The War for Late Night

by Carter, Bill

  “He cooled off,” one Letterman staff member said. “He languished there. Five, six years ago he became the thing. Then he had those five years of lame-duckness.”

  But there was much more than that behind their growing sense of confidence. As one Letterman staff member put it, “Conan is in a very perilous position. He goes on in summer, tries to get himself established, and then—here comes Jay.”

  The impending arrival of Leno in the fall as the lead-in every night at ten aroused more than curiosity among Letterman’s backers. They were all but counting the days. “Here’s what I think is going to happen,” said the writing staff veteran. “Dave’s numbers will not move. But when Jay comes on, Conan is going to stay below Dave. I feel sorry for Conan. I think he’s getting sandbagged.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE POWER OF TEN

  In the outrageously overacted scene, a cold open to a new TV show, a fake college professor, looking more like a used-car salesman in a local TV commercial, was giving a class full of girls with big hair and guys in mullets some rigorous instruction in the intricacies of network television.

  One student stood up to offer his intentionally pretentious analysis of an article on how “the temporality of physical sexual attraction necessarily undermines one’s prime-time viability—and the descent into cable is inevitable.”

  Though fraught with potential meaning for the program’s host, who was seated in the back row of the class during the first moments of The Jay Leno Show, that supposedly funny line was not precisely predictive of the course of his career.

  The entertainment that followed turned out to be a strange mix of taped segments, awkward interviews with the audience, a truncated monologue, “angry-Jay” rants, guest appearances from a lineup that included Vanna White and Doug Llewelyn, and a brief cameo from a guy in high-waisted jeans and golf shirt, ostensibly coming on to this trying-much-too-hard romp to make his “dramatic debut” in a scene from The Glass Menagerie.

  That would be David Letterman. But he wasn’t around for long. Dave walked out onstage, he greeted Jay, the lights went black, a shot rang out, and when the dust cleared, there was Letterman, stretched out onstage, allegedly shot dead. The faux-irritated but too-busy-to-care Jay made light of the moment, declaring they needed to “get this stiff out of here.”

  Between ultrastrained moments like Llewelyn—the onetime “court reporter” for The People’s Court—covering a “real trial” between a creationist and an evolutionist (something having to do with a pet monkey) and Jay unaccountably (and unfunnily) breaking a parked car’s window with a sledgehammer because it had a “Baby on Board” sign and he didn’t see any baby inside, Leno went around finding “clues” about the Letterman “murder” in the audience. These consisted of random letters of the alphabet, which he handed to Vanna to post on a board in some kind of Wheel of Fortune code meant to spell out the name of the Letterman killer.

  Actually, though, right after the shooting moment, Jay had told viewers—those “at home with VCRsʺ—to tape the show and play back the blackout scene “really slow” to see who the real killer was. If they did, they would have seen that it was in fact Jay himself who knocked Dave off—and, yes, that was the predictive highlight of The Jay Leno Show.

  But it was not the Jay Leno show that premiered on NBC at ten p.m. in September 2009. This was a much earlier Jay Leno Show, also on NBC, but one that aired in 1986. At that time NBC had already cast its eye on Jay as a potential late-night talent, mainly thanks to his many killer (in a different sense of that word) appearances with Letterman on Late Night. The network agreed to set Jay up in a pilot, his second for NBC. (The first, also an embarrassing miss, had been intended specifically to be considered for prime time.) This one was designed to showcase Jay’s varied comedy talents for possible use as part of what NBC viewed as its “late-night wheel” on Saturday nights—Saturday Night Live and shows they could use on the weeks when SNL was dark.

  That was the plan until they got a look at The Jay Leno Show. Shot, for obscure reasons, on a pier under the Ben Franklin Bridge in Philadelphia, the concept and the material impressed no one. Jay did do a monologue, but it was the furthest thing imaginable from the topical Leno joke fests he would come to be famous for. Wearing what was then his signature hip-guy gear—black pants, reddish blazer, sleeves rolled a quarter up—Jay told jokes about bad air travel and railed about corporations. But the laughs he got from an audience spread out around tables to create an ersatz nightclub effect were perfunctory. Rick Ludwin, even then NBC’s designated executive in the world of late night, watched the proceedings from backstage. He had a simple verdict: It didn’t work.

