The War for Late Night (5 page)

 

Early the next morning—even cooler, with a sprinkle of rain, which was CBSʹs problem now—Jeff Zucker arrived at 30 Rock, not overly disturbed by the disappointment of Leno’s performance. On the whole the night had gone extremely well. Conan and Fallon were outstanding. The other acts scored. People got a lot of laughs from NBC’s impromptu chuckle-front. An aberrant off performance by Jay was not going to have any significant impact on either the expectations for
The Jay Leno Show
or the willingness of advertisers to buy time in it. It was unfortunate that Jay had misfired, but it was hardly a crisis; nothing to do about it but shrug it off.

Still, the view from the fifty-second floor, high above Rockefeller Plaza, where NBC had its suite of senior executive offices, was almost always awe-inspiring. Way up there, literally among the clouds on that overcast morning, it may not have been easy to hear what another NBC staff member who had seen the show called “the cautiously hushed buzz” about Jay. That buzz was “decidedly caustic toward Leno,” the staff member said.

As various employees discussed the evening, they realized they were for the first time expressing real fears about what might happen in the ten p.m. hour in the fall. The network had so much invested in this guy, five hours of prime time a week, which meant that he had arguably more riding on his shoulders than any individual had in the history of television. It seemed, to some at least, that Jay Leno had come to New York for an event of clear, vital importance, in a theater packed with buyers, the very people who would decide the financial future of this show, and the entire network, and, in essence, he had “phoned it in.”

Some of the staff members were surprised when one of those executives from the fifty-second floor aerie visited the lower reaches of the company later in the day and—in an eruption of honesty—admitted differing with the groupthink going on at the highest levels.

“Last night was supposed to
sell
the network,” the executive told several distressed colleagues. “Not
hurt
the network.”

O
n a mid-March afternoon in 2004, Jeff Zucker found himself facing a meeting with real trepidation—and he was not by nature a trepid man.

By that point in his career Zucker had made the convoluted daily machine of the
Today
show run as smoothly as a Swiss fire drill; he had produced with distinction the endless election night of November 2000 for NBC News; he had navigated his way—not unbloodied, but certainly unbowed—through the piranha-filled waters of Hollywood during a three-year stint running NBC’s entertainment division; and he had beaten cancer—twice.

So what was so unnerving about having to walk down to Jay Leno’s dressing room at NBC’s headquarters in Burbank, California, and hand him a closing notice for his long run as host of
The Tonight Show
? Maybe it was knowing that Leno could not possibly have seen this coming, not with his ratings still dominant in late night, not with his compulsion to do this job—and only this job, as long as there was breath still in his lungs—undiminished in the slightest. Or maybe it was the private conversation he’d had with Jay’s executive producer, Debbie Vickers, two days earlier.

In her office at
Tonight
, Zucker had run the scenario by Debbie, a kindred spirit because of their shared experience producing the two most famed franchise programs in television history,
Today
and
Tonight
. Zucker’s affinity with Debbie, built over the course of many one-on-one chats about the challenges and miseries of dealing with daily deadlines and the care and feeding of talent, had led him to trust her as one of his few real confidantes during his fractious sojourn running NBCʹs West Coast operations. It only made sense to run the plan by Debbie—sound as rock, smart, dependable, patient, levelheaded Debbie—before taking it to Jay.

When he sat down with her in her
Tonight
office, his presence didn’t raise an eyebrow. Zucker almost always stopped in to see Debbie during his trips west; everyone knew how simpatico they were. Vickers had no reason to expect anything but another casual chat that March day, unless it involved some sort of confirmation that the network had agreed to another extension for Jay. That move was pro forma about eighteen months out from whatever the end date was on the current Leno deal, which was about where they were now. Vickers had every reason to believe things were moving along as normal.

Jeff Zucker, however, had other business to conduct. After some pleasantries he got directly to the point of his visit. He presented his proposal to Vickers in a “what if” sort of way: “What would you think if we extend Jay’s contract now, but at the same time we make it clear this will be his last contract for
The Tonight Show
?”

