The War for Late Night

by Carter, Bill

  Fox remained on his mind, though, because, in terms of future moves, there was the tour and then . . . if not Fox, what? For the most part Conan left such considerations in the hands of his representatives. He had learned of a few possibilities: Did HBO have interest? That would be only once a week, though. Conan had also heard rumblings that Leslie Moonves, the head of CBS, had made a pitch for Showtime, the pay cable channel he also supervised. Rick Rosen thought it might be either Les’s way of parking a potential successor to Dave or else maybe just another move by Les to give Jeff Zucker a professional noogie.

  While all that sounded mildly diverting, Conan still expected a push from Fox—though it was starting to feel awfully slow in coming.

  In early April Conan began rehearsals for his tour show, which got his adrenalin pumping again. Jeff Ross was around supervising it all. Like everyone else on Team Conan, Ross assumed the Fox deal would get done. The process seemed slow and painful, but his impression was that it was far enough down the road that it was going to happen—the situation just wasn’t going to be great.

  Unexpectedly, just after noon on one of the first rehearsal days, Ross got a call from an old friend. Richard Plepler, who had ascended to the post of copresident of HBO, went back years with Ross, who respected Plepler as a smart guy about the business, besides being a fun guy to hang with.

  Plepler said he just wanted to make a little pitch on behalf of Steve Koonin. The name rang a bell with Ross, but not too loudly. “I know you guys are meeting with him today,” Plepler continued. “And I just want to urge you to take him seriously. He’s got good ideas. You may wind up at Fox and all that, but hear the guy out.”

  The appointment had totally slipped Ross’s mind; they were scheduled to meet with Steve Koonin, the head of the cable channel TBS, that same afternoon. TBS shared a corporate parent, Time Warner, with HBO, which was why Plepler was touting Koonin. Ross now recalled that when the agents had initially told Conan and him about the TBS pitch, they had both kind of shrugged, lumping TBS in with the vague offers they had been getting from the syndication crowd.

  When Conan got back from lunch, Ross told him they would have to break from rehearsal early that afternoon. They had to head over to Beverly Hills to Rick Rosen’s office at William Morris Endeavor to listen to a pitch.

  “Why? What’s this for?” Conan said.

  “TBS,” Ross said, adding quickly before Conan could get too skeptical, “Plepler called me about this guy. I think we should hear him out.”

  Steve Koonin did not have a big profile in Hollywood, probably because he lived in Atlanta, where the cable channels that had been part of the Ted Turner empire—and now belonged to Time Warner—maintained their base. But Koonin had a plan for TBS, a cable network that even Koonin conceded had a long-ingrained image in the business: not hip, not cutting edge. “It’s an uphill climb from Andy of Mayberry and the Braves,” as Koonin put it.

  TBS had started as a local station in Atlanta that carried Braves baseball and lots of reruns of truly old sitcoms. But because Turner got it on satellite, TBS became one of the first so-called superstations, and thus one of the nation’s inaugural cable channels. As cable matured, with networks as varied as MTV, FX, and AMC acquiring distinctive brands because of signature original programming, TBS had kept its downmarket identity as that rube channel with the Southern accent.

  It had plenty of cash, though, thanks to being grandfathered into every cable system in the country, and Koonin set out to sculpt a new identity for it, essentially turning TBS into Comedy Central without the attitude, a comedy channel for older and more middlebrow tastes. He began buying up every hit sitcom that came off its network run, eventually building a stable that included Everybody Loves Raymond, The Office, Family Guy, and, of course, Seinfeld. Under Koonin, TBS’s ratings grew, especially when he moved to what he called a “vertical stack” of programs in prime time: running a show like Family Guy for three straight hours—six episodes—in a row.

