The War for Late Night

by Carter, Bill

  But this was business, and from a television executive’s perspective he saw Conan as possibly naive, or maybe just too insulated on one of those little islands that seemed to spring up and form spontaneously around every late-night star. Whatever it was, Ebersol meant to break through with some down-to-earth business-reality talk.

  After touring the Tonight set, Ebersol, favorably impressed, repaired to Jeff Ross’s still unfinished new quarters upstairs in the adjacent office building, where he sat down with Ross and Conan. Ebersol first laid out some suggestions for how they could team up in Vancouver. The first week of the games Conan would not be preempted by a late-night Olympics show, so he would get a week of regular shows with skaters and skiers providing likely the biggest lead-ins of his life. Ebersol promised to deliver some Olympics guests for the shows—and with those tie-ins NBC would be able to charge a premium to advertisers for Olympics-themed programming.

  For the second week, with a late-night Olympics program taking over for The Tonight Show, Ebersol had been mulling a plan for a two- or three-minute Conan feature each night, something that would capture Conan’s take on the big news from the games the day before. They would find a special sponsor and sell it separately. Ebersol would insert the bit somewhere within the first ninety minutes of each night’s coverage.

  The proposal sounded great to O’Brien and Ross, and Conan had every confidence he could pull something like that off.

  The preliminaries out of the way, Ebersol moved on to the central purpose of his visit. “I want you guys to know, I’m really here to say, one more time, how important it is to broaden out the comedy and think of those Midwest markets.”

  Then Ebersol launched again into the story of his 1975 visit with Lorne Michaels to the undershirted Johnny Carson in his Burbank lair, and Johnny’s advice about slotting the best comedy at the top of the show—and playing well in Topeka and Des Moines.

  Ebersol believed he detected that both men were well aware of the Carson anecdote, so he presumed Ross had filled Conan in on it.

  The conversation remained entirely collegial, but Conan made much the same point he had made on the air on his farewell Late Night show. He had made up his mind to do the things he had always done, to be himself.

  “I’m not telling you not to be Conan O’Brien,” Ebersol said. “I’m suggesting things to change at the top of the show.”

  None of this advice struck either OʹBrien or Ross as either unusual or new. Broaden your appeal? Conan’s internal reaction was the same as it had always been: OK, good; thanks for that. It didn’t seem that Ebersol was delivering anything like actionable notes. It reminded Conan of typical network chitchat. The meeting didn’t last more than fifteen minutes. As it broke up they all promised to talk more about the Olympics idea when Dick’s plans were further down the road.

  After he left, Conan and Ross thought little of the meeting in terms of what it meant for Tonight, other than that Ebersol, whom they both basically liked, came across as someone else professing to know more about their show than they did—and that he was awfully full of himself.

  Ebersol, for his part, got into his car and drove off the lot, a riffle of foreboding running through his stomach.

  At ABC, Jimmy Kimmel had more than a little natural curiosity about how Conan O’Brien would fare—and some reason to regret what might have been.

  If there really had been a might have been, that is.

  What Kimmel and a number of executives both inside and outside ABC knew was that back in January, a short time after the announcement that Leno was moving to ten, there had been a frisson of activity surrounding ABC’s late night—activity that surely would have involved Jimmy. Maybe it was just the network’s entertainment division spinning out potential alternatives, having missed out on Leno, as ABC executives later claimed. But executives conversant with ABC’s late-night plans concluded that the network was working on a plan to go after Conan on NBC by moving Jimmy to 11:35. Of course, none of that had been run by ABC’s news division, which would have risen up in righteous anger at another assault on Nightline.

  The executives aware of ABC’s planning said that Kimmel and his agent, James Dixon, had had quiet discussions and meetings with ABC executives, and several network insiders presumed that an offer to move Kimmel up to 11:35 was imminent. By that point ABC had some results from the extensive late-night research it had commissioned. One finding was that a Conan OʹBrien Tonight Show would likely be vulnerable to a show on a competing network with another young host. At that point ABC was considering which of three potential moves to take advantage of this situation made most sense: to have Kimmel go for broke and jump ahead of Conan in the 11:35 slot by months, probably starting as early as March; to sneak ahead of him just by a week or so in May, in order to steal some of his thunder; or, alternately, to hold off until October, when, if the research estimates proved out, Conan would be struggling.

