The War for Late Night

by Carter, Bill

  Conan couldn’t help but look back, like someone wondering just what it was that had hit him over the head while he was honestly going about his business. In the end he accepted Liza’s analysis: NBC had never really given him The Tonight Show. It was a Potemkin version; they gave him the outline of The Tonight Show, but left out the guts.

  He perceived the analysis emerging from certain corners of show business: Conan had played the patsy. At the very moment his career was exploding—when Fox and ABC would have torn up their floorboards to build a fire to attract him—he had allowed himself to be lured into staying where he was, because NBC had dangled The Tonight Show far in the distance.

  But he had no second thoughts—not about any of that. The most important question for him had been and remained: Where can I do good work? Hanging on at NBC and Late Night all but guaranteed he would have every opportunity to do good work as he waited out the promise of The Tonight Show in his future.

  Conan could not imagine doing anything different, either in his initial call to accept confinement in the waiting room for five years or in his final call to reject the ultimate insult of NBC’s wait-and-switch maneuver—the thirty-minute delay.

  O’Brien took solace in his conviction that he was the only individual in the whole fucking mess who could say with total honesty that he’d held up his end of the bargain.

  Could Jay Leno really claim that?

  Conan had already thought about what he might say to Jay if he ever did chance to run into him again: “I know you think you’ve won, but you have no idea what you’ve lost.”

  It wouldn’t have the slightest impact on Jay, Conan knew, because Jay would simply shrug and say, “Hey, I’m getting my numbers.”

  Between the tour, keeping up with his growing legion of fans via Twitter, and prepping for the new show on TBS, Conan had plenty to occupy his mind and keep it from drifting again and again to fantasy confrontations with NBC executives, imaginary exchanges with Jay.

  Conan was thankful for that, and immensely thankful for Liza and the kids, and for Jeff Ross and the others who had stood beside him in this sandstorm and never took a step sideways. They would all be back for the next ride in his career carnival, no questions asked, no regrets.

  All of that helped in his sensible commitment to move on.

  But still, sometimes, in the middle of the night, when the house was quiet and the bed was warm, Conan would lie awake, sleep impossible, the replay machine running in his mind, generating scenes wilder and more stunning than anything his always blazing imagination could ever have conjured.

  Liza would wake and watch him for a while, just lying there, staring blankly. And then Conan O’Brien would softly say:

  “What the fuck happened?”

  EPILOGUE

  WE’RE THE NETWORK

  A few years after he stepped down from The Tonight Show, Johnny Carson met Jerry Seinfeld for dinner in Los Angeles. As one of the many comics who broke through into public consciousness thanks to a showcase on Johnny’s show, Jerry was thrilled at the invitation.

  As they talked about the comedy business they both loved, Jerry said to Johnny, “In my entire career as a stand-up, one of the things endlessly debated in every comedy club I was ever in was: Who do you think is going to take over The Tonight Show when Johnny leaves? For like twenty years I had that conversation. And the one thing none of us realized was that, when you left, you were taking it with you.”

  Johnny had broadly agreed, Jerry said later. The point, Jerry explained, was that the show—the way Johnny did it; “the institution,” as people called it—effectively ended the day he walked off that stage. After that, what was left? A time slot, another guy in it, and a name that essentially meant nothing. Because, Seinfeld pointed out, nobody in the business ever said, “I’m doing The Tonight Show.” Instead they all said, “I’m doing Jay; I’m doing Dave; I’m doing Conan.”

  Observing the NBC events of late 2009 and early 2010, Seinfeld found himself astonished at the psychic bloodletting that had taken place, and all of it over a chair on a studio set, a television show, and whether that show would begin at this time or another time, a half hour later.

  “Nobody ever uses these show names,” Jerry said, his voice hitting the high register familiar from his routines when he addressed the most mind-boggling absurdities of life. “These names are bullshit words! How do you not get that this whole thing is phony? It’s all fake! There’s no institution to offend! All of this ‘I won’t sit by and watch the institution damaged.’ What institution? Ripping off the public? That’s the only institution! We tell jokes and they give us millions! Who’s going to take over Late Night or Late Show or whatever the hell it’s called? Nobody’s going to take it over! It’s Dave! When Dave’s done, that’s the end of that! And then another guy comes along and has to do his thing. That, to me, is an obvious essential of show business that you eventually grasp. Somehow that seems to have been missed by some of the people here.”