  Other assessments were harsher. One of Jay’s bigger supporters of that era among NBC’s late-night participants, based on Leno’s many jousts with Letterman, was astonished by the overwhelming lameness of the production, which the supporter knew had been shepherded by Jay’s then manager Helen Kushnick. (Helen and her husband, Jerry, both received executive producer credits on the special.) “Helen got him the special,” the late-night player said. “This was Jay left to his own devices. That was Jay’s sensibility, everything. It was a horrible show.”

  Somebody else had been watching the Leno special with intense interest. Sitting around with some of his “comedy nerd” friends from the Lampoon , Conan OʹBrien had made it a point to catch The Jay Leno Show. Like all hard-core Letterman devotees of that era, Conan looked forward with excitement to Leno’s bookings on Late Night, because his spots with Dave were so consistently electric. But this? For Conan and his Lampoon coterie, the Leno special was a total disconnect between the hip, hilarious comic who appeared with Dave and this clearly uncomfortable, imaginatively flailing guy. He was out of his milieu.

  If anyone at NBC in 2009 had dug out the old Jay Leno Show from some dusty network remainder bin marked “Misbegotten and Forgotten,” would it have raised any questions about Jay’s trying something so clearly out of his comfort zone, something so different from his Tonight Show? Almost surely not—because, in 2009, NBC’s top executives were convinced that Jay ranked as one of the most beloved entertainers in America. That wasn’t just their own opinion; the research had told them so.

  As for Jay, he never had reason to worry that his upcoming ten o’clock show was going to be some stab in the dark like that ghastly 1986 effort. For one thing, the terrible ideas conjured for that show were banished from his memory. For another, he had long since learned: Dance with the one who brung you.

  “Even though it’s ten o’clock,” Jay said in outlining his plans for The Jay Leno Show of 2009, “we’re going to pretend it’s eleven thirty.”

  As the weeks slipped away between his final Tonight Show in May and his big-splash premiere set for September, Jay—along with the steadfast Debbie Vickers—had to find a way to satisfy an ever expanding roster of constituencies. Left to his own, he likely would have kept most of the elements of his Tonight Show intact—all the way down to sticking around in the ancient studio he (and Carson) had occupied for years. But he pulled up stakes and moved a few hundred yards across the Burbank lot, from Studio 3 to Studio 11, a vast, barnlike room. NBC had sold the entire Burbank complex, moving most of its production operations over to the Universal lot, where Conan now worked. But everyone could see the potential conflict if the two shows occupied the same gated community. So NBC rented back the big Studio 11 in Burbank just for Leno. Jay, who didn’t “want to go to some amusement park” (and preferred not to change his drive-in routine anyway), stuck around his old digs, kicking around the potential changes for ten p.m.

  Some seemed utterly cosmetic. He would enter from what looked like the glass doors of an insurance agency, flanked by huge, square wooden columns—which made it look like an insurance agency in the Roman forum. And of course, there would be no desk. That was the major concession to Conan and The Tonight Show, the program that had invented the host behind the desk. That move, like several others, was made, Vickers ex
plained, entirely out of respect for Conan. She had great personal affection for Jeff Ross, her counterpart on Conan’s show, and believed the two shows could coexist without any issues. If Conan succeeded, it would be best for Jay, the network, and everybody, Vickers was convinced.

  Without his desk, though, Jay would be compelled to talk to guests sitting in a couple of low-set blue felt chairs—the kind you might find in a hotel lobby—in a little conversation nook, stage right. The most significant cosmetic change for him here involved wardrobe. He had to wear midcalf socks (which he hated), because with no desk to hide behind, his legs, and some potential skin peeking out from under his cuffs, could be visible during these interviews.

  But Jay would still step out onto his little monologue platform to greet the audience and deliver the nightly volley of jokes; he would still look to his left to get reaction or support from his reliable bandleader, Kevin Eubanks. And in a pinch, they would even roll out a minidesk for him to work behind for such critical elements as the “Headlines” segment, which was still set for Monday nights—just like always.

