The Late Shift

by Carter, Bill

  For Jay, this was an opportunity to contrast himself favorably with Dave for all those in the press who had written him off as stodgy Jay. Here was Dave playing it safe, while Jay banged away at the O.J. case.

  Jay’s staff cranked out the O.J. jokes and every night that Dave didn’t was a night Jay figured he had automatically “won the monologue,” as he liked to put it. It certainly made sense to Jay when the Letterman show brought in a new group of comedy writers, including one team that had worked for Carson, expressly to kick up Letterman’s monologue.

  And in one of the first developments from this renewed emphasis on the monologue, Letterman started doing occasional O.J. jokes. Leno didn’t broadcast his pleasure, but he surely sensed a degree of vindication in that move.

  As he rode the elevator inside 30 Rock, NBC’s corporate headquarters, accompanied by Mavis, Jay Leno carried himself with the bearing of a boxer given a shot at a rematch. He all but bounced on his feet.

  Just minutes earlier he had completed the taping of that night’s show, on the stage usually occupied by “Saturday Night Live,” dark that week because of the Thanksgiving holiday. The taping had gone exceptionally well, Jay believed. It was a signal that this was going to be a great week of shows in New York City, in midtown, right in the heart of Letterman country.

  Leno traced the spark that had lit his comeback to his previous trip to New York, six months earlier. That was the first time he had taken the “Tonight” show out of the Burbank studio, and the week in New York had supplied him and his staff with a bracing hit of adrenaline. Forced to build a temporary set, the producers had given Jay just a little platform above the audience, much in the manner of the stages he appeared on in comedy clubs. The result was a closeness to the audience that Jay had never experienced before as host of the “Tonight” show. Combined with the intensity and energy of the New York crowds, the closer connection with the people laughing at his jokes pumped Jay up like nothing else on the show ever had.

  From the day he had taken over as host, colleagues and critics alike had remarked that Jay was just not as good on the air as he was in the comedy clubs, and wondered why. Now Jay himself discovered the same thing—he needed to be closer to the audience to do his best work. He came away from that first New York trip feeling as though he had found the answer. He had to reinvent the show in his own image. It was time to stop doing Johnny’s old show with a new cast; it was time to make the “Tonight” show his own.

  So he asked the set designers in L.A. to redo his Burbank set in the style of what they had done for him in New York. Get rid of that bleacher look that was a holdover from the Carson days. When the new set was finished, Jay felt like a man reborn. Finally he would be doing a show tooled expressly for his own talents.

  And the tooling was certainly being done with that in mind. Beyond the set, the content of the show was being carefully calibrated to match Jay’s strengths and avoid his weaknesses. Because of his supreme ability to craft and tell a joke, and his far lesser ability in dealing with “concept humor,” the writing staff experimented with formats that lent themselves to joke telling, rather than any form of improvisation. As the year went on, the writers and producers came up with what they considered several reliable bits.

  The combination of the new set and the more focused approach of giving Jay comedy he could score with certainly seemed to be working. The ratings were up about 15 percent from the previous fall … and Dave was coming into range.

  Jay and Dave had been on the air against each other for more than sixty weeks. Jay’s total number of weeks in first place: zero. Even when Letterman had a week of repeats and Leno a week of original shows, he had never managed to beat Dave. But the tide certainly seemed to be turning in Jay’s favor. One week in October, with both shows in repeats, the two men had tied in the ratings. And Jay took special pride in the knowledge that Dave had actually planned on taking two straight weeks off that August only to scale it back to one week because, Jay concluded, Dave was afraid the streak would be broken.

  Much more thrilling to Jay were the results that arrived in the week prior to his return to New York. In a week where both men had offered new programs, Jay had trailed Dave by just one-tenth of a ratings point.

  The timing could hardly have been more propitious. Here was Jay coming to New York, ready to do battle with Dave on his home turf, and he was riding a crest. The gap had all but closed. The long humbling nightmare Leno had been compelled to live with, the descent of the mighty “Tonight” show to permanent status as the second-best late-night show, had a chance to be interrupted, if not ended completely.