  Obviously Seinfeld directed most of his amazement toward Conan O’Brien and his team for taking a position that Jerry, a contemporary comic with distinctly old-school values, simply couldn’t fathom. “I don’t really understand why they were so offended,” Jerry said. “Jay’s show isn’t working; your show isn’t working—how about a new idea? To me, when I see the numbers those two guys were getting, yes, it’s time to sit down at the idea table.” And why put a career on the line over a shift of thirty minutes, he wondered. “A half hour is a half hour no matter where it is. It goes by forty-eight times a day! Who cares where it is?” As for the passionate defense of the tradition of The Tonight Show, Seinfeld observed, “There is no tradition! This is what I didn’t get. Conan has been on television for sixteen years. At that point you should get it: There are no shows! It’s all made up! The TV show is just a card! Somebody printed the words on it!”

  Jerry admired Conan’s talent, wished him the best, and predicted he would do well “because he’s great.” But why on earth it had come to a point where he felt he had to leave NBC for TBS—that simply made no sense. “I couldn’t believe he walked away,” Seinfeld said. “I thought he should just say, ‘Yeah, let me go at midnight. Let me work this differently. Let me hang around.’ Here’s big point number two in show business: Hang around! Just stay there, just be there! The old cliché: 95 percent is just showing up. OK, I’m on at twelve; I’m still showing up. You never leave!”

  At least one Conan loyalist, Lorne Michaels, found that argument sound. Lorne had never stopped believing in Conan, in his talent and his wit, and never wavered in his certainty that, left alone with his imposing intelligence, Conan would have composed his show as well as he composed his matchless comedy writing.

  Michaels was convinced that the Conan he knew and had worked with would have reacted differently had NBC’s approach been better planned—if only it had been Jeff Zucker who turned up on Conan’s doorstep, saying, “Listen, what do I do here? I did this to protect you. Whether I was right or wrong, I did it for what I believed were the right reasons. I need your help now.”

  The earlier Conan, Lorne believed, would have responded to that plea, because he was nothing if not pragmatic. In the panicky early days at Late Night, Conan had told a previous crew of bomb-throwing colleagues to stay calm, and they’d weathered that storm.

  This time, it seemed to Michaels, Conan had been too beaten up to maintain perspective, and he had no one around him to provide the perspective he needed. Lorne didn’t know Gavin Polone at all; his frame of reference on managers was dominated by his own, the legendary Bernie Brillstein. Bernie, as Lorne recalled, used to say there were two kinds of managers: the ones who walked through kitchens and the ones who didn’t.

  “The ones who walked through kitchens” referred to old-time managers who made a point to show up in every grimy club where a client performed, to the point where “they knew the guys with the hairnets working in the back.”

  That kind of manager, as Mic
haels saw it, would have been in there talking to the guys in hairnets—and everybody else—at NBC, finding out what was really going on, getting the information he needed to warn his client that he faced serious trouble. From at least October on, Michaels believed, a Bernie kind of manager would have been asking the necessary questions: Are we OK? What do we need to do?

  It was of no use simply to make the argument that Conan was superior to Jay, had paid his dues, and deserved the job more. In television, Michaels knew from deep experience, in the contest of numbers versus taste, it was no contest. To allow the situation to get caught up in “They misled me” or “I was lied to” or “They did the wrong thing and I’m doing the right thing” had the effect of turning it toxic.

  There was no way that Bernie Brillstein would have allowed that to happen, Michaels knew. Instead, he would have been right there agreeing with Seinfeld: Stay on the air. You’re still on NBC—stay on and figure it out. Your position might not be idyllic, but complaining that “they’ve deceived me and they betrayed me” could result only in martyrdom. And, as Lorne pointed out, underscoring his and Brillstein’s (and Seinfeld’s) frame of reference, “Jews do not celebrate martyrdom.”