  The formula was unorthodox, but so was Koonin. A big guy with a slightly nasal accent, he bore a passing resemblance to the Newman character (Wayne Knight) from Seinfeld. He came by his Hollywood-outsider cred legitimately, having spent much of his early career in marketing for another Atlanta-based company, Coca-Cola. Koonin would have appreciated the metaphor perhaps better than anyone else, but he probably never heard the private remarks some NBC executives made about Conan, snidely labeling him “New Coke” (the ill-fated formula that had failed so miserably trying to replace “The Real Thing” in the eighties). But even if Koonin had heard that slam, it was unlikely that it would have deterred him. When Koonin looked at Conan, what he saw was the signature star his channel so far lacked. Koonin and TBS didn’t jump in initially because the Conan-to-Fox scenario had been reported as an all but done deal, but they remained patiently on the sidelines while Fox seemed to dither in its wooing process. With no Fox announcement imminent, it was time to make their own interest clear.

  Koonin’s pitch to Conan and his team that afternoon impressed the whole room. TBS had already tried a late-night format with George Lopez; they believed they could now expand by inserting Conan at eleven and sliding Lopez back to midnight. (Koonin assured them he had already secured George’s assent, so they would not have to worry about unfortunate suggestions that Conan was now doing to Lopez what Jay had done to him.)

  TBS had exceptional young male demos, Koonin pointed out—perfect for Conan. It also had big-time sports: The baseball play-offs in October would draw a huge audience. They could promote a November launch of Conan to that big crowd. By the time Koonin left Rick Rosen’s office, the Conan group had moved from passively curious to borderline excited. Maybe this really did represent a real possibility for them. They all had great affection for Kevin Reilly at Fox, and Peter Rice had wowed them with his intelligence and British class. But doubts had sprung up as the Fox team struggled to close the deal. Could Conan afford to get into another dicey situation with a network and its stations? Just how low a deal could they accept? Fox was talking about dropping the budget from the $70 million they’d had at NBC to about $45 million. How would that affect the show Conan could do?

  At TBS the budget would be slashed as well, but there certainly would be no issue with stations. TBS was on every cable system. In terms of reach it wouldn’t quite match that of The Tonight Show, but it looked as though it would surpass the initial hodgepodge Fox was talking about putting together.

  “So what do we know about TBS?” one of the Conan guys finally asked. “What’s the channel really like?”

  Nobody really knew, and someone finally suggested, “Let’s turn it on now and see what’s on.” Reaching for the remote to flick on the set in his office, Rosen stopped and asked, “Uh, what channel is TBS?”

  The rest of the group looked around at one another asking, “Do you know?”

  None of them did. Rosen called in his assistant and asked the same question.

  The assistant had no idea either.

  At almost the same time, over in the Fox offices in Century City, Kevin Reilly took stock of the Conan situation. What he and Rice faced included a huge capital expenditure, stern resistance from a host of stations, and ratings prospects that likely would not have generated profits for a year or two, maybe longer. He and Rice had heard from New York that Roger Ailes had stiffened his opposition and likely would not be moved. To force through a Conan deal now would surely create a raft of ill will inside the company—and, not incidentally, be a risky political maneuver internally. A misstep here could well lead to vulnerability against a dangerous adversary of the likes of Roger Ailes, and maybe an unexpected career change.

  Reilly e-mailed Rice, who was on vacation: “Look, this thing is going nowhere. I’m starting to feel like we’re in bad faith. We’re wasting a lot of our time and theirs. Let’s pass.”

  When Reilly made the call to inform the Conan forces of Fox’s decision to withdraw, they told him things had gotten close
with another party. It would only hurt their leverage if Fox publicly passed now. Would Kevin mind sitting on this, just for about a week? Kevin said sure.

  He couldn’t for the life of him guess who the other party might be.

  When the news broke on April 12 that Conan had signed with TBS, it rocked the television business. It was shocking enough that such a huge, news-making deal could be consummated under complete radio silence, but the match itself—Conan and TBS? How would that work?

  It worked for Jeff Ross and the other Conan backers because it afforded a national platform and a network that would truly commit all it had to making Conan successful—and it didn’t hurt that Conan would now have complete control of the show, including ownership.