A petite redhead in her fifties with a work-hard, stay-humble producing style and a thoroughly winning personality, Vickers had worked for Jay Leno since the beginning of his
Tonight Show
tenure in 1992 (and for Johnny Carson before that). After witnessing Jay survive his crisis-filled first eighteen months on the show, then having helped steady him, refashion him, and guide his ascension to late-night supremacy, she was able to read the feelings, intentions, and moods of the often impenetrable Leno better than anyone else on the show—or the planet (not counting Jay’s wife, Mavis, at least). Zucker’s proposition, though, needed no penetrating insight.

“I don’t think that’s gonna work,” Vickers told him, thoroughly taken aback by what she was hearing. The idea that NBC was even considering such a move—let alone now running it by her—left Vickers incredulous: Had the network been mounting this plan over the course of weeks? Months? While everybody at the show had been blithely working away? All she could picture was an image of a husband having an affair while his wife remained clueless.

“Jay’s not gonna go for this,” Vickers told Zucker flatly. If anyone knew how unremittingly committed Jay Leno was to
The Tonight Show
, now and forever, it was Debbie Vickers. “I mean, it’s ridiculous.”

Ridiculous or not, two days later Zucker steeled himself to go face-to-face with Jay himself in his private dressing room. The plan that he had in his (rhetorical) pocket, in fact, involved no “what if” scenario at all: NBC had already decided its course of action over several months of consideration and talks in New York and LA. What Debbie Vickers didn’t know, and what Jay Leno wouldn’t know either (but it probably would not take long to guess), was that NBC had for weeks been quietly back-channeling its plan for the future of
The Tonight Show
with the representatives of its other late-night star, Conan OʹBrien. And prior to this sit-down with Leno, both sides had already come to an agreement.

Conan O’Brien, after a rigidly specified waiting period, was going to become the fifth permanent host of
The Tonight Show
—and the fourth, Jay Leno, was going to go gently (NBC hoped) into that good late night.

 

The plan hadn’t begun on a specific date, nor was there an operation geared to make it happen according to a specific timetable. It happened because NBC wanted to protect its late-night empire—the one part of its entertainment operation that still claimed unchallenged leadership, with Jay at 11:35, Conan at 12:35, and
Saturday Night Live
on the weekend. It happened because with prime-time revenues plummeting, NBC more than ever needed the profits it still collected from late night—even though they had diminished from several hundred million dollars a year at their height to a more modest, but still essential, number. In 2004,
Tonight
by itself was set to generate a little under $150 million in profits on revenues of about $230 million.

Mostly, though, it happened because some executives at NBC had a sense of history and were determined to learn from the past, not repeat it.

In the 1990s, as Johnny Carson ended his long, unassailable reign over the only domain that mattered after prime time, NBC had ongoing deals with the two top names in late night in Leno and Letterman, but owned only one
Tonight Show
chair for one of them to occupy when the music stopped. The network had tried mightily—if ham-handedly—to keep both stars, but the plan blew up. Dave exited in grand opera style for CBS and created the first truly substantial competing franchise to
Tonight
, proving for the first time that late-night television—and the profits that came with it—could exist beyond
The Tonight Show
.

Now NBC had the late-night champ again in Jay and, thankfully, only one obvious next-generation successor: Conan. The only problem was the age disparity this time was not so stark. In 2004, Jay would turn fifty-four and Conan forty-one, whereas when Johnny retired, he had been old enough to be Jay’s (or Dave’s) father. Jay clearly had plenty of game left in him, but Conan had by now reached the professional juncture where Letterman had been when he pressed to move up from the lounge (12:35) to the main room (11:35). Though younger than Dave had been (forty-six) when he chafed under NBCʹs decision to pass him over for Jay, Conan had hosted
Late Night
(the show Letterman had created) for exactly as long as Letterman had—eleven years.