  Leno himself was extremely careful about leaving Letterman out of his public statements about how much better he felt about his show. But privately he could not help but be excited at the prospect of being able to say to the world for the first time: Yeah, I beat Dave last week.

  NBC saw no reason for caution at all. The network’s research department had taken to sending out weekly memos to the press boasting of Jay’s turnaround in the ratings and comparing his performance specifically to Letterman’s. In the week before Leno’s trip to New York, the NBC promotion department, in a sudden spasm of cockiness, sent out a nine-page color pamphlet, which looked like a $3.00 Hallmark greeting card. It featured Jay, behind the wheel of one of his vintage roadsters, zooming along a cartoon road. Along the way road signs were posted with Jay’s recent ratings gains in various cities: Chicago, Atlanta, Boston, all the places where Jay was suddenly beating Dave regularly. At the end was a final sign: PASSING LANE AHEAD.

  The campaign reflected NBC’s growing conviction that despite all the attention that had surrounded Letterman’s first year on the air, despite the accolades in the press, despite the Emmy award, David Letterman could still be taken.

  Jay believed it too. He had never stopped believing it. And now as he stepped off the elevator on the 64th floor, dressed in a striking blue suit, his hair cut longer than it had been in years (a striking contrast with Dave’s noticeably thinning patch), his beaming wife on his arm, Jay Leno walked into a swirling NBC holiday party looking and feeling like … a winner.

  Less than a ten-minute walk away, at the corner of 53rd and Broadway, in the offices of “Late Show with David Letterman,” the mood was very different.

  The tension that surrounded working with David Letterman never really let up, not even as Dave recorded triumph after triumph, week after week. As Letterman himself put it, “You kind of wish this could get a little easier, but it never gets any easier.” In reality, doing the show was harder than it had ever been for Letterman because he was doing more shows than ever before. He was a five-night-a-week star on CBS, where he had always only done four nights a week on NBC. That meant his daily schedule was much longer, because he came to reserve several hours at night to do his remote-taped comedy pieces, which he felt were too much a signature of the show to give up.

  So Letterman found himself leaving his home in Connecticut each morning at about 8:30 to drive to Manhattan. The workday would often last until 10:00 P.M. That put him home at 11:00, with very little time for anything until it was time to go to bed and start the whole routine all over again.

  And though he had contracted with CBS to take ten weeks of vacation, Letterman had decided that was too much, given the continuing competition. Members of his staff began to be concerned about the pace Letterman was setting. “He is always exhausted,” one of his closest colleagues said. At one point Johnny Carson called Peter Lassally and told him he didn’t believe Dave could keep up the five-day-a-week schedule indefinitely. “It’s going to wear him out,” Carson said.

  But Letterman could not back off the accelerator, not with NBC and Jay Leno spreading the word that the race was far from over. Though everyone on the show paid some lip service to the conclusion that Jay would have to win a week eventually, they all knew the week that it happened would be a grim one around Dave’s big office overlooking Broadway. Letterman was in this com
petition to win, always to win. He watched the ratings every bit as closely as Jay did, and he questioned any falloff, trying to sense if a shift was coming. Letterman did indeed cancel one week of a planned two-week vacation that August out of concern that the show could lose some of its momentum if Jay continued to do fresh shows.

  At some points Dave even longed for the good old days of 12:30 A.M. when the attention was small, the pressure slight, and the living easy. “We were lucky when we were at 12:30,” Letterman said. “We didn’t have everybody coming at us then.”

  The main somebody coming at him remained Leno, of course, and Letterman and his staff watched with some irritation as Jay and NBC mounted their campaign to sell the idea of a comeback. “I’m not surprised Jay didn’t go away,” Letterman said. “That would have been unlikely. How could the ‘Tonight’ show go away? To be on for forty years and occupy a position like that in American culture? That show will survive. Not to take anything away from Jay, but that show and the ‘Today’ show have been an integral part of the broadcast schedule for forty years.”

