The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [137]
From the start Vickers fretted about how to fill this newly constructed hour five nights a week. It could not be like late night, which formatted itself easily: monologue; second comedy bit; lead guest for two segments; secondary guest; music act; “Stay tuned for Conan—good night, everybody!”
For one thing, NBC did not want much music in prime time, if any at all. The reason musical acts were always exiled to the closing minutes of late-night shows was that they rarely pulled in viewers and more often drove away those who preferred a different style. And with just one guest onstage for a single segment, the other chunks of time seemed to Vickers like massive hungry mouths waiting to be fed.
In interviews Jay adamantly described the ten p.m. entry as a “comedy show” and not—horror of horrors—a “variety show.” The “variety” designation, Jay explained, “just has a bad connotation.” But he acknowledged that sticking to comedy meant he would likely have to commit to producing something like three times as much comedy as he had on The Tonight Show—most of it generated by the host himself.
In selling the creative breakthrough of the ten p.m. idea, NBC touted the originality of offering viewers an hour of comedy rather than the standard murder investigations and doctors having sex at ten p.m. In fact, television had had plenty of history with hour-long comedy shows, many of which ranked among the all-time classics: Jackie Gleason, Red Skelton, Carol Burnett, Your Show of Shows (that one somehow filled ninety minutes). Of course, all those shows were on once a week, and none had been seen since the late seventies. The challenge for Jay was to produce prime-time-worthy comedy on five consecutive nights, week in, week out.
The key to success, both NBC and Jay’s staff agreed, was to get the show up and running and strong enough to weather the early storm of new episodes of CSI: Miami on CBS and Private Practice on ABC; to reach December, when the dramas would go into repeats for about a month; to show what Jay could do as an alternative to repeats; and then to hang on until summer, when he would likely start to crush the all-rerun lineups he would face.
Jay promoted the logic behind NBC’s strategy almost as vigorously as the network executives did. More people were going to bed these days before late night started; fans were telling him they looked forward to a chance to see him earlier; surely there was a market at ten for something lighter than tales of lurid murders and rapes. He did have reluctance about the title, though, preferring “Weeknight with Jay Leno,” which NBC thought sounded like a news hour. Jay, again citing his mom’s discomfort with ostentation, shrank from sticking his name out there too prominently with “The Jay Leno Show.” Or maybe he remembered the one from 1986 with the same name.
But in the summer of 2009, as he made his preparations for his new show-business life, Jay Leno declared himself a realist. “It’s going to be different,” he said. “The key will be holding the audience through the second half of the show. That’s going to be tricky.”
Jeff Zucker also retained a realistic assessment of his late-night handiwork. Though he proclaimed the evident economic rationale for his move of Jay to ten o’clock, citing the desperate need for broadcast networks to reduce costs, increase revenues, or face the evolutionary grim reaper, that amounted to a bit of after-the-fact rationalizing. The plan made sense; it played perfectly to the doomed-networks scenario that prevailed in cable television circles and many places on the Internet. It even induced one remaining standard-bearer of “old media,” Time magazine, to produce a cover story featuring a mischievous-looking Jay leaning into the frame under a headline: “Jay Leno Is the Future of Television. Seriously!”
But none of that was the dominant reason why Jeff Zucker had installed Jay Leno at ten. Privately he conceded, “I didn’t make this move for economic reasons;