The War for Late Night

by Carter, Bill

  But the tack that the Letterman camp took to deal with the strike managed to unite the other hosts. Most of them were still wavering over whether to try to get back to work but had agreed in their back-channel conversations, that if they did return, they would try to do so en masse, as protection against union unhappiness. Letterman’s top executive, Rob Burnett, had been part of the discussions with the other shows, but all that changed when Worldwide Pants decided to take advantage of Letterman’s unique position with CBS.

  Because Dave owned his show as well as the 12:35 Late Late Show, he had an opportunity to make a separate peace with the Writers Guild. In December 2007, with the strike past the one-month mark, word leaked that Letterman’s company was in talks to secure an “interim agreement” with the union. That meant Letterman and Ferguson could come back on the air—with their writers.

  Besides infuriating the hosts and producers of the other shows—as one producer complained, “Dave is Dave, it always has to be about Dave; and Rob Burnett always has to be a dick”—the move created an urgency for the other networks and hosts to respond. With the Letterman and Ferguson shows poised to return on January 2, NBC announced its two competitors, Leno and OʹBrien, would come back the same night—though without any writers. Jon Stewart and his late-night partner, Stephen Colbert, tried to forge their own interim agreement, with no success. They agreed to return, writerless, on January 8.

  On the West Coast Jimmy Kimmel got a call of solidarity: Jay Leno checked in again to commiserate about the bind they both found themselves in. Kimmel felt more pressure perhaps than any of the other hosts. Not only was he still struggling in the ratings, and not nearly as well paid, but he had a string of relatives on his payroll who would be going without income for the duration of the strike.

  Jimmy’s need to get back on the air tied him closer than he had ever been to Leno, who also wanted to return to work without delay. The two hosts kicked around the news of Letterman’s special deal and agreed it was “fucking ridiculous.” Kimmel had also been talking almost daily with Stewart. None of the other hosts could believe their own union was giving a competitor an unfair advantage through some bullshit loophole. Leno and Kimmel also wound up speaking almost daily, with Jay providing advice. Some of his suggestions involved telling publicists the Guild had cleared the shows to book actors as guests, a recommendation that led to confusion over whether the union had said any such thing.

  When they finally got back on the air, however, the two hosts took decidedly different approaches. Kimmel, hewing to the letter of the restrictions, tried to do a show along the lines of his old radio work or what Regis Philbin did on his morning show, just winging it out of pieces from the papers and other odds and ends. Jay had urged him to perform a monologue; Kimmel thought that would be crossing a line. From his first night back, Leno did a full-on twenty-five-joke monologue. No writers; twenty-five jokes. Like all the other hosts, Jay went out of his way to express support for his writing team. But the show, even with no big-name stars—during his first week back Letterman, thanks to his waiver, had plenty of those, including Tom Hanks—and guests that largely consisted of NBC News personnel, animal acts, and assorted chefs and other odd-balls, had to go on.

  The early highlight was a crossover Jay suggested to Kimmel: They would go on each other’s shows on the same night. Leno told Kimmel on the air that there was one good thing about the strike: “At least we don’t have to see a lot of stupid movies and pretend they’re good.” Off the air he continued to counsel the younger host: “Don’t get too excited; don’t worry too much.” Kimmel was so tense he thought he might lose his mind. Jay told him, “Let it pass.” He also urged Jimmy again to start doing monologue jokes.

  Kimmel still fretted about taking a step like that. “I don’t feel comfortable,” he told Leno. “I’m not you. I’m not in the position you’re in.” Kimmel wrote nothing down, just to be safe.

  With no written material and no real guests, the late-night shows were supposed to come on, flop, and embarrass the networks into forcing a settlement. But Jay wasn’t about to allow The Tonight Show to be damaged that way. And of course, he was eager to show up the critics who predicted a train wreck if he tried to ad-lib his way through a show. Jay made up his mind: He was not doing a strike show; he was doing The Tonight Show, and it would not be a Tonight Show without an opening monologue.