  What would not be like always was that “Headlines” was going to disappear from its traditional spot in act two, right after the show’s first commercial pod. Instead it would be relegated to the final segment of the show, some comedy candy to keep the fans hanging in until the end. The decision to move that segment came directly as the result of a request by Jay’s most important partners in the ten p.m. enterprise: the managers of NBC’s lineup of affiliated stations. Before NBC could attempt this monumental redefinition of prime time, it had to get assurances that its stations would be on board. And they were (with that single exception of the Boston affiliate that wanted to preempt Jay but was soon browbeaten into line). The local stations had conducted their own round of research into the ten p.m. change and found the results most promising. Not only did their viewers indicate that they liked Jay and would love to see him earlier, but their answers to the research questions seemed to prove that Jay’s viewers had special interest in the news, which was why they enjoyed his topical monologues so much. The stations had only one request: They wanted input into the format of the show.

  In LA, Debbie Vickers read a piece in the paper about NBCʹs plans for the show and saw a quote from Jeff Zucker saying, “We’re going to let the affiliate board have input.” No one had mentioned this plan to Debbie. Her reaction: We’re in trouble.

  Debbie Vickers had no intention of sitting down with TV station managers—hilarious guys though they might be—to hear their ideas about how to create a comedy show. She told Rick Ludwin, “You’ve got to go to these meetings. I’m not meeting with affiliates.” Vickers had never considered herself and her team to be production geniuses, but they certainly knew more about what Jay was comfortable doing than guys selling commercial time to supermarkets in Omaha and Orlando.

  Ludwin held the meetings. Word came back: The stations wanted the strongest possible comedy material at the end of the show, to lead in to their local newscasts. That meant not just “Headlines” but also “Jaywalking” and the items from the 99-cent store—all the act two bits Jay had painstakingly assembled over time as recurring elements. Slotting them at the program’s close instead of right after the monologue would necessarily change Jay’s rhythm. Vickers thought it was a bad idea, but the network had agreed to it, so they went along. The plan then became to fill the now empty act two with a host of new “comedy correspondents” who would tape some energetic (and, they hoped, amusing) reports to keep the laughs rolling each night.

  Another move made to enforce the distinction from The Tonight Show was limiting the guest interviews to one each night—on the set, in any case. The staff then came up with another idea, “10 at 10,” in which Jay would interview some celebrity by satellite from a remote location with ten questions intended to evoke humorous replies and sparkling repartee. And then there was “The Green Car Challenge,” designed to play off Jay’s automotive avocation. Guests would be invited to take a spin in an electric-powered Ford Focus around a racetrack laid out in the area behind the studio, each recording a time. The idea was to create some competitive fun among the celebrities—while simultaneously killing some minutes on the show.

  From the start Vickers fretted about how to fill this newly constructed hour five nights a week. It could not be like late night, which formatted itself easily: monologue; second comedy bit; lead guest for two segments; secondary guest; music act; “Stay tuned for Conan—good night, everybody!”

  For one thing, NBC did not want much music in prime time, if any at all. The reason musical acts were always exiled to the closing minutes of late-night shows was that they rarely pulled in viewers and more often drove away those who preferred a different style. And with just one guest onstage for a single segment, the other chunks of time seemed to Vickers like massive hungry mouths waiting to be fed.

  In interviews Jay adamantly described the ten p.m. entry as a “comedy show” and not—horror of horrors—a “variety show.” The “variety” designation, Jay explained, “just has a bad connotation.” But he acknowledged that sticking to comedy meant he would likely have to commit to producing something like three times as much comedy as he had on The Tonight Show—most of it generated by the host himself.

  In selling the creative breakthrough of the ten p.m. idea, NBC touted the originality of offering viewers an hour of comedy rather than the standard murder investigations and doctors having sex at ten p.m. In fact, television had had plenty of history with hour-long comedy shows, many of which ranked among the all-time classics: Jackie Gleason, Red Skelton, Carol Burnett, Your Show of Shows (that one somehow filled ninety minutes). Of course, all those shows were on once a week, and none had been seen since the late seventies. The challenge for Jay was to produce prime-time-worthy comedy on five consecutive nights, week in, week out.

