The War for Late Night

by Carter, Bill

  The real financial opportunity still rested with Jay. NBC concocted all kinds of story angles to put the move in the best possible light—and many did sound valid. For the cost of only one hour-long ten p.m. drama—$3 million an episode—NBC could pay for an entire week of The Jay Leno Show. That didn’t even take account of all the money the network would save by not having to develop new shows for the ten o’clock slot, most of which would fail miserably anyway at a cost of tens of millions. It did mean, however, that NBC would have far fewer at-bats with which to attempt to hit one out of the park, as CBS had done with shows like CSI and NCIS, both of which generated hundreds of millions in syndication sales. There would be no syndication aftermarket for Jay. Still, NBC hadn’t hit one of those grand slam shows in what seemed like eons—and with GE contracting the costs down to the barest of bones, nobody foresaw a slugger-savior popping up any time soon.

  Zucker started to like his chances a bit—and his strategic plan even more. In one respect, the play could be seen as something of a coup. The goal all along had been to retain both Conan and Jay, to avoid any replays of the Letterman-Leno fiasco. Here it was, five years after the big dive into the future, and NBC still had both stars. And in a curious twist, both had signed on at significant risk, which could impact their future plans to flee for other pastures. If the ten p.m. plan worked, NBC would get credit for transforming the fundamental economics of the industry; if it didn’t, the network had at least prevented Jay Leno from going up against them—and now he might never be able to.

  As one of Zucker’s close associates put it privately, “I do think Jeff made a master stroke here. He’s positioned it so that if Leno goes down, no one will want him anymore. ABC will have moved on. Conan, meanwhile has a chance to take root.”

  Even if that didn’t happen, if Conan flopped, then it would be Conan trying to reenter the late-night market as a diminished thing. And if Jay actually did succeed at ten? “Jeff solves the ten p.m. problem,” the Zucker associate said, “and all his costs go down.”

  One of television programming’s legendary names, Fred Silverman, who led first CBS, then ABC, then NBC, provided serious cover for Zucker’s plan. “If the Leno show works,” Silverman remarked, “it will be the most significant thing to happen in broadcast television in the last decade.”

  Lorne Michaels used the “master stroke” analogy as well, on what he called “the chess-move level.” The ABC threat is over; cost savings could be massive. Lorne’s reservations had to do with the idea behind the show: Late-night guy moves to prime time. He was old enough to remember Jack Paar, who had been huge on The Tonight Show, trying to make a comeback in a prime-time hour. The show lasted only a couple of years. “I don’t know why it didn’t work,” Michaels said. “It didn’t feel right.” He harbored the same doubts about Leno, though he conceded, “Fortunes have been lost underestimating Jay Leno.”

  Another longtime NBC executive saw Zucker’s familiar fingerprints all over the move. Recalling Zucker’s trademark when he ran NBC’s entertainment division—when, faced with a threat to the network’s dominant Thursday nights, he expanded the running time of the episodes of his strongest comedies—the executive said: “Jeff is supersizing late night.”

  Competitors ripped the plan in public, though in private some nodded at the rationale. “If you look at it on one level, win-win,” one rival entertainment executive said. “They were stretched thin. They were failing. Nice Band-Aid.”

  Out in Hollywood, where Zucker was still widely seen as an alien with hostile intent, the move incited pure rage—a lot of it highly personal. Especially among writers and producers who created ten p.m. shows, the Leno invasion was taken as a belligerent affront. At a gathering of show runners during the summer press tour in LA, NBC, Zucker, and Leno were excoriated for the damage they were inflicting on the television industry—and for betraying the legacy of NBC, established by such ten p.m. classics as Hill Street Blues, Law & Order, L.A. Law, and ER.

  Shawn Ryan, who created the hit cable drama The Shield and worked on numerous network hours, including The Unit for CBS, said, “The reason you’re hearing a visceral backlash is specific to NBC. You have a generation of writers that grew up on their shows. It inspired them to write. That network used to stand for something better.” Kurt Sutter, a Shield writer who went on to create Sons of Anarchy for the cable channel FX, called NBC and Zucker “the bastards to hate.” And Peter Tolan, who skewered late night earlier in his career on The Larry Sanders Show and then found success in drama with Rescue Me, summed up the prevailing view: “I feel like they should take down the American flag from in front of their building and put up a white flag.”

