The War for Late Night by Carter Bill

Author:Carter, Bill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Viking Adult
Published: 2010-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

A few weeks into Conan’s run, a single dark-shaded cloud began to drift across the Manhattan sky, sinking just low enough to pose a threat of interfering, ever so slightly, with the spectacular views outside the CEOʹs office on the fifty-second floor of 30 Rock. Jeff Zucker was starting to feel less than thrilled with the way The Tonight Show was going, an opinion he had already expressed to NBC’s late-night executives on the West Coast, Rick Ludwin and Nick Bernstein.

There were two issues, as Zucker saw it. One was Conan’s performance. By his reckoning, Conan looked tentative, not relaxed enough. That could be expected and tolerated, to a point. People get a case of nerves starting a huge career move like this.

But as far as Zucker was concerned, there was less excuse for the second issue: missteps in guest bookings. Zucker, of course, had a great deal of accrued experience from running Today, where bookings were the lifeblood of the program (and the ratings). While each show had its own booking staff that made most of the calls, landing the biggest names often required the intervention of a star like a Katie Couric (or a star producer, like Jeff Zucker). Even close to ten years past his Today tenure, if there was one thing Zucker knew as well as or better than anybody else in the business, it was how to book for numbers. And he thought Conan and his team weren’t doing it.

To what extent that was purely Zucker’s view as opposed to how much he was being influenced by what was being murmured in his ear wasn’t totally clear to those on whom Jeff unloaded this opinion. Others at NBC were already aware that Dick Ebersol, the man whose judgment Zucker was most apt to rely on and trust, had tipped over entirely to the negative side about Conan. Ebersol’s reservations—and unhappiness at how Conan had reacted to his voluntary consultant role—had hardened, within days of the premiere.

As the shows piled up, Ebersol’s critique grew only more pointed. The focus group tape late in the first week was funny, but it almost seemed designed to offend older viewers—however many were left by that point. The music performances in the last act of the show seemed calculated to encourage the nonhip to hit the road. Even Pearl Jam, which seemed like a booking coup on Conan’s first night, had irritated Ebersol. He knew the group had many great songs, but what they played (“Get Some”) seemed to Dick—admittedly, at sixty-two, not the precise target audience for that brand of rock—to push past entertainment and toward a test of how much hearing loss a human could comfortably suffer. Alienating music acts were not going to help drive Tonight audiences into Jimmy Fallon either, Ebersol, who was already most impressed with Fallon’s early efforts, concluded.

Dick’s concerns actually started at the very top of the show—with Andy. Conan had managed just fine, it seemed to Dick, after Richter left the Late Night show in 2000.

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