The War for Late Night

by Carter, Bill

  Debbie Vickers pressed her booking department: Chase after every big name you can dredge up and confirm them for December. The Jay Leno Show would stand and fight in December.

  On November 4 Rick Ludwin came to see her. The rules had changed again. “You have until the end of November,” he told her.

  Vickers felt poleaxed. She had just moved every big name on their booking board to the following month, because she had been told it was going to be life or death for the show in December. Now they had concluded: Forget it—it’s all or nothing in November. This was bullshit, Vickers decided.

  But it wasn’t as if she had any choice. Well, she did have one. She didn’t tell Jay that their show, less than two months in, had just had its yearlong guarantee reduced to four weeks.

  On November 6, with some research analysis on the ten p.m. situation just starting to come in, Jeff Gaspin opened up an e-mail from the sales division and read a suggestion: What about cutting Jay back to a half hour, moving him to 11:35 again, and pushing Conan back?

  At first blush this idea sounded far short of viable to Gaspin, not with all the complications it would entail. Would Jay even consider a half hour? Would that necessarily mean Conan also shrank to a half hour? And then what—an hour of Jimmy Fallon? That made no sense. What about forty-five minutes of Jay, forty-five minutes of Conan, and then a half hour of Fallon? Absurd. Gaspin quickly dismissed this wispy notion that somebody had floated out there with little thought.

  In New York, meanwhile, Jeff Zucker was meeting for some private dinners with someone whose judgment he had long trusted: Lorne Michaels. The main topic of discussion: the ten p.m. problem. Zucker described the mounting pressure from affiliates to do something—as well as his ongoing concerns about Conan’s numbers and the show’s apparent unwillingness to listen to suggestions for changes.

  Michaels knew Zucker came from a place of affection for Conan and Jeff Ross. The whole ten p.m. plan for Jay, gone so precipitately wrong, could be traced back to what Michaels saw as Zucker’s real motive: to protect Conan. Now, with the options to fix this overheating lemon narrowing to exclusively unpleasant ones, Lorne tried to shore up support for his guy. He made the case that if you were betting on intelligence and talent, you simply had to leave Conan alone. He would figure it out.

  On the basis of these dinners, Michaels had no doubt that Zucker still stood with Conan.

  One factor the internal analysts at NBC couldn’t quite get their heads around was where their future proprietors stood. Comcast, still awaiting regulatory approval, could provide no insight on their plans for NBC. Lorne Michaels, for one, expected a renewed commitment to the broadcast side, after the endless GE-influenced protestations that NBC was now a “cable company.” Comcast—itself a cable megacorp—had to be aware that every NBC affiliate had the ear of its Congress member; assurances that the local stations would remain vital to the enterprise were an essential part of Comcast’s pitch to Washington. Suddenly what the affiliates said or did about ten o’clock had real resonance. The impression Michaels took away from his conversations with Zucker was that Comcast had a simple goal: Get this ten p.m. business behind you before the official change of management.

  By mid-November, the calls from affiliate executives were coming at Gaspin at an accelerating pace. Several station managers had set up their own information network and were exchanging panicky reactions based on what they were seeing happen day by day to the eleven p.m. newscasts at the big stations—during a sweep month. Some stations were down as much as 30 percent; others had seen their first-place newscast quickly fall into third place. In their calls to Gaspin, the station representatives had a consistent plea: “You have to do something!”

  With no real answer to give them, Gaspin strung them along as best he could. “Let’s just get through the month,” he told them. “Let’s get to December. Let’s get to some repeats. Let’s see how it does during repeats.” But ensconced with his team he began to press for potential solutions. Could there be another play here? What about that old eight o’clock idea that Jay had rejected? Would he reconsider? Was there something else NBC could do to make ten p.m. palatable to the affiliates for the rest of the year? Was there some way to get Jay his fifty-two weeks?

