The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [122]
“The answer is me,” Dave said. “I just think that Jay has wider appeal than I do.”
His admission likely stunned those at NBC who had been hammering away at that same argument for years in the face of the litany of excuses being thrown up by Letterman’s defenders. With Dave himself conceding, “I think more people are responding to Jay than will ever respond to me,” the excuse well had officially run dry.
Given Jay’s now acknowledged victory in what, by that point, seemed like the Hundred Years War of Late Night, NBC’s decision to relieve Leno of his Tonight chair in favor of Conan left Letterman nonplussed. While he recognized that the network may have been attempting to find a “less messy way to handle what happened to me at NBC,” he still seemed thrown by the whole concept. Maybe because he knew his counterpart so well—perhaps as well as anyone who had interacted with the near impenetrable Leno in his long career—Letterman suspected (correctly, of course) that Jay would have preferred to stay exactly where he was.
So even then, ten months before the switchover was due to take place, Letterman found himself wondering whether it was really going to happen. The few times he would talk about it around the office with his producers and writers, Dave tended to agree with those who speculated that NBC would find some way not to go through with the handover to Conan. The pattern seemed far too similar to how the network had tried to handle Dave’s departure for CBS. NBC had offered him The Tonight Show at the last minute, but only if he waited eighteen months to get it. All his advisers at the time had warned him that NBC would have stiffed him in the end if Jay’s numbers looked good.
Here they were, fifteen years later, and with the numbers still looking good for Jay, a stiffing seemed in the offing—this time for Conan. Either that or NBC would be inviting Jay to pull a Dave and launch another separate franchise, probably at ABC this time.
In either case, Dave knew for certain that the balance in late night might shift for the first time since the early nineties. For his staff, it felt like a potential reversal in the earth’s rotation—back toward Dave.
When Dave arrived that December day, summoning a few of his key people together in his office for a regular morning meeting, anticipation hung in the air like swirling smoke from a lit fuse. Then Dave walked in, sat down, and said not a word about any of it. His number one nemesis was not only leaving the field but was going to prime time, and Dave was shrugging it off, as if . . . whatever. All he said to the group was “So what are we doing on the show today?”
Conan’s now certain arrival in six months was not quite so easy to ignore. The departure of Jay might mean opportunity for Letterman, it was true, but it also carried risk—huge, momentous risk. Losing to Jay, conceding Jay’s ultimate ratings superiority, had been tough enough to swallow. No one at Late Show wanted to ponder what it would mean if Dave now lost again—to Conan.
Rob Burnett, still an executive producer on the show and the executive in charge of Worldwide Pants, whose tenure extended all the way back to Letterman’s days at NBC, never stopped being a true believer. For him NBC’s selection of Leno over Letterman could be linked to the concept of original sin: NBC picked Jay over Dave and had never really overcome plucking the apple from the wrong tree.
Had NBC seized the moment back then and elevated Dave, as this virtually religious tenet posited it, the premier late-night network would likely have preserved the utter dominance of The Tonight Show that Johnny Carson and all his predecessors had enjoyed. How? By ensuring that another network did not secure the one star capable of a successful late-night schism: Dave. Surely, this dogma went, Jay Leno, without the built-in loyalty of the Tonight Show viewership, could not have set up his tent at CBS and pulled in the same kind of crowds that he did