  But surely some Team Coco fans, in the words of a writer on the New York magazine blog Vulture, let loose “a dejected sigh.” Instead of creating a new paradigm for the digital age, “Conan will now be featured as a lead-in for Lopez Tonight (a show you don’t watch) on TBS (a cable channel you don’t watch, or at least never notice when you’re watching it). It’s not just basic cable, it’s unsexy basic cable.”

  That was certainly not how Jeff Ross viewed it. On TBS, accessible in more than 85 million homes, enough viewers would be available to go out and beat Letterman, especially in the key demo, and maybe even—if things broke right—Leno. That would never be a stated goal, of course, and cable versus a network still constituted an unfair fight.

  That didn’t mean Team Coco wouldn’t be thinking about it.

  As Conan headed out on tour, arenas from Eugene, Oregon, to Los Angeles, from New York to Manchester, Tennessee, were packed with screaming, ecstatic fans. They waited in the rain, bought Team Coco T-shirts and posters, crawled over one another to touch Conan as he worked the aisles with his guitar. It was the full rock star treatment, one difficult to imagine any other late-night star matching.

  Except maybe the pair on Comedy Central. And in a shift certain to add to the intrigue surrounding Conan’s return, he would now be going head-to-head in the basic cable universe against those two now-celebrated hosts Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. The cross-channel adulation for all three late-night hosts was never more apparent than at Conan’s June 1 stop at Radio City Music Hall—right under the shadow of NBC’s 30 Rock headquarters across Fiftieth Street.

  Conan, his voice strained by weeks of touring—much of the show consisted of singing, which Conan did surprisingly well—welcomed a couple of special guests that night: first Colbert, then Stewart. It was a love fest for the comics, who had also appeared together during the writers’ strike. But it gave some veteran Conan watchers in the audience pause, envisioning the competition to come.

  “Can Conan kill Jon Stewart?” one of Conan’s old NBC associates asked. “With intent—I mean, can he stand over the body? Because, you know, that’s what he has to do now. And we know Jon can definitely kill Conan.”

  Another longtime New York-based Conanite observed, “The young audience loves Conan—we know that. But they’ll take a bullet for Stewart. It’s not going to be easy for Conan.”

  If Conan’s switch to the cable world set up new challenges for him, it had the opposite effect at NBC—at least as far as Jeff Gaspin was concerned. He stated his position point-blank: “Late night’s not my problem anymore.”

  Jay was back; he was winning, and while he was down in the ratings, he was back ahead of Letterman, which was all Gaspin cared about. He shrugged off any suggestions that Jay’s numbers were perilously close to what Conan had been scoring. “Where would Conan’s numbers be now?” Gaspin asked.

  Best of all from Gaspin’s point of view was that Conan had signed on to move to cable. “That’s over,” Gaspin said of his not so excellent late-night adventure. “Conan’s going to cable. I don’t have to wait for the next shoe to drop.”

  Gaspin admitted that had Conan jumped to Fox, it would have again meant daily scrutiny of the late-night numbers. “I would have had the whole Jay versus Conan thing again,” Gaspin said. “Now I don’t have to worry about that. Now it’s Conan versus Jon Stewart. So I’m out of that game.” And he reinforced the competitive point: It was less a question of ratings than it was of who was winning, or at least who could be widely identified as winning. “Leno is beating Letterman. I don’t care if his ratings are a third of what they are, as long as he’s beating Letterman.”

  All in all, Gaspin judged the late-night cup to have come out half full; maybe, in the long run, as he explained, “It’s better for Conan. It’s better for all of us.”

  While it was surely better that Jay Leno had escaped his exile in the Siberian wastes of ten o’clock, as he resumed the routine of his life, monologues every night, was it really all back to normal for Jay? Just like that? Hadn’t Jay been part of NBC’s ritual of human sacrifice? How many pieces of his spirit had the experience carved away?

  In his appearance on Oprah, Jay had looked almost shattered—puffy faced and profoundly sad. Was that the real Jay? Nobody masked emotion better than Jay; he was so good at it, many people accused him of having none to mask. How much of that flat, emotionless disposition was real and how much was just another part of the persona he presented to the world? Even many of those close to him had trouble sorting out that question.

