The War for Late Night (32 page)

In reality ABC could not have been more excited about the upcoming changes at NBC both in late night and at ten p.m. Its research had come back with a strong answer to the question of whether ABC should feel compelled to follow NBC’s lead: Don’t even think about it. An ABC executive made a prediction: “We know it’s going to be bad. It’s going to be a disaster. They can say whatever they want about saving money, but they are going to kill their local news and this is not going to last.”

As smoothly as all the deal points had gone with Conan’s shift to
The Tonight Show
, one thread of his old deal had been left dangling—and on the end of that line was an awfully big fish.

Lorne Michaels had more than discovered Conan O’Brien; he had basically sprinkled magic dust on him and created a star. Part of his reward for that was an ongoing financial stake in
Late Night
. Michaels retained an executive producer credit on
Late Night
that provided him with a weekly fee of about $25,000.

From the start no one disputed there was real value in this arrangement, even though Lorne did not sustain any direct day-to-day role on the show after its initial years. Lorne had put Conan on the air, fought for the show, and protected it as best he could in its rocky early days, influencing its style from its conception. But as he saw it,
Late Night
then became Conan’s show, in the same way that the sitcom Lorne had helped create,
30 Rock
, became Tina Fey’s show.

Still, as the start of
The Tonight Show
loomed, the question of whether Lorne’s financial association would continue lingered for some time unresolved. NBC’s position was that some members of the Conan side had sent a message indicating that they were cool to the idea of keeping Lorne on. For their part, Conan’s reps swore that they steered clear of any and all financial arrangements between NBC and Michaels, because the network paid the fee; they didn’t.

However the process unfolded, the result was that Lorne Michaels received no EP credit on
The Tonight Show
and no weekly fee.

Michaels raised no protest.
The Tonight Show
was going to be in LA, three thousand miles away from New York, where he was already deeply involved with
SNL
and Jimmy Fallon’s new 12:35 show. Michaels himself interpreted the decision as Conan simply deciding to leave the nest. Conan had tossed that bouquet of gratitude Lorne’s way on the last
Late Night
show, and Michaels had been moved by it.

Lorne never said a word to Conan or Jeff Ross about the change in the arrangement. But Zucker, for one, concluded Michaels was hurt more than he ever would say to have that association with Conan and his show cut off.

He was right: Michaels would never say. Lorne concluded that, even without any contractual arrangement, Conan and Jeff Ross would always know he was on their side—because he was.

 

When Johnny Carson was counting down the days to his final edition of
The Tonight Show
, a cavalcade of favorite guests dropped by for one last visit with the King. David Letterman had been on the list; Jay Leno had not.

Jay had been determined never to repeat the rancor that accompanied that changeover, when neither Carson in his final show, nor Leno in his first, saw fit to mention the other. As always seemed to happen with Jay, he took all the heat for that snub—and even he later came to agree with that judgment. It had been an unconscionable faux pas, one that took years for him to live down. He had apologized for it, laying the misbegotten decision at the feet of his tyrannical manager, Helen Kushnick, who had all but gotten him fired from the show with that and other scorched-earth personal dealings. (And that, in turn, had always played to some as an especially egregious example of the ritual of blaming the manager or agent. As one of Jay’s late-night competitors put it, “If my manager told me to jump off a bridge, I wouldn’t jump off a bridge.”)

The bitter aftermath of that transition influenced many of Jay’s decisions about how to end his own
Tonight
run. The parade of familiar guests in the final weeks was inevitable; but Jay insisted that the finale needed to go down exactly opposite of how it had transpired with Carson. Not only would Jay acknowledge Conan on the last show, he would have him as his final guest.

So on Friday, May 29, 2009, Conan and Jeff Ross left their new studio and the preparations for Conan’s premiere the following Monday to make the short drive east on the 134 to Burbank.

Conan had done numerous appearances on
Tonight
, always with strong results. Whenever he was booked, his West Coast fans seemed to make a point to get there. Some of Conan’s support group took note of the raucous reaction he would attract sitting up there with Jay and concluded that it made Jay uncomfortable for Conan to bring all that passionate popularity into his house.

On the finale, his 3,775th
Tonight Show
as host, Jay got a huge ovation, which he had to tamp down to leave enough time for the usual joke-intensive monologue. Jay dug from some best hits: Bill Clinton, George Bush, Michael Jackson, even O.J. Of course, NBC’s travails were not ignored. “I’m going off to a safe, secluded spot where no one can find me. Prime time on NBC!”

After a collage of the best of “Jaywalking” segments drew some big laughs, Jay brought out Conan, to another thunderous ovation. Conan looked cool and professional in his dark suit and royal blue shirt—a stark contrast to the gawky kid in blazer over jeans who first visited Leno in 1993. (Jay showed a clip of that visit.)

Conan teased his incipient
Tonight Show
run with a snippet from an upcoming remote segment: Conan in disguise leading a focus group analyzing the prospects of . . . Conan OʹBrien.

As he handed off the symbolic baton, Jay declared, “I couldn’t be happier” with the selection of his successor. “You were the only choice; you were the perfect choice. You are an absolute gentleman . . .
”

Someone in the audience shouted out, “Conan rocks!”

“I agree: Conan rocks,” Jay said. “Good luck, my friend.”

Conan shook his hand, saying, “Jay, thank you for everything.”

At his close Jay offered thank-yous to Debbie Vickers, of course, whom he identified as his executive producer “from day one.” (Actually Helen Kushnick had been the original top executive producer for Jay.) He singled out Warren Littlefield, the former NBC Entertainment chief who fought to keep Jay in the chair. He thanked his longtime head writer Joe Medeiros and NBC’s top late-night executive, Rick Ludwin, for being steadfast “when we were getting our ass kicked.” Jeff Zucker got a mention, too, with thanks for “giving us another opportunity.” And then, of course, an affectionate shout-out to Mavis. “I’m leaving this dance with the same girl I came in with,” Jay said.

