The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [119]
The accumulated wisdom of all this analysis reached the Conan team in drips and splashes. Jeff Ross was having lunch a lot at the Grill on the Universal lot with Marc Graboff and listening to what Marc was hearing from New York—nothing really different from what was in the notes Ludwin and Bernstein were delivering in LA. Graboff didn’t think Jeff had slipped on a pair of rose-colored glasses; he always seemed to appreciate the inside intelligence.
But the heavy-rotation concentration on the bookings drove Ross a little mad. Of course they were trying to book the best names they could; they weren’t idiots. They always sought the A-list. But it was early summer, and how many A-list stars were making the rounds unless they were in summer popcorn movies, which were usually about robots anyway?
The music complaints seemed even sillier to Ross. The notes said, put on more music with wide appeal. Like who? Ross asked. There were only so many American Idol losers available. He checked his list: The music acts seemed to have a high quotient of crossover artists, with many singers Leno had previously booked.
One note from the network did get addressed quickly. As early as the first night no one had liked the way Andy did the voice-over opening. To many inside NBC it sounded like Richter was putting a little ironic top-spin in his inflection of “Conan OʹBriiii-en,” with the last syllable trailing off like the fade-out at the end of a song—as though Andy was partly spoofing the role of the announcer. That element got fixed
One other element—and a significant one, as far as Jeff Zucker was concerned—did not.
Jeff Zucker had never completely hung up his Today show cleats—the ones he had used, with recurring glee, to stomp on competitors when he produced the show in the nineties. Even as CEO of the far-flung NBC Universal entertainment empire (cable channels, broadcast network, movie studio, theme parks), he was still known to check in on occasion with the Today producer Jim Bell to suggest a segment—or, more frequently, a booking. Zucker prided himself on knowing a great story when he saw one, and the best way for a television show to take advantage of that story.
So as June rolled by with the press taking note of Conan’s shrinking margins over Letterman—and by week three Dave had edged past Conan in viewers for a full week (though Conan continued to crush Dave in the young demos)—Zucker saw the kind of wide-open opportunity that used to ring his wake-up alarm in the mornings:
Sarah Palin.
Always a magnet for press attention, Palin had jumped on an insult to her young daughter to launch a summer publicity offensive. And the target of her righteous parental wrath was none other than David Letterman, who had stumbled into Palin’s PR gunsights by cracking a joke that would have wandered dangerously close to offensive even if it had been accurate. The fact that it wasn’t only set Letterman up as easy prey for the former governor of Alaska.
On June 9, with Conan just starting his second week on his show, Dave told a joke about Palin’s visiting Yankee Stadium with her daughter. “One awkward moment for Sarah Palin,” Letterman said. “During the seventh-inning stretch her daughter was knocked up by Alex Rodriguez.”
Everyone knew Palin’s unmarried eighteen-year-old daughter, Bristol, had gotten pregnant by her boyfriend and now had a child. Bristol wasn’t the daughter who accompanied Palin to the stadium, however. It was Palin’s fourteen-year-old, Willow.
Palin seized the moment. While she and her husband, Todd, took turns volleying fire at Letterman, accusing him of