The War for Late Night (31 page)

Conan did worry about it anyway despite the network’s assurances. Conan told Polone he suspected NBC might still try to pay him off the $45 million and give the show back to Jay. Polone was accustomed to glimpses of Conan’s darker side, when he would get down and start worrying about things that weren’t really about to happen. Polone simply dismissed the payoff idea as absurd. How could anybody think of doing that? Only a complete idiot would think of doing that.

Rosen, for one, didn’t write off NBC’s potential for possessing an idiot factor. When he pressed Zucker on the payoff issue, Zucker flicked away the notion. “It’s never going to happen,” he told Rosen. The people talking about it were just “those Hollywood people.” Zucker repeated, “It’s never going to happen to you guys. There’s nothing to worry about.”

Conan did his best to embrace the idea that ultimately this Jay stuff didn’t matter. What mattered was hosting
The Tonight Show
. His representatives would assure him: of course, that was true. But among themselves, with Conan out of earshot, they all agreed: Jay at ten was bad, and it was going to stay bad. Not one of them could offer a single positive note about NBC’s plan—other than that Jay wouldn’t be at ABC at 11:35, of course. Sure, it might be better to be in the same boat with Jay, rather than on opposing warships; but it would be better still if Jay sailed away entirely.

For Jeff Ross, the situation was much more complicated. He had to get a show—and his guy—ready to knock America dead, so it did no good to waste time stewing over getting leap-frogged by Leno.

He had made his own discomfort plain to his pal Zucker and then moved on. For the sake of the show, and Conan, Ross allowed himself a few sips of the Kool-Aid.

Maybe it
would
mean a broader audience for Conan
, Ross told himself.
Who the fuck knows?

 

On May 12, less than a month before Conan’s premiere, and only a week before Conan’s trip to New York for the comedy showcase for the advertisers, Dick Ebersol, in LA for some other business, dropped by the new
Tonight
studio. The ostensible reason for the meeting was to nail down ideas for Conan’s participation in NBC’s coverage of the Winter Olympics from Vancouver, set for February 2010. Ebersol was more than just the executive in charge of the Olympic telecasts—he would personally produce every hour of prime time for the games. Both Conan and Jeff Ross were enthusiastic about the additional exposure Conan was sure to get during those hugely watched events.

But Ebersol had another message he wanted to convey, one he had told Jeff Zucker he was determined to get across to Conan. Since his lunch with Jeff Ross in April 2008, Ebersol had only grown more worried about whether Conan & Co. grasped the nuances of difference between shows at 11:35 and 12:35. Ebersol became especially worried after he watched Conan’s farewell show on
Late Night
in February and heard him promise, straight out, in his closing address to his fans—one that, to Ebersol, seemed to ring of defiance—that he didn’t care what people suggested, he wasn’t about to change.

A conversation about Olympics exposure would serve as a convenient pretext for Ebersol to offer his theories of what made for late-night success or failure directly to Conan.

Ebersol had fond feelings toward Conan—almost everyone at NBC did, of course. But Dick’s affection touched another level. When Ebersol and his wife, the actress Susan Saint James, had suffered the shattering tragedy of losing their young son Teddy in a private plane crash—one that had almost killed Dick as well—Conan had handwritten a note to the couple that they remembered as extraordinarily moving. So Ebersol put Conan, as a person, at the highest level.

But this was business, and from a television executive’s perspective he saw Conan as possibly naive, or maybe just too insulated on one of those little islands that seemed to spring up and form spontaneously around every late-night star. Whatever it was, Ebersol meant to break through with some down-to-earth business-reality talk.

After touring the
Tonight
set, Ebersol, favorably impressed, repaired to Jeff Ross’s still unfinished new quarters upstairs in the adjacent office building, where he sat down with Ross and Conan. Ebersol first laid out some suggestions for how they could team up in Vancouver. The first week of the games Conan would not be preempted by a late-night Olympics show, so he would get a week of regular shows with skaters and skiers providing likely the biggest lead-ins of his life. Ebersol promised to deliver some Olympics guests for the shows—and with those tie-ins NBC would be able to charge a premium to advertisers for Olympics-themed programming.

