average Joes whom Jay saw as the backbone of both Stern’s audience and his. If you started making it tough for the average Joes to find you, pretty soon you wouldn’t be a populist anymore. “To me,” Jay said, “the key to The Tonight Show is you’re at the airport and, oh look, it’s on the TV over the bar.”

  Not likely that a show on the USA Network was making it onto many TVs in the airport in, say, Reno. Jay told Zucker his cable idea was a nonstarter.

  As the 2008 calendar rolled through spring, May becoming June, Conan O’Brien could not help but think of the date looming one year in the future. His first night on The Tonight Show was set for June 1, 2009.

  The prospect filled him with a real thrill because O’Brien, despite his long-held Letterman worship, also had a deep personal connection to Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. He associated Carson directly with his dad and the fondly remembered experience of watching The Tonight Show as a twelve-year-old in 1975, in his den, next to his father, and recalling how his father laughed and enjoyed Carson’s matchless delivery and timing.