  How he did it quickly became a matter of both conjecture and condemnation from the union’s many supporters. Jay said he was merely writing for himself, which is precisely what Johnny Carson had done when he came back on the air during a previous strike. But the Guild had expressly forbidden the hosts from writing material of any kind. They were supposed to sit there scriptless and hack their way through an hour of television.

  Many of the jokes on the Tonight strike shows certainly sounded fresh, as Jay poked at figures in the news, the president, Congress, and the latest bit of outré behavior by some Hollywood starlet or reality-show contestant. At the same time, some of the gags did seem like ancient material dredged up from some joke crypt. “Doctors in China have confirmed the existence of a man born with three eyes. Three eyes! And today LensCrafters announced they can make him glasses in about an hour and a half.”

  Jay swore he was getting no help, not even from the faxers who could have made more than the usual hundred bucks (though at the risk of never being accepted into the Guild). One of Jay’s longtime writers, out on strike but watching carefully, explained his method. “Jay takes the premise from some old joke, plugs in a current name from the news, and sells it as a new joke.”

  Even that process seemed to violate the spirit of the rules the Guild had set down, though Jay argued (supported by one of his writers who was present) that he had been given assurances in a private meeting with union leaders that they would not “hassle him.” After the strike Leno was called to a hearing by the disciplinary committee of the Guild and was unanimously cleared.

  During the strike Leno proved again how sturdy and loyal his audience really was. A couple of weeks in, he averaged 5.2 million viewers to Letterman’s 4.1, despite all the advantages Dave enjoyed. In private Jay took great pride in that achievement. He was enjoying himself, feeling resourceful, and even took to comparing it to another moment when he had had to rely on his own devices when under the gun. In 1993, when NBC engaged in last-minute dithering about whether to dump Jay and install Letterman in The Tonight Show, Leno had initiated his own little espionage mission, listening in surreptitiously on a conference call during which NBC executives thrashed out the relative merits of the two comics. Jay reveled in that episode because he was able to tweak NBC’s executives with the information gleaned from his eavesdropping, leaving them flummoxed about how he had learned what had gone on in a meeting on the other side of the country.

  What became known as Jay’s “closet moment” did carry a little stigma, one he largely ignored. However, a number of his friends, like Jerry Seinfeld, occasionally brought it to his attention, warning him that some of the characterizations in the press, and those of other comics, of Jay as an unprincipled schemer sprang from the closet story. Instead of making him look wily and determined, they suggested, the tale made him come across to some as sneaky and guileful. That didn’t really bother Leno, any more than did questions about whether he really was putting together those long, polished monologues all by himself. During the strike he had symbolically hidden in a closet again, refusing to let events control him. People had looked forward to tuning in to see him die on the air—and he had showed them. One competing host shrugged at the issue, saying, “Jay was cheating.” No one ever proved that. But the strike proved something else: Jay was still winning.

  In New York, Conan O’Brien did not reconstruct old jokes, but the strike did seem to inspire him to reconstruct the old Conan a bit. Left completely to his own devices, O’Brien became more instinctive and inventive, with results that energized him. He found humor in the picayune—like spinning his
wedding ring on his desk each night, timing it in the control booth as if it were an Olympic event, trying to set a new record each attempt. He led audience members out into the halls to the vending machines. He flashed a light to try to turn the studio into a German disco. One night he set up his desk in the back row of the studio, presenting the show from a reverse angle and interacting with the fans in the upper rows. (He even brought them doughnuts.)

  For guests, he marched through the same assortment of animal trainers, athletes, and NBC standbys, with the Today showʹs Al Roker piling up more appearances on top of his already impressive total. One night the show booked a sex expert named Sue Johanson. She brought along a display of sex toys and talked about sex games for couples. O’Brien, even redder than usual, wove magic out of how flustered the frank sex talk was making him. “I blacked out there for a minute,” he said at one point. Mostly Conan cannily took advantage of anything a guest or unscripted moment offered him.