  “ABC can deny whatever they want,” said a longtime network executive connected to the discussions about Kimmel, “but they met with Kimmel and he really thought he was going to 11:35.”

  When word of the possible move for Kimmel leaked, ABC did deny it. Anne Sweeney, the network’s chief executive, wrote the notion off as too unlikely to qualify even as far-fetched—words that comforted the news division.

  The maneuvering was complicated by the dysfunctional chain of command at the network. Most staff members (and indeed much of the rest of Hollywood) knew that the entertainment division boss, Steve McPherson, technically reported to Sweeney, but in practice the two didn’t get along at all and barely spoke to one another. “At ABC, there’s Bob Iger, Anne Sweeney, and Steve McPherson,” said one long-serving ABC employee, explaining the network hierarchy. “Anne and Steve hate each other. Bob gets along with both of them.”

  One hint of ABC’s possible late-night intentions was revealed when Iger, the Disney chairman, led a little hunting foray into the territory of the E! cable channel in pursuit of that network’s late-night host and signature star, Chelsea Handler. That approach may have been totally serious, or merely a little fun for Iger. The fun theory held that Iger might simply have been messing with—or perhaps doing a favor for—one of his oldest Hollywood cronies, Ted Harbert, a former ABC and NBC Entertainment executive, now the head of the E! channel (and, not coincidentally, the man in Chelsea Handler’s life at that point). What was indisputable was that ABC executives did meet, rather publicly, with Handler at the Beverly Hills Polo Lounge.

  Handler, blond, toned, and thirty-five, from Livingston, New Jersey, had made a splash—and a name—with a series of best-selling books about her outrageous (in a funny way) drinking and sex habits. She became immensely important to E! (and Harbert) because her show, Chelsea Lately, was scoring with an audience of women between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four, a demographic that was not being reached in as big numbers by any of the guys in late night.

  After the meeting between ABC and Handler and her agents, she was able to land a new, more lucrative contract at E!. Handler later alluded to her dealings with ABC when she acknowledged in a Web interview with CBSʹs Katie Couric that she had, in fact, been approached for a network job, but admitted she didn’t think she was “ready to graduate to that particular point.” For one thing, Handler said she didn’t think she would be able to say the things on network television that she routinely got away with on cable. (Her show chewed up low-rung celebrities.) For another, she wanted to be able to express views that were “more pointed” than “somebody like Jay Leno, who has to be nice to everybody.”

  The job Handler’s backers reported ABC had pitched to her was as follow-up act to an upgraded Kimmel, in an 11:35 to 12:35 pairing. But there may, in fact, have been no real spot for her at ABC. One proposal for Kimmel that ABC executives had discussed internally would have re-created the original format of The Tonight Show at ninety minutes. In the shrinking economy of late night, a ninety-minute show could have real appeal. The costs w
ould be negligibly higher than an hour show, but the extra half hour would easily cover that and more with the additional commercial time it could sell. Jettisoning Nightline would also have wiped out the high cost of that show.

  But at the same time these machinations were roiling behind the scenes at ABC Entertainment, Nightline was quietly restoring itself to competitive health at 11:35. With a new format that worked more as a newsmagazine than as an interview show, Nightline had grabbed a core audience that, while not overpowering, was sizable enough to defy expectations that the show was sliding toward cancelation.

  ABC often hawked ratings numbers that showed Nightline approaching or even beating the late-night entertainment shows on NBC and CBS. But the network always compared its half-hour score for Nightline to the hour score for Leno and Letterman. Of course, both those shows lost viewers every minute they were on the air because they were running late into the night. In a fairer comparison of the viewership for the first half hour of each show, Nightline almost always came in third. Still, because the entertainment shows were clearly fading in ratings, Nightline became more viable.

