The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [139]
Even if that didn’t happen, if Conan flopped, then it would be Conan trying to reenter the late-night market as a diminished thing. And if Jay actually did succeed at ten? “Jeff solves the ten p.m. problem,” the Zucker associate said, “and all his costs go down.”
One of television programming’s legendary names, Fred Silverman, who led first CBS, then ABC, then NBC, provided serious cover for Zucker’s plan. “If the Leno show works,” Silverman remarked, “it will be the most significant thing to happen in broadcast television in the last decade.”
Lorne Michaels used the “master stroke” analogy as well, on what he called “the chess-move level.” The ABC threat is over; cost savings could be massive. Lorne’s reservations had to do with the idea behind the show: Late-night guy moves to prime time. He was old enough to remember Jack Paar, who had been huge on The Tonight Show, trying to make a comeback in a prime-time hour. The show lasted only a couple of years. “I don’t know why it didn’t work,” Michaels said. “It didn’t feel right.” He harbored the same doubts about Leno, though he conceded, “Fortunes have been lost underestimating Jay Leno.”
Another longtime NBC executive saw Zucker’s familiar fingerprints all over the move. Recalling Zucker’s trademark when he ran NBC’s entertainment division—when, faced with a threat to the network’s dominant Thursday nights, he expanded the running time of the episodes of his strongest comedies—the executive said: “Jeff is supersizing late night.”
Competitors ripped the plan in public, though in private some nodded at the rationale. “If you look at it on one level, win-win,” one rival entertainment executive said. “They were stretched thin. They were failing. Nice Band-Aid.”
Out in Hollywood, where Zucker was still widely seen as an alien with hostile intent, the move incited pure rage—a lot of it highly personal. Especially among writers and producers who created ten p.m. shows, the Leno invasion was taken as a belligerent affront. At a gathering of show runners during the summer press tour in LA, NBC, Zucker, and Leno were excoriated for the damage they were inflicting on the television industry—and for betraying the legacy of NBC, established by such ten p.m. classics as Hill Street Blues, Law & Order, L.A. Law, and ER.
Shawn Ryan, who created the hit cable drama The Shield and worked on numerous network hours, including The Unit for CBS, said, “The reason you’re hearing a visceral backlash is specific to NBC. You have a generation of writers that grew up on their shows. It inspired them to write. That network used to stand for something better.” Kurt Sutter, a Shield writer who went on to create Sons of Anarchy for the cable channel FX, called NBC and Zucker “the bastards to hate.” And Peter Tolan, who skewered late night earlier in his career on The Larry Sanders Show and then found success in drama with Rescue Me, summed up the prevailing view: “I feel like they should take down the American flag from in front of their building and put up a white flag.”
One top studio executive, left to contemplate a business minus five hours of drama programming that an outside production unit could potentially fill, delivered a blunt opinion: “This has all the earmarks of a train wreck.” The executive zeroed in on the affiliate question. “The biggest issue is the affiliate lead-ins. So they’re putting the better comedy bits at the end. What do you do between 10:12 and 10:50? More comedy? All that comedy is impossible to write and rehearse.” Citing CBS head Leslie Moonves and Disney/ABC head Bob Iger, the executive said, “Les and Iger must figure they could finish off NBC with this.”
Even within NBC the Leno move did not win anywhere near unanimous consent. Something about the way the network had positioned it—the cost savings, writing off ever being able to find hit-level success at ten p.m., writing off winning—offended some of the network’s loyal veterans. One