  Among those watching closely, and totally approving, was Rick Ludwin. In his capacity as the executive in charge of late night, Ludwin had the assignment of nudging Conan and his team toward expanding his act in anticipation of moving up to The Tonight Show. It wasn’t often an easy task. While receptive to Rick, whom they all respected, the corps around Conan always believed they knew best what made their comedy work. When Ludwin offered suggestions, the Conan staff was invariably polite and professional, but little changed.

  The biggest area of concern for Ludwin had always been Conan’s apparent reluctance to get out from behind his desk and do something—anything. The show continued to love its set pieces—“If They Mated” (mash-ups of celebrity photos); “SAT Analogies” (Jordin Sparks is to “I grew up on American Idol” as Paula Abdul is to “I threw up on American Idol”); and “Celebrity Survey” (for the question “My Kids Won’t Shut Up About,” Sarah Jessica Parker wrote G-Force; Brad Pitt wrote Harry Potter; and Britney Spears wrote, “Their immediate need for food, shelter, and medical care, y’all”). But Ludwin laid out some research for Conan and his team indicating that every survey revealed that the audience loved it when a late-night host interacted with the audience. He suggested often that the show find its version of the old Carson “Stump the Band” bit—something they could go to periodically to get Conan off the stage and in with the fans. Rick pointed out that Conan always scored when he riffed with regular people. (That was as true in America as it was in Finland, where he did a week of memorable shows built largely around his playful communicating with Finnish folk.)

  That’s why the strike shows so warmed Ludwin’s heart: Conan now had no choice but to mix it up with the audience. He told Ludwin and others that the experience was teaching him what had been missing from his show. When the writers returned, he promised Ludwin, “We’re going to do this kind of stuff and more.”

  When the writers did return, however, Ludwin took immediate note. Suddenly the show was right back to doing “New State Quarters” (mottoes on the back of new quarters, like “Nebraska—A great place to be butt-ugly”). As funny and creative as such bits could be, they were all about art cards in front of the camera and Conan reading cue cards from behind his desk. Ludwin knew Conan thought like a writer, was a writer, and so leaned toward fully scripted material. It looked as though the strike was not going to inspire the lasting changes Ludwin was hoping for.

  In the end, the strike didn’t really change any of the late-night equations. The numbers rolled out pretty much as they always had, with one exception: The networks had taken in a lot more cash. With no production costs for three months and ratings not that much worse for the repeats they were putting on, network balance sheets, battered for years by sinking ratings and rising expenses, started to look suddenly favorable

  “It was like this gold mine for the networks,” one late-night host said. “I went to the Guild and told them, you’re not hurting them, you’re helping them. They’re not even bothered by this. They don’t care.”

  At NBC the strike benefits had become apparent almost immediately even as the news from prime-time continued to be miserable. The latest savior selected by Jeff Zucker to head the entertainment division, Ben Silverman (replacing Kevin Reilly), saw the sizzle of his announcement fizzle almost immediately thanks to a combination of the dead calm the strike imposed on the creation of new programming and his own proclivity for attracting unflattering PR.

  With all that going on, NBC all but welcomed the infusion of extra money the strike guaranteed. “I never saw Jeff happier than during the writers’ strike,” said one of his entertainment executives. “The books were amazing. We were still selling DVDs and other things.” At the quarterly review, the executive reported, Zucker’s announcement that “these numbers are great” prompted one of the other executives in the room to pipe up, “Well, if we never produce anything, we’ll be in great shape.”

  One week in April 2008, just over a year from the expected date when Conan O’Brien would take over The Tonight Show, the late-night ratings arrived as usual, and a few eyebrows popped up inside offices at two addresses on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan.

  At CBS, on Fifty-second Street, they looked at the numbers and saw a headline: Craig Ferguson Beats Conan O’Brien. At NBC, down the block between Forty-ninth and Fiftieth streets, they looked at the same numbers and saw a need for a rapid response: Big Deal, Conan Trounced Him Where It Counts—As Usual.