  Of course, any change for Jay would involve some alteration of his contract. Gaspin decided it was time to delve into that nettlesome issue. When he did, he was caught short by the deal’s salient, italicized, capitalized feature: NBC had committed to a pay-and-play arrangement with Jay.

  Jeff Gaspin had never in his life heard of granting someone a pay-and-play promise in a contract. He tried to work out what it would mean in practice to have guaranteed not only to pay a performer but also to play him—for two years. This demanded serious legal interpretation, and the one Gaspin got from NBC’s legal team left him with little doubt: NBC faced risk—big risk. A strict reading of the contract presented the possibility that the network could be liable for damages in a suit brought by Jay’s very capable attorney. As crazy as it sounded, he could even seek an injunction that would force NBC to keep Jay on the air.

  Neither outcome came close to being likely, but neither could they be automatically dismissed. From what Gaspin was hearing from the lawyers, it wasn’t going to be a pretty picture if they simply tried to yank Jay off the air. Gaspin grasped that before he took any action he needed to do one essential thing: get Jay on board with whatever NBC did.

  Suddenly the choices narrowed. For the first time another option moved into focus: Cancel Conan, and put Jay back into The Tonight Show. The prime-time issue had spilled over into late night, despite Gaspin’s intentions not to mix the two. Conan’s performance, his numbers—all those things Gaspin had filed under “later”—became urgently relevant.

  At the meeting he called to discuss the situation, Gaspin got some clarification on Conan’s ratings, but he wanted more information. His late-night executives were there, Rick Ludwin and Nick Bernstein, along with NBC’s chief deal man, Marc Graboff. Of course, the impact of the sharply diminished lead-ins—from Jay to the local news, the local news to Conan—was discussed. Ludwin, as always, praised Conan’s effort and long-term promise. But when asked how well Conan was adapting to the earlier hour, Ludwin was just as frank with Gaspin as he had been with Zucker: “They’re fighting us on some of the things we want to see happen.”

  This sounded to Gaspin like a significant, but not critical, concern. He did not get the sense that Conan and his team were simply refusing to listen, only that some of Rick’s and Nick’s suggested changes had met with real resistance.

  But the research department had some intriguing data for him, too. When they broke down Conan’s results in the key category of viewers between the ages of eighteen and forty-nine, they discovered an eye-catching statistic. Conan’s strength in that group was highly concentrated in the eighteen-to-thirty-four portion. (That was often broken out as a separate segment for advertising sales, especially for youth-oriented channels like MTV and Comedy Central.) Fully half of Conan’s audience in the large eighteen-to-forty-nine group fell within the eighteen-to-thirty-four segment.

  Having the breakdown tip that way was highly unusual—50 percent was about twice the norm for a television show. Certainly this helped explain how Conan had so drastically reduced the median age for The Tonight Show, from fifty-six to forty-six. In big swaths of television that would have been considered a sensational development. NBCʹs research department didn’t think so. For them it only seemed to confirm the growing suspicion that Conan might be that dreaded item: a “niche” talent. At 12:35, that sort of hyperyoung profile was ideal. But coming in the earlier hour, it signaled to the researchers a weakness in the show’s breadth of appeal: People over thirty-five had significantly less interest in it.

  One NBC executive floated a notion that some others had only whispered about to that point: Was a show-business version of the Peter Principle at work here? Had Conan been perfect at the 12:35 level and mistakenly
pushed himself to a level where he couldn’t quite succeed?

  Jeff Gaspin wasn’t buying that. He resisted any scenario that posited that Conan couldn’t be a winner on The Tonight Show and so they needed to go crawling back to Jay. NBC had designated Conan O’Brien the future of late night five years earlier, and Gaspin had no intention of reversing that decision now. There had to be a better way.

