The War for Late Night Read online

  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.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  SELL-BY DATE

  On 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.

  Conan didn’t speak about it in public—his young fans, who didn’t know Carson from carpeting, would have been baffled by it—but Conan had the dream, the same one that had inspired and infected Letterman and Leno. As a serious student of the history of American television, and a devotee of its classic programs, he could not help himself. He was in thrall to the dream: He wanted The Tonight Show. He wanted to be the guy at the head of the franchise, the show that, when he was twelve, he had watched with his dad, taking in the things Carson said and did that his father laughed at and enjoyed so much late at night in their home in Brookline, Massachusetts. That shared memory had a powerful pull on Conan.

  Ross himself could not deny the seductive appeal inherent in being the guy who produced The Tonight Show every night; for a late-night producer, that was still the mountaintop, as well.

  And both men had such links to NBC that tearing themselves away, just as Conan was steering into the fast lane of his career, would be personally wrenching. Bob Wright, the NBC chairman, had built a true connection to Conan, who sparked to Wright’s genuine interest and human touch. Lorne Michaels, the impresario of Saturday Night Live, was show-business godfather to both of them; he had plucked the unknown OʹBrien and installed him in the Late Night chair, and he had opened the door to a big-time television career for Ross.

  Then there was Zucker. Though O’Brien and Zucker had a Harvard connection that bonded them, the real relationship that mattered on a personal basis was between Ross and Zucker. Their friendship—again initiated by the shared challenges of producing daily television—had set down deep roots. The two men were frequent golf partners; more than that, they were just plain buddies.

  Still, none of that was going to matter if NBC placed something puny on the table against the magnitude of what Fox was promising. Ross set out to make sure Zucker was aware of the danger NBC was in. He told Zucker he had heard that Zucker’s nominal West Coast boss, Sassa, had been assuring people at the network that they need not worry about Conan defecting because Fox could not clear enough stations to give the show a realistic chance.

  “We gotta get this deal made,” Ross told Zucker, “because they’re fucking around with Conan and they’re gonna push him to Fox.”

  “They can’t clear Fox anyway,” Zucker replied, having heard much the same intelligence as Sassa.

  “Yeah they can,” Ross shot back. “I know they can.” And he laid out the research from the consultant.

  Zucker took that information away with him, and NBC soon came back with a more realistic offer, extending Conan through the end of 2005 and bumping up his salary to $8.25 million a year. Although that was still only about a third of the Fox money, the NBC side was convinced it could risk the lowball offer, because it was dealing from strength: namely, the accumulated history of the network’s preeminence in late night—and of course, the ultimate prize, the gold standard, The Tonight Show, still dangling in the distance.

  For Conan’s professional advisers, it wasn’t nearly enough. The Endeavor agency had no formal titles, but its acknowledged leader was Ari Emanuel. Ari, already establishing himself as one of Hollywood’s most aggressive, energized, and plugged-in talent reps, pushed for the Fox deal. So did his Endeavor colleague Rick Rosen, though as Conan’s more day-to-day agent, and already growing close to him personally, Rosen wanted to be sure to read and serve his client’s intentions as best he could. As for Gavin Polone, Conan’s manager, he was about 80 percent of the way to “We gotta do this with Fox.”

  The NBC side was well aware of how things stacked up. As Marc Graboff, the business affairs boss, analyzed it, the Endeavor team—and Polone—would surely be lured by the big dollar signs coming from Fox. If Conan defected to Fox, Endeavor would also be in position to claim the package. (A “package” is when an agency brings together several of the creative elements of a given project and receives a healthy fee for its efforts. One of Endeavor’s biggest rivals, the Creative Artists Agency, had held the package—and commensurate fat annual fee—on the Letterman show for almost a decade.) The NBC executives guessed that Endeavor must be “salivating at the opportunity to package Conan,” especially because the alternative, staying with NBC, off
ered no such shot. The Tonight Show was unpackageable—it was a franchise rooted so deep that no agency could enhance it by packaging other elements beyond the host. Conan’s professional representatives were up front with NBC about their intentions: They were advocating that Conan take the $21 million and a better overall deal at Fox over the measly $8 million NBC had put on the table.

  Still, NBC was unworried. However ardently the management side was promoting the Fox offer, Conan and Jeff Ross had been equally candid about their reluctance to leave. Ross had heard his star’s analysis of the situation clearly, and personally he agreed: It wasn’t time. “I’ve only been at this for eight years,” Conan told Ross, adding, “You know what? This company has been good to me.”

  OʹBrien had studied the tangled 1990s business with Letterman closely and taken note of how wrenching it had been for Dave to be separated from the body of work he had created during his eleven years at NBC. Conan had a passion to stay connected to his own body of work, work he felt he had “poured my bone marrow into,” work he was intensely proud of.

  When the decision finally came, it was Conan alone who met with Peter Chernin. After telling him how impressed and overwhelmed he had been by the offer, and how appreciative he was for the time and effort Chernin had personally put into the courtship, he had to give an answer that Chernin was not going to like: “I’m not going to do it.”

  Chernin and the rest of the Fox team, while disappointed, could not have been completely surprised by the outcome. They had reasonably calculated that their gambit might have come a little early in the game, but at least they were now in good position for whenever the late-night wheel spun again. Nor had Conan’s advisers, avid as they were for the Fox deal, been undone when Conan had told them his feelings.