The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [113]
In Burbank, the NBC press department shuddered. Did NBC really want to go out with that message? One week on the air, and Conan had already earned a crown? Phone calls flew back and forth between the network press people and other executives.
In the offices of their late-night department, Rick Ludwin and Nick Bernstein were deeply worried about the release. It was unfair and unwise to stick a label like that on Conan this early. They urged that it be changed, as did many of the PR executives, concerned about the inevitable instant backlash in the press. Even Jay Leno, after all his years of winning, never really claimed that royal title; it belonged to Johnny Carson, once and always. Jay was too smart to ever allow NBC to stick it on him. It would only serve as an invitation to mockery.
Ludwin understood the motivation behind Zucker’s aggressive promotional effort. But to Ludwin it recalled how the Fed chairman Alan Greenspan had described what had motivated overenthusiastic investors during the stock market boom: “irrational exuberance.” This amounted to the Conan boom. One week in, and Conan had lost one night to Letterman—in the ultimately meaningless category of total viewers. That only meant Dave was adding the old people who simply didn’t get Conan. One night, and already the press was jumping on Conan for not being broad-based enough. Ludwin saw it as nothing more than a self-fulfilling prophecy, the narrative the press had been gunning to write even before Conan uttered one word on The Tonight Show. That didn’t make him any less certain that Zucker had made a mistake.
Other NBC executives reached the same conclusion; but they quickly got the message: Jeff wanted that headline. For one executive, the move captured a salient Zucker trait: “He’s the kind of guy who is so smart and so capable that he thinks he can do everyone else’s job better than they can, from the entertainment boss to bookers to the PR department. That’s why he insisted on ‘King of Late Night’ when the PR executives argued against it.”
Later Zucker himself, with the benefit of hindsight, would agree with Ludwin’s assessment. The press release was mistake. That Thursday, though, it went out.
When Jeff Ross received an e-mail with the release, he strenuously disapproved. In truth, he went insane, and immediately called Rebecca Marks, who ran the LA press department.
“Please tell me this is a draft,” he said to her.
“No,” she replied, not fully concealing her own reservations. “It went out.”
“It went out!” Ross shouted. “We’re going to get fucking killed!” He spent the rest of the morning calling NBC executives, unloading an earful to each of them about how absolutely stupid this move was.
A short while later Conan strolled in, ready to start his day, and Ross showed him the release. All the new king could do was roll his eyes and shake his head.
Conan was proud of the Tonight shows they were putting on night after night, and he was happy and fulfilled to be living his dream. He didn’t sweat the early ratings much—not the irrational exuberance of the first week, nor the turbulence in the total-viewer numbers—calculating that fluctuation was normal: You settle in, find a groove, grow from there. That it might take some time to find that groove didn’t throw him in the least. He recognized that, unlike anybody else in the history of this iconic show, he was taking it over while squaring off against an established late-night star, one who had been on television twenty-seven years and who was, by most estimates (including his own), one of the greatest comic talents in the history of the medium. David Letterman was also a star of the baby-boom generation, the audience least likely to be spending a lot of time on computers and other gadgets. They watched their entertainment the old-fashioned way, on a television set.