  Robert Morton, long gone from the employ of David Letterman, retained many friends in the late-night world, but none closer than Jeff Ross. The two producers shared the short-hand of warriors who had been in the trenches and seen and heard things no one outside their tiny band of brothers would ever know. Morton had experienced the tumultuous ride from 12:35 to 11:35 when he was Letterman’s executive producer and close adviser in the 1990s. Now his good buddy Jeff was in the middle of the same bumpy transition with Conan; naturally, they had much to talk about.

  Morton had moved to LA after his ouster from Worldwide Pants, which made it convenient when Conan’s show moved west. As the waters deep beneath NBC’s entertainment division were just beginning to bubble and stir that holiday season, Morty and Jeff set a date to meet for dinner. Jeff said he would bring along Rick Rosen, who by that point had become much more Jeff’s intimate friend than merely Conan’s principal agent.

  Much of the talk at that meal, as might be expected, centered on The Tonight Show. Ross expressed just a little sense of uneasiness about relations with the network. NBC’s notes didn’t seem onerous; he couldn’t quite put a finger on it, but something about the situation felt a bit weird to him.

  That tripped a wire for Morty. Back in the days when the Letterman team had been haggling with NBC over their exit, much turned on whether NBC, which had retained the right to match any financial offer Dave had received, could really equal CBS’s terms if NBC didn’t guarantee Dave the 11:35 time period—which it couldn’t do, of course, as it had already filled that slot with Jay Leno. CBS and Dave’s representatives had hammered out a contract that stated in explicit detail that Dave would be programmed each night directly following the late local news on CBS’s stations. The time-period stipulation remained a standard part of Dave’s deals, and Morty knew Jay had the same guarantee.

  “You guys got that for Conan, too, I’m sure,” Morton said.

  He waited, while watching Rosen and Ross exchange a little look.

  “You didn’t?” Morty asked, holding back his next thought, which was, You’ve got to be kidding me. He was stupefied by this revelation. Why on earth take a chance like that? No fully stipulated time-period protection?

  Both Rosen and Ross indicated that they knew it could be a risky situation, but they didn’t dwell on it. Neither did Morton. But as he left the dinner that night he made a point to remember the conversation. There might be consequences down the road.

  The end of the November sweep brought no relief for Jeff Gaspin—on the contrary, the gang with the torches and pitchforks gathering outside Jay Leno’s ten p.m. castle had grown larger and louder.

  As the November sweep ratings books began arriving, the spate of affiliate calls became a slew. Now the messages began to carry a note of hysteria: “Oh my god, we were killed!ʺ

  Gaspin, still promising something would be done, had to make his own plea to the station managers: Please do not go public. Several of the stations were threatening to open up to their local press about what a disaster Jay Leno had turned out to be at ten o’clock and how they would take action if NBC did not. The affiliate board urgently requested a conference call, which Gaspin joined in, accompanied by Rick Ludwin. The appeal from the board members was completely professional, but their stance was unequivocal: NBC needed to act on ten p.m., and whatever the new plan was going to be, it could not wait. The affiliates were demanding the action take place in January. They would not even wait for the natural break in the prime-time schedule that NBC had coming in February with the Winter Olympics from Vancouver. If something wasn’t done in January, the stations themselves would seek their own remedies. They would begin preempting Jay—either by moving their newscasts up to ten and pushing Jay back into late night or by acquiring some syndicated hour to stick in at ten—and they would go public with their plans.

  Gaspin realized that it was one thing to fight the preemptions with threats to place NBC programming elsewhere, but once the complaints started getting aired in public, the situation would surely descend into nastiness. If the affiliates started bad-mouthing Jay and the decision to put him at ten, Leno would surely be damaged, perhaps irrevocably. Even if the protest started with only a few stations, as few as five or ten, the blood would be in the water. And battling your own partners? What kind of place was that to be in?