  That conclusion was Dave’s rational mind speaking. The fact was, Letterman and his staff did not understand how Leno could have risen up again, zombie-like, from the competitive dead to pose a threat again—or at least to be perceived in the press as posing a threat again.

  As Leno arrived in New York that week, Letterman saw the publicity surge that accompanied Jay—and it drove him nuts. It made him even more nuts to hear that when Jay appeared as a guest on “Live with Regis and Kathie Lee,” Regis Philbin, one of Dave’s most frequent guests, introduced Jay with a comment on how he was “running neck and neck with Dave.” Letterman didn’t watch the show but his executive producer, Robert Morton, told him about it, helping to drive Dave even more crazy.

  Morton, as usual, was among the feistiest of the late-night combatants. He believed the so-called Leno comeback was a sham and did his best to get that message out into the press. Leno’s improvement, as Morton saw it, had nothing to do with a new set, new comedy bits, or any other reinvention of his show. Morton argued that any tightening in the ratings between Dave and Jay was entirely due to circumstances outside each of the shows: namely, the changing fortunes of the networks the two men were working for.

  In the eighteen months since Letterman had come to CBS, the network, so successfully rebuilt in the early 1990s, had undergone a transformation. Instead of leading, CBS was reeling. With shortsightedness that seemed astonishing in retrospect, the network had plugged holes in its schedule with stopgap programs and specials, most of which appealed to older audiences, instead of finding new youthful hits to capitalize on the network’s success.

  Much worse, CBS played hardball too long in its renegotiations for rights to the NFC package of NFL football games. After losing more than $100 million, CBS figured it was time to get a better price from its longtime partner. The other networks wanted the same thing. But none of them counted on the willingness of a new player, Rupert Murdoch, and his Fox network, to pay almost anything to get into the NFL arena.

  In the end Murdoch took advantage of CBS’s slow reaction and NBC, recognizing the danger, moved quickly to firm up a new NFL deal at a price the league liked. Murdoch offered more than $1.6 billion for a four-year NFL deal, an astronomical increase over what CBS had paid. When the CBS chairman, Larry Tisch, balked at matching the price, which CBS calculated would mean losses of $200 million a year or more, “The NFL on CBS,” a fixture of more than thirty years’ standing, was gone.

  For Letterman the blow was devastating. “It was so discouraging to lose football,” he said. “That really hurt us. To have your image associated with the NFL is so dynamic, so important.”

  If anything, the news got worse for CBS five months later when Murdoch pulled off another coup. Opening his apparently bottomless wallet again, he shelled out another $500 million to buy an interest in New World Communications, one of the largest owners of television stations. Many of the stations New World owned were affiliated with CBS, but as soon as they had a deal with Murdoch, they announced their intention of dumping CBS in favor of Fox. Huge markets were involved—Atlanta, Cleveland, Detroit, among others.

  After the dust cleared, and after all the networks had made new deals to try to shore up their affiliation relationships, CBS was hurt badly. In each of those three markets, along with Milwaukee, CBS was relegated to a distant UHF station, whose signal was inherently weaker than what CBS had previously had with New World’s VHF stations. In those cases mighty CBS had become the coat-hanger network. The worst case was Detroit, where CBS was forced to buy off a religious broadcaster for rights to Channel 62, formerly known as WGPR—for “Where God’s Power Reigns.”

  “It’s so discouraging,” Letterman said. “In Detroit they don’t even have a real building for the station. I just know we’re going to be on Channel A Hundred and Seven. And I remember the days when CBS was the network everyone wanted to be with.”

  Winding up on a network in disarray was the last thing David Letterman expected when he decided to jump to CBS in January, 1993. He believed Howard Stringer when he said CBS was the network on the move up. Letterman thought he was boarding a moving train. He had no inkling that it was almost out of fuel and he himself would be counted on to do most of the stoking.