  One NBC executive who was truly fond of Jay called him “a strange, strange guy.” Dick Ebersol called him “almost guileless,” while competitors used words like “conniving” and even “diabolical.” How could one guy fit two such opposite descriptions?

  Jay seemed to defy Carson’s central maxim about hosting a late-night show: Whoever you truly are comes out eventually. Even after thousands of hours behind the desk, Jay defied that transparency; few viewers had a clue who he really was.

  What Jay had to say about the rough ride of 2009 sounded at once sincere and somehow calculated, depending on who was doing the listening. He expressed surprise that things had turned so bitter on the Conan side and said that he found it truly sad that he and Conan would likely never speak again. He really had tried, he said, to put in a call to Conan when it all started to unravel, but was dissuaded by NBC executives who told him that Conan would not take the call.

  At the same time, when Jay discussed with his staff all the actions and reactions of that chaotic month, the one thing none of them really understood was that whole dream-destroying theme that Conan had expressed so eloquently. When Jay was a kid, he’d dreamed of hosting The Tonight Show, too. But as an adult it became his employment. Debbie Vickers questioned why Conan persisted in seeing the show as a dream when it was, in reality, a job—and one that required bringing in winning ratings. On Jay’s side of the late-night divide, pretending that ratings didn’t matter so much qualified as a form of arrogance, something they just could not subscribe to, because, as they saw it, they were too busy doing shows.

  Jay intended to settle back in and stay busy doing shows for the foreseeable future, but he swore he was open to considering a true end date now, though one he could pick at his own discretion—not NBC’s. He cited what he called the Midwestern model: put twenty or more years into a job, get to sixty-three, sixty-five, or so, and that’s retirement time. Reminded that Carson went until he hit sixty-six, Jay conceded that sounded OK, too. He even volunteered to try on a plan he had always opposed: opening up some nights to allow guest hosts to replace him—a way for NBC to identify potential new host prospects. This kind of talk was totally new for Jay, who more often talked of working until the lights went out—literally. As in: “I’m Scottish; we die in the mine.”

  The course of events that fall and winter did throw Jay off his stride, he admitted, and not just because of all the body blows he’d suffered. There was something a bit eerie about it all, or maybe it was just déjà vu. But at times Jay felt as if he were back in 1993, trying to hold on to the show because some people at NBC wanted to give it to Dave. Jay would never have believed he would be caught up in a replay of that unhappy time again.

>   But here he was, again forced to defend himself against charges of being an unworthy schemer—even though he had been the top-rated comic in late night for sixteen years.

  One of his NBC associates, who had a good if somewhat superficial relationship with Jay, said that in the wake of what had taken place in the previous five months, Jay spoke more openly about his feelings when he returned to The Tonight Show. He made it clear that he wanted to get back in the good graces of those who still held ill feelings toward him because of the Conan business. But the heart-on-sleeve moments didn’t last. Jay could never be someone who waxed philosophical, the associate said. He simply didn’t look back. Seeking perspective might deflect his focus, and Jay believed that to stay on top it was essential to be single-mindedly focused on the job and the job alone. “The fact that he’s still number one alleviates most of the grief he takes,” the associate said. “He does his gigs; people eat it up. That justifies everything for Jay.”

  Not that he believed anything he had done really required justification. The fact that show-business people, who really should have known better, could possibly conclude that it was somehow incumbent on him to walk away from The Tonight Show simply stunned Jay. His take remained: The show was taken from him, which was fair and square; somebody else got it. But the wheel had spun and, totally unexpectedly, the show came around again.

  There was no deal in a back room. Circumstances played out; NBC moved him back where he had always wanted to be.

  Jay slept well at night.

  The tour, with all the spontaneous outpourings of love and support he encountered in every venue, surely helped Conan O’Brien get past some of his anger, but he was realistic. It would take time, longer than he probably could guess, to process completely the cosmic event that had crashed into his life.