  Kimmel, meanwhile, remained a personal favorite of ABC executives, who were more and more convinced of his growing talent. He made a tradition of appearing at every ABC upfront in May, where he would invariably deliver an outstanding (and scathing) monologue. In 2009, on May 18, the same day Jay Leno crashed and burned onstage downtown, Kimmel, up at Lincoln Center, told advertisers, “Everything you hear this week is bullshit. Let’s get real here. Let’s get Dr. Phil here. These new fall shows? We’re going to cancel about 90 percent of them, maybe more. Every year we lie to you, and every year you come back for more. You don’t need an upfront; you need therapy.” He also took a little shot at the age of the likely fans for NBCʹs upcoming ten p.m. star, saying that NBC was giving “Jay’s viewers exactly what they want: an early-bird special.”

  In reality ABC could not have been more excited about the upcoming changes at NBC both in late night and at ten p.m. Its research had come back with a strong answer to the question of whether ABC should feel compelled to follow NBC’s lead: Don’t even think about it. An ABC executive made a prediction: “We know it’s going to be bad. It’s going to be a disaster. They can say whatever they want about saving money, but they are going to kill their local news and this is not going to last.”

  As smoothly as all the deal points had gone with Conan’s shift to The Tonight Show, one thread of his old deal had been left dangling—and on the end of that line was an awfully big fish.

  Lorne Michaels had more than discovered Conan O’Brien; he had basically sprinkled magic dust on him and created a star. Part of his reward for that was an ongoing financial stake in Late Night. Michaels retained an executive producer credit on Late Night that provided him with a weekly fee of about $25,000.

  From the start no one disputed there was real value in this arrangement, even though Lorne did not sustain any direct day-to-day role on the show after its initial years. Lorne had put Conan on the air, fought for the show, and protected it as best he could in its rocky early days, influencing its style from its conception. But as he saw it, Late Night then became Conan’s show, in the same way that the sitcom Lorne had helped create, 30 Rock, became Tina Fey’s show.

  Still, as the start of The Tonight Show loomed, the question of whether Lorne’s financial association would continue lingered for some time unresolved. NBC’s position was that some members of the Conan side had sent a message indicating that they were cool to the idea of keeping Lorne on. For their part, Conan’s reps swore that they steered clear of any and all financial arrangements between NBC and Michaels, because the network paid the fee; they didn’t.

  However the process unfolded, the result was that Lorne Michaels received no EP credit on The Tonight Show and no weekly fee.

  Michaels raised no protest. The Tonight Show was going to be in LA, three thousand miles away from New York, where he was already deeply involved with SNL and Jimmy Fallon’s new 12:35 show. Michaels himself interpreted the decision as Conan simply deciding to leave the nest. Conan had tossed that bouquet of gratitude Lorne’s way on the last Late Night show, and Michaels had been moved by it.

  Lorne never said a word to Conan or Jeff Ross about the change in the arrangement. But Zucker, for one, concluded Michaels was hurt more than he ever would say to have that association with Conan and his show cut off.

  He was right: Michaels would never say. Lorne concluded that, even without any contractual arrangement, Conan and Jeff Ross would always know he was on their side—because he was.

  When Johnny Carson was counting down the days to his final edition of The Tonight Show, a cavalcade of favorite guests dropped by for one last visit with the King. David Letterman had been on the list; Jay Leno had not.

  Jay had been determined never to repeat the rancor that accompanied that changeover, when neither Carson in his final show, nor Leno in his first, saw fit to mention the other. As always seemed to happen with Jay, he took all the heat for that snub—and even he later came to agree with that judgment. It had been an unconscionable faux pas, one that took years for him to live down. He had apologized for it, laying the misbegotten decision at the feet of his tyrannical manager, Helen Kushnick, who had all but gotten him fired from the show with that and other scorched-earth personal dealings. (And that, in turn, had always played to some as an especially egregious example of the ritual of blaming the manager or agent. As one of Jay’s late-night competitors put it, “If my manager told me to jump off a bridge, I wouldn’t jump off a bridge.”)