 

A cold open had worked well in 1993; why not try it again in 2009?

In what dedicated fans surely recognized as a thematic reference to his introduction to American television, Conan O’Brien burst onto the screen in his first moments as
Tonight Show
host on another symbolic journey, this time not through Manhattan, but all the way across the country.

Fast, arresting, funny, and oddly patriotic at the same time, the run from New York to LA included shots of Conan going full tilt everywhere from the Amish country to across the Wrigley Field outfield in mid-inning—all real, no green screen—backed by the pounding and utterly unconnected theme music, “Surrender,” by Cheap Trick. The opening carried an electrical charge unlike anything seen on the Jay Leno version of
Tonight.
This show was going to be 100 percent Conan, right off the bat.

The voice of Andy Richter, back as sidekick/announcer—and sounding a little less than fully committed—rose up behind the wailing theme song: “Here’s your host, Conan OʹBriiii-en!
”
The first audience, the early LA adapters, already whipped into a frenzy, erupted as Conan strode out, looking leaner, certainly more mature, hewing to the lesson he’d learned from Jack Paar: classic dark suit, light blue shirt, striped tie. As the squeals went on and on, the more mature Conan almost had to give them a little taste, even if he hadn’t planned to, even if it wasn’t really broad-based and middle American—just a few moves from the string dance.

Tall as he was, Conan looked somewhat dwarfed by the capacious new set. When the camera pulled back to show a glimpse of the adoring fans, the space looked deep and cavernous. The next day Tom Shales in
The Washington Post
would call it a “Circus Maximus,” and indeed this frenzied crowd might well have fit in there, rooting on the chariots. After letting them go on a bit too long, Conan finally started the monologue, the first joke about his great timing, coming to California just as it was going bankrupt and being sponsored by the equally bankrupt General Motors. He tossed out a few others, but this was not a night to try a string of hot topical jokes. That wasn’t what he and his guys had worked on all these months; that wasn’t going to be the signature of the Conan
Tonight Show
. The opening—that had the Conan touch, and he had more.

He introduced another taped segment, clearly one he and the staff saw as a high card they wanted to play right at the start. It would also stamp the new location in which they had landed: Conan took over a tourist tram shuttling around the Universal lot.

Later, most critics would be rapturous, but a few first-night viewers with vested interests would express some reservations about this choice: a taped piece that early? And one that long? And one that didn’t quite work for some (such as a contingent of associates from 30 Rock)? And one that was so clearly—maybe too clearly—Lettermanesque: the host exploring the new neighborhood, riffing with regular folks, relying on spontaneous wit and quick tape cuts?

But OK, it was the first night, and not everything had been locked in yet. If Conan’s nerve ends seemed a bit jangly to some of his old colleagues in New York, it was understandable.

After the first commercial, when he took his seat behind his new elegantly S-shaped cherry-toned desk, Conan had the obligatory exchange with Andy, now revealed in an unexpected location: standing behind a wooden podium that made him look like an exiled candidate from a presidential debate. But after a comfortable bit of business with the always reliable Andy, Conan would go no further without checking off the next critical item on his to-do list.

“I want to take a second,” he said. “I want to acknowledge somebody, a very good friend of mine, a true gentleman, a very gracious man, a man who hosted this show for seventeen years, took good care of the franchise. Ladies and gentlemen, let’s all give it up for Mr. Jay Leno!” As the obligatory applause rained down, Conan added, “He’s going to come back on the air—in two days, three days maybe, tops!” Then he slipped into the high-pitched Jay voice: “You know, got to get back in there!”

After the laugh, Conan added one more thought: “He’s been a very good friend to me. And so I’m looking forward to him being our lead-in once again.”

A few moments later Conan brought on his sole guest for the night—Will Ferrell again—and got a huge kick out of Ferrell’s apparent disbelief that someone actually went through with it and gave Conan the job.

“Don’t get me wrong—I’m pulling for you,” Ferrell said. “But this whole thing is a crapshoot at best.”

 

The overnight, unofficial Nielsen numbers attested to just how big a deal
Tonight
remained in the United States. Conan’s premiere pulled over 9 million viewers, more than triple David Letterman’s audience for the night, and more than anything on television that evening in prime time—on a night in June, no less. He utterly dominated among the younger audience segments, which was exactly what his network wanted him to do. Conan’s 3.8 rating among the eighteen to forty-nine audience would have been a hit number for any show in prime time at any time of year. In late night it looked like something from a time machine—a throwback to the 1980s.

But over the course of the premiere week a pattern seemed to emerge. Viewers over the age of fifty, many of them presumably Jay Leno fans, started to check out—steadily, night by night. It wasn’t as though Conan hadn’t anticipated a reaction like that. The focus group bit he had teased on Jay’s last show (and would run on his own during the second week) had been conceived specifically to address the lingering questions about whether older viewers would ever embrace Conan. In concealing makeup that made him look a little like the Popeye character Wimpy, O’Brien, posing as a researcher named Stuart Wexler, led a group of senior citizens (“crusty, crotchety old people,” as Conan put it) in discussions about a series of clips involving this comic named Conan O’Brien. The most outstanding of the many pretaped pieces the show had banked, the hilarious focus-group bit showed Conan at his smartest and best: interacting with people and getting laughs without making fun of them, and landing a point at the same time. One woman suggested this guy didn’t belong on TV, he belonged in a mental institution. Another said simply, “I can see why some younger men who watch a lot of pornography might like this.”