The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [116]
Colbert certainly looked the part. He had a bookish demeanor behind his spectacles, wore a suit well, like a professional something, and kept his dark hair shortish and precisely in place. Of average height, weight, and appearance, Stephen could have found a niche in the fifties playing Jim Anderson’s best friend from the insurance office on Father Knows Best. Except he was really funny—and, yes, kind of subversive. (That didn’t describe his personal life, which really did seem right out of Father Knows Best. Colbert, happily married to Evelyn McGee, also a South Carolinian, was the father of three and lived in suburban conventionality in Montclair, New Jersey, where he also taught Sunday school in his local Catholic parish.)
Ultimately Colbert was apparently too funny—or subversive—for Good Morning America, which didn’t dare try many of his ideas on their show. (Two of about twenty he proposed were filmed; only one aired.) But the experience did leave him with a real press credential, which helped land him a tryout on the just emerging Daily Show in 1997, when Craig Kilborn was still the host. The faux, full-of-it correspondent turned out to be the ideal expression of the Colbert character, but he hit his full stride only when Jon Stewart took over the show in 1999 and raised the show’s comedy threat level from broad to biting. Colbert’s smug, know-nothing know-it-all began to take shape, and after the show’s first star correspondent, Colbert’s former Second City mate Steve Carell, left for movie fame, Stephen became the breakout feature player for the show’s growing legion of fans.
Colbert’s pompous conservative egotist eventually took over for the merely moronic correspondent. Comedy Central had been looking for a companion series to run at eleven thirty following The Daily Show. Stewart had by this time become more or less Colbert’s professional brother (among other things, they also shared an agent, the ultra-ubiquitous James Dixon), and Jon’s Busboy Productions became the producing entity for the new show. Success came instantly; Comedy Central commissioned a study in 2008 showing that the degree of passion and loyalty expressed toward Stewart and Colbert dwarfed anything else in late-night television. For a time Colbert faced some questions about whether he could possibly sustain a talk show essentially acting every night instead of presenting himself and his own views. Five years in, he answered those questions nightly, modifying his character slowly and subtly over time to add dimension to the show—and to the host’s future possibilities.
Some of those close to Stewart and Colbert suggested that Jon was now well settled and needed nothing more from his career than continuing what had become, professionally and culturally, the job of a lifetime. But Stephen Colbert? He might be up for much bigger ambitions, colleagues said—like reinventing what it was the networks were doing with their late-night shows. If they ever decided to break the form—the couch, the desk, the band, the jokey monologue—Colbert had by 2009 earned a spot high on the candidate list; he had certainly proved he had the creative nerviness to do it.
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