  One top studio executive, left to contemplate a business minus five hours of drama programming that an outside production unit could potentially fill, delivered a blunt opinion: “This has all the earmarks of a train wreck.” The executive zeroed in on the affiliate question. “The biggest issue is the affiliate lead-ins. So they’re putting the better comedy bits at the end. What do you do between 10:12 and 10:50? More comedy? All that comedy is impossible to write and rehearse.” Citing CBS head Leslie Moonves and Disney/ABC head Bob Iger, the executive said, “Les and Iger must figure they could finish off NBC with this.”

  Even within NBC the Leno move did not win anywhere near unanimous consent. Something about the way the network had positioned it—the cost savings, writing off ever being able to find hit-level success at ten p.m., writing off winning—offended some of the network’s loyal veterans. One watched it all unfold and was consumed by unhappiness: “The news conference when the idea was announced was staggering. For the first time in network history, someone acted like we didn’t want to win. Someone said, ‘We have a number in mind.’ That really had a big impact in-house. People noticed that. It was a poor-mouthing of the network. We’re supposed to work in the magic department. We do things the public can only dream about. Yet here was a guy saying, ‘No, we just have to make a number and that’s all we’re doing.’ It was terribly depressing.”

  Knowing how hard Zucker had tried to keep Jay with all the other proposals he had run by the comic, another of NBCʹs most influential players explained, “The ten o’clock idea was the worst idea of all. We all thought it was a disaster. Conan was going to get the wrong lead-in. He’d have no chance to succeed. It was a catastrophe waiting to happen.”

  The doomsayers kept their concerns to themselves, of course, because what was done was done, and everyone had to pull together to try to make it work. The executive with likely the most influence on Zucker, Dick Ebersol, didn’t buy the doom-and-gloom talk anyway. Late that summer he said, “No one would be more shocked than I if Jay doesn’t work.”

  Something did shock Dick Ebersol that summer—and Jeff Zucker, too. In late August they got word from Jeff Immelt that GE was in the process of negotiating the sale of a controlling interest in NBC Universal to the country’s biggest cable operator, Comcast. Serious talks had been under way since April. Immelt had deliberately kept Zucker out of the loop until late in the process.

  Only two years earlier the GE CEO had made a statement to the company’s shareholders to tamp down rumors that the company wanted to unload NBC, perhaps sometime before the massive outlay that would be required to cover the 2008 Olympics from Beijing. “Should we sell NBCU? The answer is no!” Immelt wrote in GE’s 2007 annual report. “I just don’t see it happening. Not before the Olympics, not after the Olympics. It doesn’t make sense.”

  It did start to make sense soon after, though, when Brian Roberts, the Comcast CEO, began his pursuit. GE suddenly saw what had been bruited about forever in terms of its relationship with NBC: the limited synergies between its core industrial business and a media company—one with valuable cable assets but a limping flagship, the NBC network.

  For a while Zucker believed GE was trying to arrange a sale to Comcast only of the 20 percent stake in NBC Universal still held by the French company Vivendi. When he final
ly got a clear message from Immelt of GE’s intentions, Zucker faced the obvious question: What did it mean for him?

  GE promised a contract extension, which would cover Zucker financially. But even with that concession he would still be cast as a lame-duck manager until Comcast won regulatory approval for the acquisition. Zucker accordingly set out to thwart that characterization by securing assurance from the incoming Comcast executives that he would continue as NBCU’s CEO.

  Comcast could not officially comment, but that didnʹt stop many executives claiming inside knowledge of that company from suggesting Zucker was headed for an executive trapdoor as soon as Comcast took charge. As he usually did, Zucker took to shrugging off those rumors with the same confident “We’ll see” attitude that he applied to most efforts to marginalize him. The regulatory process was likely to extend through 2010, giving Zucker, in essence, a year to prove to Comcast’s management that he was a leader they ought to retain.