For the second week, with a late-night Olympics program taking over for
The Tonight Show
, Ebersol had been mulling a plan for a two- or three-minute Conan feature each night, something that would capture Conan’s take on the big news from the games the day before. They would find a special sponsor and sell it separately. Ebersol would insert the bit somewhere within the first ninety minutes of each night’s coverage.

The proposal sounded great to O’Brien and Ross, and Conan had every confidence he could pull something like that off.

The preliminaries out of the way, Ebersol moved on to the central purpose of his visit. “I want you guys to know, I’m really here to say, one more time, how important it is to broaden out the comedy and think of those Midwest markets.”

Then Ebersol launched again into the story of his 1975 visit with Lorne Michaels to the undershirted Johnny Carson in his Burbank lair, and Johnny’s advice about slotting the best comedy at the top of the show—and playing well in Topeka and Des Moines.

Ebersol believed he detected that both men were well aware of the Carson anecdote, so he presumed Ross had filled Conan in on it.

The conversation remained entirely collegial, but Conan made much the same point he had made on the air on his farewell
Late Night
show. He had made up his mind to do the things he had always done, to be himself.

“I’m not telling you not to be Conan O’Brien,” Ebersol said. “I’m suggesting things to change at the top of the show.”

None of this advice struck either OʹBrien or Ross as either unusual or new. Broaden your appeal? Conan’s internal reaction was the same as it had always been:
OK, good; thanks for that.
It didn’t seem that Ebersol was delivering anything like actionable notes. It reminded Conan of typical network chitchat. The meeting didn’t last more than fifteen minutes. As it broke up they all promised to talk more about the Olympics idea when Dick’s plans were further down the road.

After he left, Conan and Ross thought little of the meeting in terms of what it meant for
Tonight
, other than that Ebersol, whom they both basically liked, came across as someone else professing to know more about their show than they did—and that he was awfully full of himself.

Ebersol, for his part, got into his car and drove off the lot, a riffle of foreboding running through his stomach.

 

At ABC, Jimmy Kimmel had more than a little natural curiosity about how Conan O’Brien would fare—and some reason to regret what might have been.

If there really had been a might have been, that is.

What Kimmel and a number of executives both inside and outside ABC knew was that back in January, a short time after the announcement that Leno was moving to ten, there had been a frisson of activity surrounding ABC’s late night—activity that surely would have involved Jimmy. Maybe it was just the network’s entertainment division spinning out potential alternatives, having missed out on Leno, as ABC executives later claimed. But executives conversant with ABC’s late-night plans concluded that the network was working on a plan to go after Conan on NBC by moving Jimmy to 11:35. Of course, none of that had been run by ABC’s news division, which would have risen up in righteous anger at another assault on
Nightline
.

The executives aware of ABC’s planning said that Kimmel and his agent, James Dixon, had had quiet discussions and meetings with ABC executives, and several network insiders presumed that an offer to move Kimmel up to 11:35 was imminent. By that point ABC had some results from the extensive late-night research it had commissioned. One finding was that a Conan OʹBrien
Tonight Show
would likely be vulnerable to a show on a competing network with another young host. At that point ABC was considering which of three potential moves to take advantage of this situation made most sense: to have Kimmel go for broke and jump ahead of Conan in the 11:35 slot by months, probably starting as early as March; to sneak ahead of him just by a week or so in May, in order to steal some of his thunder; or, alternately, to hold off until October, when, if the research estimates proved out, Conan would be struggling.

“
ABC can deny whatever they want,” said a longtime network executive connected to the discussions about Kimmel, “but they met with Kimmel and he really thought he was going to 11:35.”

When word of the possible move for Kimmel leaked, ABC did deny it. Anne Sweeney, the network’s chief executive, wrote the notion off as too unlikely to qualify even as far-fetched—words that comforted the news division.