  Both versions of reality had the virtue of truth. For one week, for the first time ever, Ferguson, the third and latest CBS 12:35 a.m. host to take on Conan during his fifteen-year run, had got his Scottish nose ahead of Conan’s Irish pompadour in the category of most viewers. That this meant less than it seemed was a quirk of the television business, where having the most almost always mattered less than having the most select. So the fact that Ferguson had more viewers than O’Brien—1.88 million to 1.77 million—was thoroughly mitigated by the fact that Conan still ruled big-time with the under-fifty crowd.

  But still . . .

  NBC had already broken ground on the Universal lot in LA, commencing its capital investment of tens of millions on a grand new studio for The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien. It still had no answer to the oft-repeated question “Are you really going to allow ABC to steal Jay Leno?” other than “We believe in Conan.” Craig Ferguson’s just happening to have more people watching him in a week than the guy NBC had that massive a bet riding on had to be worth at least a Huh?

  The official line from NBC was: No worries. A blip.

  Craig Ferguson had been called a lot of things in his turbulent life, including “Bing Hitler,” but “a blip”? Not bloody likely.

  The path of most late-night hosts traversed familiar terrain: watched a lot of Carson/Letterman; decided “I could do that”; found an agent/manager /producer who could open the right door; jumped on a break and made it happen.

  Craig Ferguson’s path touched none of those mileposts—except the last. Instead, his course followed no familiar pattern at all, having started in Scotland, of all places. The fact that his accent sounded so alien, at least to most Americans, was one more reason why Ferguson’s successful entry into the world of late-night television had a hint of hallucination to it.

  Ferguson had done enough alcohol and drugs in his youth to hallucinate just about anything, but not this. This was the product of accidental timing meeting unforeseen talent. That he did have abundant talent was apparent in his résumé: rock drummer, stand-up, sketch satirist, film actor, stage actor, screenwriter, director, sitcom actor, novelist. And much of that had been accomplished while he was barely able to stand on his feet.

  Ferguson had a theory about why Scotland was such a drinking society, and its climate was a major factor. “Anywhere you go where it’s cold, people drink like crazy,” Ferguson observed. But his homeland was different, in that the drinking there was all but pathological. “It was excessive; it was ridiculous,” Ferguson said. A Scottish politician Ferguson once met offered an explan
ation Craig came to embrace as telling. “Scotland is a country in mourning,” he said, “ever since World War II. So many died. It changed the society.”

  The Glasgow of Ferguson’s youth—he was born in 1962—was a sorry place, riven by animosity between Protestants and Catholics and prone to casual violence that seemed impossible to escape. Ferguson often cited getting beaten up as a youth, though that wasn’t the worst experience of his childhood. For him, nothing could top the horror of school. Ferguson’s family was blue collar and lived in a soulless Glasgow area called Cumbernauld, mostly government housing built to absorb the overflow from the city, but it was a family that respected learning and education. Not Craig, though. Every early encounter with a teacher—nasty, disinterested, burned out, cruel to the students—soured his psyche. “I couldn’t take it. It was awful. Bad company and mean people doing horrible things to each other.”

  He escaped in his teens, but the scars lasted. Ferguson could never sit for training of any kind because of his “abhorrence of the early years of my academic life. I couldn’t trust anyone who was willing to give me information.” That left him to pursue interests he could teach himself, like drumming, a hobby he fell into mostly because the punk world attracted him and playing in a punk rock band had the perfect subversive appeal. As with most things he tried, Ferguson proved himself to be quickly adept and he landed in a band called Bastards from Hell (later softened to Dreamboys). He was funny, too, of course, but humor had been of so little use in his life to that point that he considered it unworthy of his time or attention, except in the pursuit of girls who dug guys who could make them laugh. The band’s lead singer, Peter Capaldi (who later enjoyed a successful career as an actor), pushed Ferguson to give comedy a shot.