  In the shorter term, Zucker had tried to initiate yet another fix in NBC’s chronically stalled-out entertainment division. In late July, conceding what others in the company—and throughout much of Hollywood—had long before identified as a mismatch made far from heaven, Zucker found a way to part from Ben Silverman, the onetime “rock star” executive he had chosen in 2007 to revivify NBC’s pulseless prime-time schedule. After a couple years of announcements of new directions and much cost cutting, but no real hits, the relationship finally came to the end that outsiders had been forecasting—sometimes in extravagantly vituperative terms—from the beginning. In the end each man quietly acknowledged this particular partnership had been a mistake for both parties.

  In place of Silverman’s flash and sizzle, Zucker opted for competence and solidity. Rather than picking anyone new, he simply added to the duties he had already piled on to one of his longest-serving lieutenants, Jeff Gaspin. No other executive at NBC possessed a more successful portfolio than Gaspin, who was in charge of NBC’s entertainment cable channels, like USA, Bravo, Syfy, and Oxygen, which generated by far the largest share of NBC’s earnings.

  No one at NBC would ever mistake Gaspin for Ben Silverman; he did not, for example, throw parties accompanied by models in bikinis and white tigers in cages. Even though he had once worked at MTV Networks, running programming for the VH1 channel (where he introduced signature concepts like Behind the Music and Pop-Up Videos), Gaspin personally exuded conventionality more than dynamism.

  But his results were invariably impressive—so much so that Gaspin believed he had deserved the job running NBC Entertainment on both previous occasions when Zucker had hired someone else (first Kevin Reilly, then Silverman). Gaspin’s low-key demeanor and somewhat awkward manner held him back at times. He did not always make a strong first impression. But his apparent diffidence masked consuming ambition and drive, a match for anyone else’s at NBC, or the rest of the TV business, for that matter.

  Gaspin looked far younger than forty-eight; of medium height, he was thin but fit, with boyish features and shortish, carefully composed dark hair. His face and hairline had seemed unchanged for so long that some colleagues joked that he must have a nasty self-portrait hanging somewhere.

  For the most part, Gaspin got high marks from those under him for his leadership skills. It was true that some noted a shifty quality to his narrow eyes and tight smile, and even some of his body language, which they thought suggested he was always calculating his next move or next word. But in interviews he fired straight and without apparent guile or pretense.

  He did seem to have a bit of a jones for the glamour side of the television business, though. One NBC colleague said, “Gaspin coveted the NBC job because it’s a high-profile job and it seemed like he wanted to have the town recognize him as a macher. He seemed to always resent that cable was considered a nice little business but never got the same press attention or attention in Hollywood. It always made him crazy.”

  Gaspin arrived at NBC Entertainment on July 27, 2009. By then the fall schedule was in place, of course, and he didn’t hesitate to cite the highest priority for the network: “All attention is going to be on Jay.” All through the months since Zucker had set in motion his ten p.m. plan for Leno, Gaspin had been busy with his cable responsibilities and had paid little attention to the new show, other than to be impressed that Zucker had found a way to keep both his late-night stars again. Now that the Jay-at-ten issue was on his own plate, Gaspin had the general conviction that it represented a perfectly reasonable attempt to try something new.

  As for what might happen if it didn’t work, Gaspin simply avoided discussing the subject. In his mind he knew what moves he might make if Jay’s show simply cratered, but he kept them to himself. When he analyzed the possibilities for Jay, Gaspin focused on the upside. The financial part could work with a really minimal rating; it certainly seemed like a more creative solution than trying to slam five more dramas on the air when the rest of NBCʹs schedule was bloodied and bowed.

  At the same time, Gaspin did not spend much time worrying about the condition of Conan O’Brien’s Tonight Show. As July came to a close, the pattern seemed to be holding, with Letterman winning almost every night in terms of total viewers and Conan prevailing in the younger demographics, though his margins had narrowed a bit. For the last three weeks in July, Conan’s weekly margin in the audience between eighteen to forty-nine was .2 of a rating point (about 260,000 people), and each week he trailed Dave by around 750,000 to 800,000 total viewers.