  Every day when Morton got the overnight ratings from CBS research, he looked at how Dave was faring in the bigger cities and all but choked. Leno had started beating Dave regularly in Chicago and Los Angeles, among other places. Jay was even occasionally nosing ahead of Dave in New York. But Morton saw the context. CBS’s prime-time ratings were almost in a freefall, at least on the weeknights, when Letterman was on the air. Except for Monday, CBS was at a competitive disadvantage every night.

  Worse, NBC was making a serious prime-time charge. The network had boldly rebuilt its Tuesday night. Most impressive of all was what NBC had done on Thursday. Its new drama “ER” was the runaway hit of the season. Because it played at 10 P.M., that meant it led directly into the local news—and from there directly into Jay Leno.

  All of a sudden Thursday night was becoming a daunting night for Letterman to try to compete with Leno. Thanks to that powerhouse “ER” lead-in, Jay was beating Dave like a drum every Thursday. “Thursday is a tsunami,” Letterman acknowledged ruefully.

  As they always had in the past at NBC, Letterman’s off-the-air frustrations occasionally spilled onto the air. He started taking shots at CBS for its prime-time disasters. One night, in a bit about unusual product warning labels, Letterman held up a copy of TV Guide with the attached label: “Warning: May contain CBS primetime schedule!”

  In mid-October, he subjected his CBS bosses to the full treatment: a top ten list: “The Top Ten Ways CBS Can Improve Its Prime-Time Ratings.” Among the selections:

  New Contest: Watch a week of CBS shows, get a shot at helping Connie Chung have a baby.

  Send Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, on the road to perform complimentary throat cultures.

  Let Beavis and Butthead sit in for Dan and Connie.

  Judge Ito hosts Funny, Funny Courtroom Bloopers.

  More shots of Dan Rather spitting.

  Later Letterman had a little remorse. “I don’t want to burn the network too badly,” he said. “I kind of feel maybe the jokes are reinforcing the image of a network in trouble. But it’s certainly discouraging. They don’t seem to have a great inventory of shows.”

  Letterman’s concerns about CBS’s prime-time travails came to a head the week Leno came to New York. It was November, a network sweeps month. CBS had begged Letterman for a prime-time special, an anniversary show like the ones he used to do on NBC. Of course, his anniversary was really in August. But that wasn’t the main problem. Letterman simply didn’t want to do a prime-time show. It meant more work, and more pressure. Letterman always hated going into prime time; he wasn’t comfortable there. He was more exposed there.

  “I just feel like it’s all me. The show is al
l me,” Letterman said. “I feel like I’m the reason people are going to watch or not watch. If I don’t carry the comedy, the show suffers. I mean if Don Mattingly hits, you can pretty much count on the fact that the Yankees are going to win. It just always ends up in my lap.”

  It was all he needed: the additional scrutiny of a prime-time show. But CBS persisted. And finally Letterman relented. He agreed to do a show based on the best of his remote comedy pieces. Then he spent what he called “endless hours” looking at videotape, culling the best bits, such as his junk food excursion through L.A. with Zsa Zsa Gabor.

  The special was scheduled for Monday night, Jay Leno’s first night in New York. It was one more chip to raise the stakes on the table.

  Almost every NBC figure of any significance, from Bob Wright to Tom Brokaw to Katie Couric, even to the nonagenarian Bob Hope (in town to ride a float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade), was crowded into the banquet room on the 64th floor of 30 Rock. The occasion was the start of the holiday season in New York, but it was more than that for NBC. The network was celebrating its escape from the brink of the grave.

  Daytime was still a black hole, but otherwise the network was recovering on all fronts: News was improving; Sports was in exceptional shape, having preserved football to go along with the NBA and the upcoming Olympics in Atlanta; prime time was looking better than it had in years.

  That only left late night, once considered the birth-right of NBC. The shocking ascension of David Letterman to supremacy in late night had left a deep scar inside NBC, especially on the psyches of those executives who had a hand in passing over him in favor of Leno. All of them were still at the network. That surprised many outsiders who could not believe that the executives who had made that call, one of the most significant in the history of television, were still in place.