The War for Late Night Read online

  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.”

  Later, some at NBC would suggest the piece carried particular irony. The night it aired, Tuesday, June 9, was Conan’s seventh edition of The Tonight Show, and it wound up being the first night David Letterman attracted more viewers. The difference was tiny, and Conan still commanded all the younger demographic groups by huge margins. But he had dropped in terms of the overall number of viewers watching on each night since his huge premiere. A few NBC executives, even while they shrugged off the competitive results—with predictable comments like “Let Letterman take all the old people; the young demos, that’s where the money is”—did mention they hoped to see the total viewer number level off soon. (The Tonight Show was not accustomed to losing in any area, ever.)

  Naturally, with the unrelenting scrutiny being applied to all things late night, Conan’s first night trailing Dave was going to receive wide coverage. NBC moved quickly to the defensive: Marc Graboff gave interviews emphasizing that late night was always about the long term, “a marathon, not a sprint.”

  Jeff Zucker checked in with Conan by phone, offering congratulations based on how spectacularly he had dropped the show’s median age—a full decade in just a week. Zucker had been stressing to other NBC executives, as Conan’s first numbers came in, that this was the goal of the five-year plan—generational change. He told Conan much the same, assuring him that this was what NBC cared about and urging him not to worry about that mass number.

  That was comforting news and especially appreciated, because a few details around the edges were already nagging at Conan. It seemed to him that the promo spigot had been turned off. Right up until he went on the air, notices of the new Tonight Show appeared to be everywhere: billboards, sides of buses and trucks, all over NBC’s shows. (A banner six stories high had floated outside NBC’s main office building in Burbank, consisting of a shot of Conan, only from the hairline up.) Now, suddenly, the promotions seemed to have ended—all at once. Jeff Ross, meanwhile, had been watching some prime-time show on NBC and noticed that the promotions for what was coming up on The Tonight Show had suddenly become double promotions, including what was going to be on that night on Jimmy Fallon. Promos were a disquieting issue to all Conan people because they had chafed for years under NBC’s long-term promo policy, which devoted all the airtime to clips from what Leno had on that night, followed by a rushed announcer voice-over at the end: “And Conan’s got Al Roker!” But Ross, too, received assurances from his good friend in New York that the demo numbers were exciting—and all that really mattered.

  In reality, not every NBC executive was so sanguine, even at that early date. In New York Dick Ebersol watched the first few Conan Tonight shows and felt his queasy feelings were being validated: This was not going over well. When the early spectacular ratings came in, Ebersol felt compelled to warn Zucker and others at NBC, “Don’t celebrate this.”

  That advice also died aborning. Two days after Tonight first slipped behind Letterman, the weekly late-night numbers arrived. (Nielsen, still a monopoly and thus under no real burden to be timely, delivered a week’s official national late-night ratings on the Thursday after a previous week had been completed.) Even though he had shown some declines each night, Conan’s first week remained truly spectacular.

  Conan averaged ov
er 6 million viewers for the premiere week, about 900,000 less than Jay had scored in his final week at Tonight. But those young demos! Conan posted eye-popping numbers for the crowd eighteen to forty-nine, averaging a 2.3 rating, about a full rating point above Jay’s average for the previous year. And he crushed Letterman across the board, by more than 2.5 million viewers and 1.4 rating points in those demos.

  The weekly numbers gave NBC all the ammunition it needed to shoot back at those in the press eager to start questioning the wisdom of the big late-night shift, given Conan’s slide in the mass viewer totals. And Jeff Zucker intended to fire that ammo at will. When the NBC press department put together its release celebrating Conan’s mighty inaugural week, Zucker, who from his earliest Today show days knew how to ride a good PR story , decided to stick a big headline on the release: “Conan Is the New King of Late Night.”

  In Burbank, the NBC press department shuddered. Did NBC really want to go out with that message? One week on the air, and Conan had already earned a crown? Phone calls flew back and forth between the network press people and other executives.

  In the offices of their late-night department, Rick Ludwin and Nick Bernstein were deeply worried about the release. It was unfair and unwise to stick a label like that on Conan this early. They urged that it be changed, as did many of the PR executives, concerned about the inevitable instant backlash in the press. Even Jay Leno, after all his years of winning, never really claimed that royal title; it belonged to Johnny Carson, once and always. Jay was too smart to ever allow NBC to stick it on him. It would only serve as an invitation to mockery.

  Ludwin understood the motivation behind Zucker’s aggressive promotional effort. But to Ludwin it recalled how the Fed chairman Alan Greenspan had described what had motivated overenthusiastic investors during the stock market boom: “irrational exuberance.” This amounted to the Conan boom. One week in, and Conan had lost one night to Letterman—in the ultimately meaningless category of total viewers. That only meant Dave was adding the old people who simply didn’t get Conan. One night, and already the press was jumping on Conan for not being broad-based enough. Ludwin saw it as nothing more than a self-fulfilling prophecy, the narrative the press had been gunning to write even before Conan uttered one word on The Tonight Show. That didn’t make him any less certain that Zucker had made a mistake.

  Other NBC executives reached the same conclusion; but they quickly got the message: Jeff wanted that headline. For one executive, the move captured a salient Zucker trait: “He’s the kind of guy who is so smart and so capable that he thinks he can do everyone else’s job better than they can, from the entertainment boss to bookers to the PR department. That’s why he insisted on ‘King of Late Night’ when the PR executives argued against it.”

  Later Zucker himself, with the benefit of hindsight, would agree with Ludwin’s assessment. The press release was mistake. That Thursday, though, it went out.

