The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [112]
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 over 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