  Conan also had a raft of fervent supporters online, and many in the press, who feted his show as a gem that NBC had treated as if it were a chewed-over olive pit. In one delicious twist for him, Conan’s Tonight Show was nominated for an Emmy (he lost again to Jon Stewart, who won for an astounding eighth straight year), while Jay was totally shut out. And of course, the stand Conan took to walk rather than be downgraded was widely celebrated as courageous and justified.

  Among others in the comedy business, Conan had enormous support. His old friend and summer roommate Jeff Garlin linked the outcome to character issues—as in, Conan had character and Jay didn’t: “Jay should have had the character to say, ‘No, I said I was leaving and I’m going to stand by what I said. Instead he pretended like it never happened,”Garlin said.

  Like some others, though, Garlin was not convinced Conan had found his rhythm yet on The Tonight Show—or at least not until his last two cant-miss weeks of shows. “Conan is extraordinarily talented,” Garlin observed. “He’s totally different. He should play up those things.” Instead, on Tonight, Garlin argued, Conan was trying to be both outrageous and mainstream. “You can’t be both things. He didn’t have enough time. He was three-quarters of the way there.”

  Even Garlin conceded that NBC was probably right in believing that Jay would have beaten Conan in the ratings if he had left to go to ABC rather than move to ten p.m. But Garlin insisted that that proved nothing: Jay already beat Letterman with regularity, “and you can’t tell me that The Tonight Show with Leno is funnier than Late Show with Letterman.” Jay’s dominance, Garlin said, went back to the taste vs. numbers debate. “The people that Jay appeals to are not comedy fans,” Garlin argued. “It’s just the general public. Letterman and Conan appeal to people who are comedy fans. It’s like comparing John Coltrane to Kenny G. One of Kenny G’s albums probably sold more than all of John Coltrane’s library. But you can’t tell me for a second that Kenny G is better than John Coltrane.”

  NBC didn’t care if Conan O’Brien was funnier, just as in 1992 it had not cared if David Letterman was funnier, though many of those in the position to make that decision had little doubt that he was. What NBC did care about was, yes, those album sales—or ad sales, in this case. Jeff Zucker had never claimed that Jay Leno was funnier than Conan; nor had Jeff Gaspin. In a business of quantification, how was a comparison like that even relevant? Nobody counted laughs and sold them to advertisers.

  But for all the top executives’ efforts to walk away from the wretched experience and move on to the next item on the network agenda, something about Conan’s departure hit NBC deep down where it lived—or at least where its self-image lived. Despite all its sorry, self-inflicted wounds of the past decade, NBC still seemed to stand for something distinctive in the television world, something a little hipper, cooler, more urban, and sophisticated than its rival networks. Could shows like 30 Rock and The Office and even SNL, going on four decades old, exist anywhere but on NBC?

  Conan, too, had belonged on that list—hip, urban, distinctive. Jeff Zucker and many others had always known that. Losing him was like losing another piece of NBC’s heritage, its DNA, much like losing Letterman had been.

  Gaspin could not help but wonder how things might have been different: Perhaps if he had gone to Conan first, before approaching Jay with the late-night changes; perhaps if he had just been able to get more time with Conan himself, get him into a real negotiating session. Or maybe if Conan had really been able to shine a flashlight under his chin and really look into the future—like, later in the year 2010? Gaspin wondered if that might have altered the outcome.

  “If he knew there was no Fox ...,” Gaspin mused. “If he knew he was going to end up on cable, do you think he would have done the same thing? The best you’re going to do is TBS? Do you think he would have swallowed hard and would have come to the table and just asked for a few things?”

  Such as? Hadn’t NBC already offered him the big thing? Hadn’t they kept him around once with a promise he would move up in five years?

  “A guarantee,” Gaspin suggested. “In three years, no question, you’ll get rid of the guy—you’ll shoot him; you’ll put an arrow through his head.”

  But Gaspin already had the answer. “Who’s going to believe me, right? Who’s going to believe me after what we just did, right?”

  Inevitably, the denouement involved dollars.