  Gaspin appealed to Michael Fiorile, the board chairman, to keep the complaints inside the circle for just a little while longer while NBC pursued the alternatives. Fiorile promised to try to control the station bosses as best he could. He and the other board members were pleased that NBC had taken their concerns seriously enough to acknowledge that there was a crisis. But the answer had to come soon, he stressed: “From what I’m hearing, you could start losing stations any day.” What Fiorile had been hearing specifically was that stations might not dump Jay every night of the week, but they would certainly look at a few nights where they could find something higher rated.

  Conan was hardly mentioned, but when the station leaders broached the idea of sliding Jay back to late night (some wanted to start him at eleven, after an hour of local news), they argued that one side benefit was that “Jay provided a better lead-out for our local news—more people stayed around after the news to hear his monologue.”

  “What if we cut Jay back to three days?” Gaspin proposed.

  “No,” Fiorile said. “Maybe two days.”

  “I can’t convince Jay to do just two days,” Gaspin replied, repeating his plea for a little more patience.

  Several nights after the call with the station managers, Ludwin dropped by Leno’s stage and ran into Jay. “What are you hearing about our show?” Jay asked.

  “Well, since you asked me a direct question,” Ludwin said, “I’m hearing that the affiliates are not happy. They are making noises about their poor lead-ins.”

  Jay took it in, looked resolved, and said he would call a few of the affiliates himself to try to win them over.

  Meanwhile, still looking for any kind of answer, Gaspin had a wild thought about offering Jay four days a week, but making Saturday and Sunday two of them. He had no idea how the network would sell a package like that. It felt like a mess. Besides, all this desperate scrambling didn’t constitute a creative solution. Instead, it had come to seem to Gaspin like nothing so much as maneuvering to satisfy Jay’s contract, rather than actually solving NBCʹs problems.

  Consulting on phone calls with Zucker about the imminent affiliate revolt they had on their hands, Gaspin ran down what he now saw as the range of options he had left: Jay cuts down to a couple of nights a week; he gets canceled and leaves altogether; or they somehow find a way to move him back into late night.

  “We haven’t given them enough time,” Zucker protested.

  “I know,” Gaspin replied. But it looked as if time had run out anyway.

  The alternative Gaspin did not present was canceling Conan and simply returning Jay to The Tonight Show. He did contemplate the possibility of the two hosts somehow sharing the time period. Alternating nights? Alternating weeks? The notions started getting crazy.

  When Zucker, eager for another opinion, called Ludwin, Ludwin went right to the recommendation of pulling back Jay to just one night a week—maybe two, at most. Slot the night on Tuesday, when Jay benefited from that Biggest Loser lead-in, and if necessary, maybe add Friday at ten, where he could follow a stable show, the newsmagazine Dateline NBC.

  Again the obvious question arose: Would Jay be likely to accept so dramatic a reduction in the routine he loved so much—shows five days a week, year round? Ludwin had his doubts, bu
t, then, he had never believed Jay would accept the ten p.m. idea. He didn’t think they should just rule the possibility out.

  Two prominent network employees were not consulted for input or ideas on NBCʹs problem: Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien. No one at NBC thought it wise to tip either host that a high-speed train might be hurtling toward him. What sense did it make to spook them with these still-unsettled proposals?

  So both shows continued to churn out their comedy bits and interview segments every weeknight. Debbie Vickers, now convinced more than ever that NBC should never have let the affiliate managers in the door, decided to flout the stations’ wishes and go with what she believed was best for the show. She moved Jay’s stronger comedy departments up into act two, where they belonged. Most of the correspondents bit the dust; the stronger ones got slots deeper into the show. She moved the “10 at 10” segment back to the caboose, leading into the local news—at least the stations would have some name celebrity on the air just before they reported the traffic accidents on the local interstate.

  At The Tonight Show, meanwhile, Sarah Palin finally made her appearance, on December 11—five months after her feud with Letterman, but she was on. The show had found a way to include her that was consistent with Conan’s style—not at the desk for an interview, but instead as a participant (and a rather good one) in a comedy bit. And her guest spot was a walk-on—there had been no advance publicity.