The maneuvering was complicated by the dysfunctional chain of command at the network. Most staff members (and indeed much of the rest of Hollywood) knew that the entertainment division boss, Steve McPherson, technically reported to Sweeney, but in practice the two didn’t get along at all and barely spoke to one another. “At ABC, there’s Bob Iger, Anne Sweeney, and Steve McPherson,” said one long-serving ABC employee, explaining the network hierarchy. “Anne and Steve hate each other. Bob gets along with both of them.”

One hint of ABC’s possible late-night intentions was revealed when Iger, the Disney chairman, led a little hunting foray into the territory of the E! cable channel in pursuit of that network’s late-night host and signature star, Chelsea Handler. That approach may have been totally serious, or merely a little fun for Iger. The fun theory held that Iger might simply have been messing with—or perhaps doing a favor for—one of his oldest Hollywood cronies, Ted Harbert, a former ABC and NBC Entertainment executive, now the head of the E! channel (and, not coincidentally, the man in Chelsea Handler’s life at that point). What was indisputable was that ABC executives did meet, rather publicly, with Handler at the Beverly Hills Polo Lounge.

Handler, blond, toned, and thirty-five, from Livingston, New Jersey, had made a splash—and a name—with a series of best-selling books about her outrageous (in a funny way) drinking and sex habits. She became immensely important to E! (and Harbert) because her show,
Chelsea Lately
, was scoring with an audience of women between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four, a demographic that was not being reached in as big numbers by any of the guys in late night.

After the meeting between ABC and Handler and her agents, she was able to land a new, more lucrative contract at E!. Handler later alluded to her dealings with ABC when she acknowledged in a Web interview with CBSʹs Katie Couric that she had, in fact, been approached for a network job, but admitted she didn’t think she was “ready to graduate to that particular point.” For one thing, Handler said she didn’t think she would be able to say the things on network television that she routinely got away with on cable. (Her show chewed up low-rung celebrities.) For another, she wanted to be able to express views that were “more pointed” than “somebody like Jay Leno, who has to be nice to everybody.”

The job Handler’s backers reported ABC had pitched to her was as follow-up act to an upgraded Kimmel, in an 11:35 to 12:35 pairing. But there may, in fact, have been no real spot for her at ABC. One proposal for Kimmel that ABC executives had discussed internally would have re-created the original format of
The Tonight Show
at ninety minutes. In the shrinking economy of late night, a ninety-minute show could have real appeal. The costs would be negligibly higher than an hour show, but the extra half hour would easily cover that and more with the additional commercial time it could sell. Jettisoning
Nightline
would also have wiped out the high cost of that show.

But at the same time these machinations were roiling behind the scenes at ABC Entertainment,
Nightline
was quietly restoring itself to competitive health at 11:35. With a new format that worked more as a newsmagazine than as an interview show,
Nightline
had grabbed a core audience that, while not overpowering, was sizable enough to defy expectations that the show was sliding toward cancelation.

ABC often hawked ratings numbers that showed
Nightline
approaching or even beating the late-night entertainment shows on NBC and CBS. But the network always compared its half-hour score for
Nightline
to the hour score for Leno and Letterman. Of course, both those shows lost viewers every minute they were on the air because they were running late into the night. In a fairer comparison of the viewership for the first half hour of each show,
Nightline
almost always came in third. Still, because the entertainment shows were clearly fading in ratings,
Nightline
became more viable.

Kimmel, meanwhile, remained a personal favorite of ABC executives, who were more and more convinced of his growing talent. He made a tradition of appearing at every ABC upfront in May, where he would invariably deliver an outstanding (and scathing) monologue. In 2009, on May 18, the same day Jay Leno crashed and burned onstage downtown, Kimmel, up at Lincoln Center, told advertisers, “Everything you hear this week is bullshit. Let’s get real here. Let’s get Dr. Phil here. These new fall shows? We’re going to cancel about 90 percent of them, maybe more. Every year we lie to you, and every year you come back for more. You don’t need an upfront; you need therapy.” He also took a little shot at the age of the likely fans for NBCʹs upcoming ten p.m. star, saying that NBC was giving “Jay’s viewers exactly what they want: an early-bird special.”