  As NBC executives sorted through the impact and implications of the latest late-night tug-of-war, it was hard to find anyone who wasn’t either muddied or nursing a few rope burns. Those, at least, could be salved and bandaged.

  The real cost, one that could be assessed accurately only over time, was in the damage that may have been exacted on what had been, for a generation, television’s most lucrative program. Soon after the pools of contract ink had dried, Jeff Gaspin offered a startling appraisal of where The Tonight Show stood financially.

  To the charge from Conan’s people that, if their cheaper version was allegedly losing money, Jay’s Tonight Show surely must be, Gaspin had a forthright response: “Oh, we’re going to lose money—but what don’t we lose money on?”

  The Tonight Show, which once generated profits of more than $150 million a year, no longer made money? That was Gaspin’s honest admission in the first months after the Jay-Conan contretemps. By spring both he and Zucker were rescinding that analysis, noting that the television ad business had demonstrated a significant comeback, and upfront sales for NBC’s late night had come in far more robust than expected.

  But Gaspin had also raised longer-term questions, including a most ominous one. He suggested that within five years NBC might not necessarily even be programming a Tonight Show, or anything else for that matter, in what the networks labeled the late-night day part. “While we have this heritage in the day part, you know, we also all used to be in daytime,” Gaspin said, recalling the days when networks filled the daytime hours with soap operas, fewer and fewer of which were surviving. “We all used to be in Saturday morning programming,” he added, referring to the days when the networks made money on children’s cartoons. “The broadcast business is changing.”

  It was not hard to find others who shared Gaspin’s gloomy late-night forecast. Six months after the tempest over The Tonight Show, the ratings picture turned darker—and starker. Nobody was doing well; Leno’s winning numbers were down by about a million viewers—more than 20 percent, and both he and Letterman had dropped to their worst audience levels ever. None of the late-night shows demonstrated significant growth or even real traction. The culprit, in most evaluations, was the digital video recorder, the increasingly ubiquitous machine that allows viewers to record all their favorite shows with ease. Now viewers could watch any show they had recorded at any time they liked—and man
y seemed especially to like playing them back in the late-night time period.

  “I really think it’s done,” said one important late-night player. “I think late night is done. Everything we know it to be is over.”

  If the doomsaying sounded a bit like a demented prophet wearing a sign reading “The End Is Near,” the speaker, having made a living off late-night for two decades, had apparently legitimate evidence to justify the sentiment.

  Besides the DVR, whose impact was only likely to get worse as its penetration spread from under 40 percent of households to the more than 60 percent projected for just a few years down the road, the late-night shows were also seeing their relevance undercut by hyperavailability. “YouTube is like the icing on a horrible cake,” the late-night hand-wringer said. “You always have a firm sense that if something great happens on one of these shows, you’ll see it anyway.” Recent examples included the actor Joaquin Phoenix’s apparent freak-out on Letterman or Sarah Silverman’s much-talked-about “I’m Fucking Matt Damon” music video on Kimmel’s show. Everybody was talking about those moments, the late-night veteran said, “but they’re on YouTube; why sit through the whole show to see them?”

  Kimmel, for one, believed the time had come for the shows to address the threat posed by the easy availability of their best material online—an opinion he advanced even though his show generated its most buzz when its clips got passed around digitally. It especially distressed Kimmel because he was convinced his show had more impact online than anyone else’s in late night. While the response to great clips was always huge, he noted, his ratings were still challenged. Kimmel thought it might be time for the late-night shows to get together and say, “We’re not putting anything online anymore. You want to see it? You better fucking watch it.”

  To many executives at the networks, taking a stand against technology didn’t seem a logical response, but threatened only to become one more way to turn late night into the equivalent of rest-home entertainment. Cutting young viewers off from their lifeline of clips of every kind, available at fingertips, would almost surely stir up some kind of organized protest and encourage them to write these network shows off as hopelessly moth-ball infested. Already NBC had begun exploring the notion that instead of selling late-night shows to advertisers on the basis of ratings for viewers between the ages of eighteen and forty-nine, it should consider raising the sales demo for late night to the group twenty-five to fifty-four, the same sales target used by—gasp—news shows, the hoariest genre in the medium.