  There was certainly reason for some of the concern Gaspin was hearing from New York, but not enough to panic. Early on in his new tenure, he made a point to visit with Conan and have a couple of lunches with Jeff Ross. The conversations went well, from Gaspin’s point of view. Conan seemed to have a firm grasp of the situation. He told Gaspin he knew the show needed to be somewhat broader in appeal, but he assured him he was a “good Irish Catholic boy,” and when the audience came to realize that about him they would join the party.

  At lunch with Ross, Gaspin was impressed, as everyone always was, with the friendly, levelheaded, and unflappable producer—and, in this case, with how in touch he was with the issues concerning the show. The numbers had come down, but they were still OK. Ross underscored his belief that what mattered most was doing good shows. Gaspin had no argument with that.

  Nor did he dispute Ross’s other observation, that as August headed to a close he and the Conan guys were looking forward to Jay’s arriving at ten. That might actually help in the numbers.

  In the weeks before his ten p.m. show premiered, Jay Leno would occasionally check in with Conan OʹBrien, just a call here or there to see how he was doing. They would exchange the usual pleasantries. Jay mentioned some plans for his show; they discussed a few guests. Nice to talk to you.

  Conan thought nothing much of the conversations. He wasn’t wasting time worrying about Jay’s show. He was supremely focused on his own windscreen, where the view ahead looked sunny and clear. Overall he was well pleased with his team’s early efforts. The shows felt strong; he was proud of them. Of course, he didn’t expect to ease right into the groove, but they were getting there. Conan could see where the show was going and how it was growing. He had enormous fun playing with two wax figures of Tom Cruise and Henry Winkler the staff had found, placing them around the studio in various creepy poses. On August 6, outside the studio, Conan lined up a couple of the cannons that Ringling Brothers used to shoot people across the circus ring. He loaded up Tom and Henry and fired them across the broad driveway leading in from the gate to the lot. The wax figures paid the ultimate price, but Conan scored some big laughs with their explosive demise. The next day the Web site Gawker posted about the bit, calling it “awesome” and “one of the funniest sketches you’ll ever see on a television show.”

  All seemed good.

  But Rick Ludwin was still hearing from New York.

  Ludwin, so long experienced in late night, always kept close tabs on his shows. With Jay y
et to go on, Conan dominated his days and nights. Every day the numbers arrived; Letterman, surprisingly, was winning the viewer battle by margins that were on par with the edge Jay used to have over Dave. And most of the press—maddeningly, as far as NBC was concerned—continued to call Dave the winner every night, ignoring the category that really counted, the one where the money was made. NBC PR executives quietly decried many TV journalists for not being sophisticated enough about the business to understand the advantage of securing the younger viewers every night, and the relative worthlessness of Dave’s dominating the fifty-plus category.

  Of course, at the same time New York kept asking Ludwin why Conan wasn’t making the show broader to draw some of those older viewers back. While never wavering in his own faith in Conan, Ludwin did understand the frustration of Jeff Zucker and his other colleagues in New York. All Rick seemed to be doing was telling and retelling the same accounts of offering up notes to Conan’s team but not seeing any results.

  “And they won’t say why they’re not taking notes?” the New York colleagues would ask, increasingly incredulous that Ludwin’s suggestions had been ignored. “What do you mean, they won’t do that?”

  Ludwin was reminded of how Carson would describe trying to make adjustments to The Tonight Show: “It’s like trying to change a flat tire while the car is still in motion.”

  Conan’s ratings performance, on every radar screen in New York, was also being closely scrutinized out in LA, in the offices where Jay Leno and his team were spending long days preparing for their prime-time debut. This was hardly a new activity; Jay and Debbie Vickers had studied the Tonight Show ratings over seventeen years, poring over them as if they were encrypted messages from the Enigma machine. They knew which guests spiked a number (Tim Allen, say) and which ones tanked (no names on the record). They knew which act two bits held the best percentage of the monologue audience. They knew the impact a week of repeats had on the following week’s numbers.