Live From New York - James H. Miller [230]
One thing I started hearing toward the end was, “You’ve got to fire Jim.” You know, it was almost as if, “You fire Jim and everything will be cool and you can keep going with ‘Update.’” I had no interest in anything but “Update.”
ANDY BRECKMAN, Writer:
I was in the studio the week after O.J. was acquitted and there was this tension in the country because the country was divided and it was this weird sort of thing. It was almost something that was hard to think about, especially in mixed company. You didn’t know where people were coming from. And the cold opening that week on SNL — you might remember the sketch, I don’t know who wrote it and it wasn’t even, on paper, that funny of a sketch, and in read-through it didn’t kill — but the sketch was this: Tim Meadows as O.J. is back at his old job calling the games at ABC’s Monday Night Football. And the first joke of the sketch was O.J. on the field doing commentary about a play, and he’s doing the thing that Madden does where he writes on the screen and he’s joining the marks together — and eventually they spell out “I Did It.”
And that was the first joke of the sketch. When he wrote that out, I was in 8H, and the place exploded like — I’ve never heard a reaction in my life like that, ever. It exploded, but it wasn’t just laughter, it was almost a release — like, of course he did it, you know? And thank God somebody said it out loud. And there was applause and laughter. There is no place else that could have done that. Letterman and Leno danced around it, and they were very coy about it, but there was nothing, nothing that came close. And Downey, bless his heart, he was relentless, even after the acquittal, about O.J.
DON OHLMEYER:
My only concern was what I thought was best for the show. I might be wrong or full of shit, but it wasn’t like I had some political agenda. The O. J. Simpson thing was over by this time. I put everybody at NBC in a very awkward situation, you know. I was brought up that you don’t desert somebody who’s been a friend for twenty-seven years because he’s at the worst point in his life. My decision to be supportive of O.J. as a person caused a tremendous amount of grief to people at NBC, to my family, to my kids. I did it because I wasn’t going to desert somebody who had been my friend for twenty-seven years. But when the whole situation with O.J. started, I called Lorne, I called Jay Leno, and I called Conan. And I said, “Look, this is awkward, but I’m telling you if you in any way lay off this situation out of some concern for what I might think — forget about my feelings, just what I might think — you’re crazy. You have a job to do. It’s the biggest story in the country right now. And you have to deal with it the way you think is best.” That was the difficult part of the Norm situation, because it resurrected all the O.J. stuff again. You know, life isn’t fair, but that to me was like, what does this have to do with that?
ROBERT WRIGHT:
Anything about O.J. had an incendiary effect on Don, but Don is a very easy guy to misread. He’s so blunt, but you can’t necessarily read into the bluntness that he’s unfair. I know it sounds contradictory. He can say something that appears to be completely arbitrary, but his actions generally were almost never completely arbitrary.
It would be very easy and consistent to conclude that because Norm said some things about O.J. which were inflammatory to Don that that would be a great reason to get him off the show. But I never found a lot of evidence of that in anything else. He could get very angry about people who were anti-O.J., but doing anything about it from a business standpoint was never part of the agenda. We’ll never know the answer to that one. He didn’t think Norm was funny. And he probably didn’t think the O.J. stuff was. It was like the world against God on O.J. The enemies list was a long list.
WARREN LITTLEFIELD:
Don knew if he ever so much