  The key to success, both NBC and Jay’s staff agreed, was to get the show up and running and strong enough to weather the early storm of new episodes of CSI: Miami on CBS and Private Practice on ABC; to reach December, when the dramas would go into repeats for about a month; to show what Jay could do as an alternative to repeats; and then to hang on until summer, when he would likely start to crush the all-rerun lineups he would face.

  Jay promoted the logic behind NBC’s strategy almost as vigorously as the network executives did. More people were going to bed these days before late night started; fans were telling him they looked forward to a chance to see him earlier; surely there was a market at ten for something lighter than tales of lurid murders and rapes. He did have reluctance about the title, though, preferring “Weeknight with Jay Leno,” which NBC thought sounded like a news hour. Jay, again citing his mom’s discomfort with ostentation, shrank from sticking his name out there too prominently with “The Jay Leno Show.” Or maybe he remembered the one from 1986 with the same name.

  But in the summer of 2009, as he made his preparations for his new show-business life, Jay Leno declared himself a realist. “It’s going to be different,” he said. “The key will be holding the audience through the second half of the show. That’s going to be tricky.”

  Jeff Zucker also retained a realistic assessment of his late-night handiwork. Though he proclaimed the evident economic rationale for his move of Jay to ten o’clock, citing the desperate need for broadcast networks to reduce costs, increase revenues, or face the evolutionary grim reaper, that amounted to a bit of after-the-fact rationalizing. The plan made sense; it played perfectly to the doomed-networks scenario that prevailed in cable television circles and many places on the Internet. It even induced one remaining standard-bearer of “old media,” Time magazine, to produce a cover story featuring a mischievous-looking Jay leaning into the frame under a headline: “Jay Leno Is the Future of Television. Seriously!”

  But none of that was the dominant reason why Jeff Zucker had installed Jay Leno at ten. Privately he conceded, “I didn’t make this move for economic reasons; I made this
move to keep Jay from going to ABC.”

  The risk involved, had that happened, would not have merely made a serious dent in NBC’s late-night dominance—and profits. A defection by Jay would link back directly to Zucker’s 2004 move to ask the top dog in late night to step aside so NBC could guarantee Conan The Tonight Show. Jeff was still on the hook for however that call was going to turn out. But besides that, by almost every external evaluation in 2008, a Jay Leno at ABC figured to more than dent NBC; it looked like he would T-bone them like one of his Duesenbergs ramming a Mini Cooper.

  NBC’s own research department had come up with much the same results. At ABC, Jay would do very well, and probably win.

  That summer Zucker presented a different argument. With Jay at ABC, Conan still would have won, he said,or at least he would have beaten Jay where it most counted for NBC, in the young demo. Rick Ludwin had assertively made that point to Zucker: Conan was going to take away the younger viewers, while Jay and Dave would be left to divvy up an audience that was largely above fifty years old.

  But the idea of slicing the late-night pizza again, with Jay eating up a sizable portion of the advertising dough—which was already being doled out among Letterman, Conan, Kimmel, Stewart, Colbert, Ferguson, etc.—gave Zucker long pause. By NBCʹs calculations, a number of the late-night players already faced diminishing financial futures. The network didn’t think Jimmy Kimmel’s show made money at all, and Craig Ferguson’s, maybe a pittance—a couple of million a year, they guessed. (CBS begged to differ, without offering specifics.) NBC figured that even Jimmy Fallon, who had started up amid diminished expectations, would do no better than OK.

  Of course, some measure of Fallon’s fate would depend on how Conan did in the hour preceding. The 11:35 shows were still where the big advertising money gravitated, but they were no longer a source of big earnings. The Tonight Show, a $150 million profit machine less than a decade earlier, had begun to fall below a third of that annual total. NBC believed Conan could keep that level up if he cornered the younger adult viewers. As one senior network executive observed, “We don’t believe Letterman is strong enough to take any advertising money away.”