And suitors had already come knocking. Three years earlier Fox had mounted an extended, comprehensive campaign to land Conan, a talent who Fox executives believed was a sweet match for their image of themselves and their programming style—young, hip, somewhat subversive. The wooing had been managed from the very top: Peter Chernin, the chief executive of the Fox entertainment empire—and one of Hollywood’s genuine power brokers—had authorized the pursuit of Conan. But it was kicked off with a contact based in the personal connection between Gail Berman, the talented Fox network entertainment president, and Jeff Ross, Conan’s executive producer and closest adviser. Both now in their forties, the two had become friendly as kids trying to break into the New York theater and music worlds twenty years earlier. Shortly after Berman assumed the Fox network job in 2001, she invited Ross to her office and planted the seed:

“What do you think about coming over to Fox? Not right now, but sometime—you should think about it. When your contract is up.”

Ross certainly appreciated the interest but didn’t think too much about it until the calls from Chernin started. Chernin systematically hit all the legs of the Conan support system—his manager, Gavin Polone; his new group of agents from the Endeavor agency, led by Rick Rosen; and Ross—as well as Conan himself. Chernin’s arguments on behalf of Fox were, as the experienced and savvy Rosen saw them, “incredibly compelling.”

The timing wasn’t bad, either. By 2001, the latest of O’Brien’s deals had a little more than a year to run, and NBC was—as it had too often done with Conan—“dicking around a bit” with the negotiations, in the words of one of Conan’s team. The executive then in charge of NBC’s West Coast division, Scott Sassa, offered Conan a raise, but only of about 10 percent. OʹBrien was, at the time, on the low end of the late-night pay scale, earning about $3 million a year—a fraction of what Leno and especially Letterman (with a salary of upwards of $25 million) were taking in. Conan had come into his own in the preceding years; he was featured on magazine covers and became a darling on college campuses in America. But NBC still didn’t seem to be taking him seriously where it counted—at the pay window.

Fox entered this scene with verve—and a big offer. Chernin took Conan and Ross to several dinners. Between courses, he laid out Fox’s plan for a Conan late-night show: It would start at eleven, getting the jump on both Jay and Dave; it would receive precisely targeted promotion on youth-oriented shows like
Family Guy
and
The Simpsons
and on Fox’s NFL games on Sundays; Conan would become the signature star of the network.

While O’Brien was flattered and hugely impressed with Chernin on a personal basis, he and his team had concerns about Fox—not so much the network itself, but its lineup of stations and the hour-long newscasts those stations ran from ten to eleven p.m. Those newscasts had a different audience makeup from Fox in prime time—older, less affluent—and they would be serving as the direct lead-in to Conan at eleven. But that was not the only hang-up. Could Fox also deliver on station clearances—in other words, how many stations would actually jump in to carry a Conan show? Did too many of them have deals with syndicators for reruns of sitcoms like
Seinfeld
? Would they be willing to drop those for Conan? Could Conan compete on equal footing with the big boys, Jay and Dave?

The Conan team commissioned a consulting firm to look into the clearance issue specifically. The report was encouraging: Fox did have the right in its affiliate deals to push through the clearances across the entire network.

For the hired guns in charge of Conan’s career, the resolution of the clearance issue meant the Fox offer had to be taken very seriously, especially after Chernin laid down his marker. His opening offer to Conan was $21 million a year—
seven times
his NBC salary, a figure so impressive that the agents didn’t even consider a counteroffer. Chernin also argued persuasively that Conan’s hanging around waiting for Jay Leno to leave the stage was only an invitation to long-term disappointment, and potentially a path toward undermining a promising career.

“Jay’s not going anywhere,” Chernin told them decisively. “And if you wait for
The Tonight Show
, it won’t be worth what it is today.”

Jeff Ross heard Chernin’s impressive spin, contrasted it with the halfhearted stroking they were getting from NBC, and he felt the wind shifting hard in Fox’s direction. That concerned him, because he knew one thing better than the money guys working for Conan. His guy had the bug, the congenital disease that had afflicted virtually every comic of the baby-boom generation—and, yes, that still included O’Brien, born in 1963: a craving to do the job Johnny Carson had defined so indelibly, to host
The Tonight Show
.