The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [133]
What the Letterman people liked, though, was the trend. As the weeks of summer wore on, Dave’s margin in viewers grew larger; he began winning weeks by totals of more than 700,000, then 800,000—one week in August Dave won by close to a million viewers.
The margin for those eighteen-to-forty-nine viewers was dropping, too—though the fact that Conan always won, even with those massive deficiencies among the overall viewing totals, spoke to the fact that some kind of sweeping generational migration was taking place.
Neither host had any real structural advantage in the summer. In general, CBS’s ten p.m. repeats of cop shows provided decent lead-in audiences, but NBC had by far the biggest show of the summer months in the reality competition show America’s Got Talent, which several nights extended all the way to eleven p.m., giving Conan a presumed boost.
One thing that was not happening was any sniping between the two shows. Conan had long since established his membership in the Letterman fan club, so his team wasn’t about to start throwing stones; Letterman had clearly laid his imprimatur on Conan with his visits to his show. Whenever the subject of Conan came up, Dave went right to the heart of the matter: “He’s a very funny guy.”
Not that he thought Conan always appreciated the full weight of the late-night cross. He noted that when Conan came on as a guest on Dave’s CBS show, about two years into his run on Late Night, and Dave asked him how it was going, Conan replied that things were great and he had done about eighteen tremendous shows in a row. Dave recalled thinking, Holy Christ, he’s either lying or insane. The obvious reason: Dave couldn’t think of eighteen tremendous shows he had done during his entire late-night career.
A staff member who had been with Dave through most of his career broke down the comedy of the three big network talents. He said, “Conan’s comedy is whimsical, which was like Dave’s, but he’s moved away from that as he’s gotten older. I don’t know if Conan has evolved a ton since he was in his thirties. Jay doesn’t really have a point of view, other than ‘I’m a joke-telling machine and I’m a blue-collar guy.ʹ Conan is very smart. He has thoughts in his head. He’s got a point of view, but not like a broadcaster like Dave who just comes out and says stuff. I think Conan chooses not to have a point of view, unlike Jay, who doesn’t really have the mentality to have one.”
One veteran member of Letterman’s writing staff had a question about whether Conan might be saddled with an inherent handicap: “Is there something about the look, the presence, the sound of his voice? The oldest credo in television is you need to have a big head to star on TV. As much as we want to get away from that stuff, we are humans and there’s something that goes on there. Conan is kind of gangly, pasty looking. He’s got a high voice.”
Really none of that had anything to do with Conan’s talent, which was all that really should have mattered, as the Letterman staff members conceded. But as the summer weeks passed and the ratings came in, and Dave looked more and more competitive with Conan, confidence suffused the Late Show staff. By their reckoning the timing of the move to The Tonight Show—that five-year wait on the sidelines—had ultimately hurt O’Brien.
“He cooled off,” one Letterman staff member said. “He languished there. Five, six years ago he became the thing. Then he had those five years of lame-duckness.”
But there was much more than that behind their growing sense of confidence. As one Letterman staff member put it, “Conan is in a very perilous position. He goes on in summer, tries to get himself established, and then—here comes Jay.”
The impending arrival of Leno in the fall as the lead-in every night at ten aroused more than curiosity among Letterman’s backers. They were all but counting the days. “Here’s what I think is going to happen,