The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [108]
The job Handler’s backers reported ABC had pitched to her was as follow-up act to an upgraded Kimmel, in an 11:35 to 12:35 pairing. But there may, in fact, have been no real spot for her at ABC. One proposal for Kimmel that ABC executives had discussed internally would have re-created the original format of The Tonight Show at ninety minutes. In the shrinking economy of late night, a ninety-minute show could have real appeal. The costs would be negligibly higher than an hour show, but the extra half hour would easily cover that and more with the additional commercial time it could sell. Jettisoning Nightline would also have wiped out the high cost of that show.
But at the same time these machinations were roiling behind the scenes at ABC Entertainment, Nightline was quietly restoring itself to competitive health at 11:35. With a new format that worked more as a newsmagazine than as an interview show, Nightline had grabbed a core audience that, while not overpowering, was sizable enough to defy expectations that the show was sliding toward cancelation.
ABC often hawked ratings numbers that showed Nightline approaching or even beating the late-night entertainment shows on NBC and CBS. But the network always compared its half-hour score for Nightline to the hour score for Leno and Letterman. Of course, both those shows lost viewers every minute they were on the air because they were running late into the night. In a fairer comparison of the viewership for the first half hour of each show, Nightline almost always came in third. Still, because the entertainment shows were clearly fading in ratings, Nightline became more viable.
Kimmel, meanwhile, remained a personal favorite of ABC executives, who were more and more convinced of his growing talent. He made a tradition of appearing at every ABC upfront in May, where he would invariably deliver an outstanding (and scathing) monologue. In 2009, on May 18, the same day Jay Leno crashed and burned onstage downtown, Kimmel, up at Lincoln Center, told advertisers, “Everything you hear this week is bullshit. Let’s get real here. Let’s get Dr. Phil here. These new fall shows? We’re going to cancel about 90 percent of them, maybe more. Every year we lie to you, and every year you come back for more. You don’t need an upfront; you need therapy.” He also took a little shot at the age of the likely fans for NBCʹs upcoming ten p.m. star, saying that NBC was giving “Jay’s viewers exactly what they want: an early-bird special.”
In reality ABC could not have been more excited about the upcoming changes at NBC both in late night and at ten p.m. Its research had come back with a strong answer to the question of whether ABC should feel compelled to follow NBC’s lead: Don’t even think about it. An ABC executive made a prediction: “We know it’s going to be bad. It’s going to be a disaster. They can say whatever they want about saving money, but they are going to kill their local news and this is not going to last.”
As smoothly as all the deal points had gone with Conan’s shift to The Tonight Show, one thread of his old deal had been left dangling—and on the end of that line was an awfully big fish.
Lorne Michaels had more than discovered Conan O’Brien; he had basically sprinkled magic dust on him and created a star. Part of his reward for that was an ongoing financial stake in Late Night. Michaels retained an executive producer credit on Late Night that provided him with a weekly fee of about $25,000.
From the start no one disputed there was real value in this arrangement, even though Lorne did not sustain any direct day-to-day role on the show