The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [13]
One showcase cast member blamed Jay for undoing what had been an entertaining and successful night. Others offered comments about how dated the material seemed to be. The most vocal Jay critic took the nastiest tack, wondering out loud if the audience had just been “served the same shit Jay feeds to the free-buffet crowd in Branson, Missouri.”
Early the next morning—even cooler, with a sprinkle of rain, which was CBSʹs problem now—Jeff Zucker arrived at 30 Rock, not overly disturbed by the disappointment of Leno’s performance. On the whole the night had gone extremely well. Conan and Fallon were outstanding. The other acts scored. People got a lot of laughs from NBC’s impromptu chuckle-front. An aberrant off performance by Jay was not going to have any significant impact on either the expectations for The Jay Leno Show or the willingness of advertisers to buy time in it. It was unfortunate that Jay had misfired, but it was hardly a crisis; nothing to do about it but shrug it off.
Still, the view from the fifty-second floor, high above Rockefeller Plaza, where NBC had its suite of senior executive offices, was almost always awe-inspiring. Way up there, literally among the clouds on that overcast morning, it may not have been easy to hear what another NBC staff member who had seen the show called “the cautiously hushed buzz” about Jay. That buzz was “decidedly caustic toward Leno,” the staff member said.
As various employees discussed the evening, they realized they were for the first time expressing real fears about what might happen in the ten p.m. hour in the fall. The network had so much invested in this guy, five hours of prime time a week, which meant that he had arguably more riding on his shoulders than any individual had in the history of television. It seemed, to some at least, that Jay Leno had come to New York for an event of clear, vital importance, in a theater packed with buyers, the very people who would decide the financial future of this show, and the entire network, and, in essence, he had “phoned it in.”
Some of the staff members were surprised when one of those executives from the fifty-second floor aerie visited the lower reaches of the company later in the day and—in an eruption of honesty—admitted differing with the groupthink going on at the highest levels.
“Last night was supposed to sell the network,” the executive told several distressed colleagues. “Not hurt the network.”
CHAPTER TWO
SELL-BY DATE
On a mid-March afternoon in 2004, Jeff Zucker found himself facing a meeting with real trepidation—and he was not by nature a trepid man.
By that point in his career Zucker had made the convoluted daily machine of the Today show run as smoothly as a Swiss fire drill; he had produced with distinction the endless election night of November 2000 for NBC News; he had navigated his way—not unbloodied, but certainly unbowed—through the piranha-filled waters of Hollywood during a three-year stint running NBC’s entertainment division; and he had beaten cancer—twice.
So what was so unnerving about having to walk down to Jay Leno’s dressing room at NBC’s headquarters in Burbank, California, and hand him a closing notice for his long run as host of The Tonight Show? Maybe it was knowing that Leno could not possibly have seen this coming, not with his ratings still dominant in late night, not with his compulsion to do this job—and only this job, as long as there was breath still in his lungs—undiminished in the slightest. Or maybe it was the private conversation he’d had with Jay’s executive producer, Debbie Vickers, two days earlier.
In her office at Tonight, Zucker had run the