The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [140]
Knowing how hard Zucker had tried to keep Jay with all the other proposals he had run by the comic, another of NBCʹs most influential players explained, “The ten o’clock idea was the worst idea of all. We all thought it was a disaster. Conan was going to get the wrong lead-in. He’d have no chance to succeed. It was a catastrophe waiting to happen.”
The doomsayers kept their concerns to themselves, of course, because what was done was done, and everyone had to pull together to try to make it work. The executive with likely the most influence on Zucker, Dick Ebersol, didn’t buy the doom-and-gloom talk anyway. Late that summer he said, “No one would be more shocked than I if Jay doesn’t work.”
Something did shock Dick Ebersol that summer—and Jeff Zucker, too. In late August they got word from Jeff Immelt that GE was in the process of negotiating the sale of a controlling interest in NBC Universal to the country’s biggest cable operator, Comcast. Serious talks had been under way since April. Immelt had deliberately kept Zucker out of the loop until late in the process.
Only two years earlier the GE CEO had made a statement to the company’s shareholders to tamp down rumors that the company wanted to unload NBC, perhaps sometime before the massive outlay that would be required to cover the 2008 Olympics from Beijing. “Should we sell NBCU? The answer is no!” Immelt wrote in GE’s 2007 annual report. “I just don’t see it happening. Not before the Olympics, not after the Olympics. It doesn’t make sense.”
It did start to make sense soon after, though, when Brian Roberts, the Comcast CEO, began his pursuit. GE suddenly saw what had been bruited about forever in terms of its relationship with NBC: the limited synergies between its core industrial business and a media company—one with valuable cable assets but a limping flagship, the NBC network.
For a while Zucker believed GE was trying to arrange a sale to Comcast only of the 20 percent stake in NBC Universal still held by the French company Vivendi. When he finally got a clear message from Immelt of GE’s intentions, Zucker faced the obvious question: What did it mean for him?
GE promised a contract extension, which would cover Zucker financially. But even with that concession he would still be cast as a lame-duck manager until Comcast won regulatory approval for the acquisition. Zucker accordingly set out to thwart that characterization by securing assurance from the incoming Comcast executives that he would continue as NBCU’s CEO.
Comcast could not officially comment, but that didnʹt stop many executives claiming inside knowledge of that company from suggesting Zucker was headed for an executive trapdoor as soon as Comcast took charge. As he usually did, Zucker took to shrugging off those rumors with the same confident “We’ll see” attitude that he applied to most efforts to marginalize him. The regulatory process was likely to extend through 2010, giving Zucker, in essence, a year to prove to Comcast’s management that he was a leader they ought to retain.
In the shorter term, Zucker had tried to initiate yet another fix in NBC’s chronically stalled-out entertainment division. In late July, conceding what others in the company—and throughout much of Hollywood—had long before identified as a mismatch made far from heaven, Zucker found a way to part from Ben Silverman, the onetime “rock star” executive he had chosen in 2007 to revivify NBC’s pulseless prime-time schedule. After a couple years of announcements of new directions