  The bitter aftermath of that transition influenced many of Jay’s decisions about how to end his own Tonight run. The parade of familiar guests in the final weeks was inevitable; but Jay insisted that the finale needed to go down exactly opposite of how it had transpired with Carson. Not only would Jay acknowledge Conan on the last show, he would have him as his final guest.

  So on Friday, May 29, 2009, Conan and Jeff Ross left their new studio and the preparations for Conan’s premiere the following Monday to make the short drive east on the 134 to Burbank.

  Conan had done numerous appearances on Tonight, always with strong results. Whenever he was booked, his West Coast fans seemed to make a point to get there. Some of Conan’s support group took note of the raucous reaction he would attract sitting up there with Jay and concluded that it made Jay uncomfortable for Conan to bring all that passionate popularity into his house.

  On the finale, his 3,775th Tonight Show as host, Jay got a huge ovation, which he had to tamp down to leave enough time for the usual joke-intensive monologue. Jay dug from some best hits: Bill Clinton, George Bush, Michael Jackson, even O.J. Of course, NBC’s travails were not ignored. “I’m going off to a safe, secluded spot where no one can find me. Prime time on NBC!”

  After a collage of the best of “Jaywalking” segments drew some big laughs, Jay brought out Conan, to another thunderous ovation. Conan looked cool and professional in his dark suit and royal blue shirt—a stark contrast to the gawky kid in blazer over jeans who first visited Leno in 1993. (Jay showed a clip of that visit.)

  Conan teased his incipient Tonight Show run with a snippet from an upcoming remote segment: Conan in disguise leading a focus group analyzing the prospects of . . . Conan OʹBrien.

  As he handed off the symbolic baton, Jay declared, “I couldn’t be happier” with the selection of his successor. “You were the only choice; you were the perfect choice. You are an absolute gentleman . . .”

  Someone in the audience shouted out, “Conan rocks!”

  “I agree: Conan rocks,” Jay said. “Good luck, my friend.”

  Conan shook his hand, saying, “Jay, thank you for everything.”

  At his close Jay offered thank-yous to Debbie Vickers, of course, whom he identified as his executive producer “from day one.” (Actually Helen Kushnick had been the original top executive producer for Jay.) He singled out Warren Littlefield, the forme
r NBC Entertainment chief who fought to keep Jay in the chair. He thanked his longtime head writer Joe Medeiros and NBC’s top late-night executive, Rick Ludwin, for being steadfast “when we were getting our ass kicked.” Jeff Zucker got a mention, too, with thanks for “giving us another opportunity.” And then, of course, an affectionate shout-out to Mavis. “I’m leaving this dance with the same girl I came in with,” Jay said.

  A cold open had worked well in 1993; why not try it again in 2009?

  In what dedicated fans surely recognized as a thematic reference to his introduction to American television, Conan O’Brien burst onto the screen in his first moments as Tonight Show host on another symbolic journey, this time not through Manhattan, but all the way across the country.

  Fast, arresting, funny, and oddly patriotic at the same time, the run from New York to LA included shots of Conan going full tilt everywhere from the Amish country to across the Wrigley Field outfield in mid-inning—all real, no green screen—backed by the pounding and utterly unconnected theme music, “Surrender,” by Cheap Trick. The opening carried an electrical charge unlike anything seen on the Jay Leno version of Tonight. This show was going to be 100 percent Conan, right off the bat.

  The voice of Andy Richter, back as sidekick/announcer—and sounding a little less than fully committed—rose up behind the wailing theme song: “Here’s your host, Conan OʹBriiii-en!” The first audience, the early LA adapters, already whipped into a frenzy, erupted as Conan strode out, looking leaner, certainly more mature, hewing to the lesson he’d learned from Jack Paar: classic dark suit, light blue shirt, striped tie. As the squeals went on and on, the more mature Conan almost had to give them a little taste, even if he hadn’t planned to, even if it wasn’t really broad-based and middle American—just a few moves from the string dance.