  When Jeff Ross received an e-mail with the release, he strenuously disapproved. In truth, he went insane, and immediately called Rebecca Marks, who ran the LA press department.

  “Please tell me this is a draft,” he said to her.

  “No,” she replied, not fully concealing her own reservations. “It went out.”

  “It went out!” Ross shouted. “We’re going to get fucking killed!” He spent the rest of the morning calling NBC executives, unloading an earful to each of them about how absolutely stupid this move was.

  A short while later Conan strolled in, ready to start his day, and Ross showed him the release. All the new king could do was roll his eyes and shake his head.

  Conan was proud of the Tonight shows they were putting on night after night, and he was happy and fulfilled to be living his dream. He didn’t sweat the early ratings much—not the irrational exuberance of the first week, nor the turbulence in the total-viewer numbers—calculating that fluctuation was normal: You settle in, find a groove, grow from there. That it might take some time to find that groove didn’t throw him in the least. He recognized that, unlike anybody else in the history of this iconic show, he was taking it over while squaring off against an established late-night star, one who had been on television twenty-seven years and who was, by most estimates (including his own), one of the greatest comic talents in the history of the medium. David Letterman was also a star of the baby-boom generation, the audience least likely to be spending a lot of time on computers and other gadgets. They watched their entertainment the old-fashioned way, on a television set.

  So Conan figured that with his younger-skewing style it was always going to be hard to recruit the Dave fans and the Jay fans—especially the latter. They had enjoyed years of a different sort of Tonight Show than the one Conan was going to offer, and besides, now they could wait the summer out and get back to their chosen comic in September.

  As satisfied as Conan was with so much of the Tonight Show experience, something about the decision to keep Jay continued to distress him. Jay didn’t really feel gone, thanks to NBCʹs decision to give him ten p.m., and his presence lingered—like the long-graduated college alum who still wanted to hang around the dorm and party.

  Conan knew his late-night history. Every other Tonight host had enjoyed the unconditional support of the brass in New York and LA: The network lined their big clanking machine behind their choice and went full bore on his behalf. In his case it felt as if they were somehow hedging their bet. But Conan believed that tentativeness had to change; they couldn’t half give anybody The Tonight Show. Nobody half married somebody. You’re in or you’re not, right? All he could do for now was accept NBC’s protestations of good faith and hope Jay and ten would work out. He had to root for Jay.

  Meanwhile, stick to the knitting. For Conan, that meant hitting the notes he knew best how to sing. Yes, he wanted to build a mass audience following, but at what risk? He found himself confronting a fundamental question: Did they really expect him to grab a broad-based viewership immediately without alienating his core fans? To him it made no sense to send a signal to all those college kids and seventeen-year-olds secretly staying up late to watch him in their bedrooms, or following his bits online, that he wasn’t their guy anymore.

  The problem was this: By the time Conan loped out onstage every night at 11:35 p.m., another late-night host, with increasingly potent appeal to those same college kids and teens in front of their video and computer screens, was already five minutes into his act, one that was being widely admired for both its comedy and its “truthiness.”

  Stephen Colbert had so quickly thrust his comic character and his blowhard vocabulary into the national consciousness that the Merriam-Webster dictionary editors had selected “truthiness”—according to Colbert, “what you want the facts to be, as opposed to what the facts are”—as its Word of the Year in 2006. A year earlier, after Colbert had been on the air only a few months, another group, the American Dialect Society, had awarded it the same honor, while clarifying truthiness as a “stunt word.”

  In a way, the whole Colbert Report on the Comedy Central cable channel was a stunt, the first late-night entry to flout the premise that nightly talk-show exposure inevitably reveals the real personality of the host. Stephen Colbert wasn’t doing faux news like his pal Jon Stewart; he was doing faux personality. His on-air character started out as a full-blown satirical take on Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly, only bigger and more bloviating. The show’s conceit had distinct advantages. Colbert could mock the excesses and bizarre stances taken by right-wing talk-show hosts by celebrating them instead of denigrating them. (And indeed some conservatives—like the former House majority leader Tom DeLay—didnʹt quite get the joke for a time, thinking maybe they finally had a really funny guy on their side.)

  It was a filament-fine line, but Colbert danced agilely on it most nights thanks to laser-sharp writing and his own consummate improv skills. That was never more apparent than during his transformative performance at the 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner. Bo
oked, as comics had always been, to provide a little humor—and maybe a dig or two at the current chief executive—Colbert brought out the biggest sword he could find and laid waste. Capturing much of the prevailing national take on the Bush administration, Colbert took his pretend admiration to the heights of absurdity that national opinion demanded.

  In one of his most quoted lines, Colbert, citing Bush’s then-32 percent approval rating, said, “We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in ‘reality.’ And reality has a well-known liberal bias.”

  The bit accomplished something rare in the clubby atmosphere of Washington politics and press: It disturbed people. Colbert was only vaguely aware that night of the stir he was causing, by his audience’s avoiding making eye contact with him. But over the next few days he got the message. He had dared disturb the universe, and the level of opprobrium he attracted stunned him. “I didn’t want to be subversive,” he said. “I just wanted to be funny.” Still, for every accusation hurled at him of having violated the dinner’s unspoken code of gentlemanliness, there were an equal number of plaudits from fans who realized that they now had their own champion of truthiness.

  In many ways, Colbert was closer to O’Brien in background and training than anyone else in late night: never a stand-up, intellectually gifted, and balls-out fearless in pursuit of a laugh. Born in Washington, D.C., almost exactly a year after Conan, and raised on James Island near Charleston, South Carolina, Stephen Tyrone Colbert was also Irish Catholic, from a huge family, and the son of a doctor. Conan tried tap; Stephen tried ballet.