The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [143]
Ludwin was reminded of how Carson would describe trying to make adjustments to The Tonight Show: “It’s like trying to change a flat tire while the car is still in motion.”
Conan’s ratings performance, on every radar screen in New York, was also being closely scrutinized out in LA, in the offices where Jay Leno and his team were spending long days preparing for their prime-time debut. This was hardly a new activity; Jay and Debbie Vickers had studied the Tonight Show ratings over seventeen years, poring over them as if they were encrypted messages from the Enigma machine. They knew which guests spiked a number (Tim Allen, say) and which ones tanked (no names on the record). They knew which act two bits held the best percentage of the monologue audience. They knew the impact a week of repeats had on the following week’s numbers.
Debbie Vickers noticed, for example, that Conan’s numbers had taken a serious hit the week after his first break from the show. NBC, as the American network rights holder, had a commitment to present a late-night update show for the final full week of the Wimbledon tennis tournament, which would have delayed the start of The Tonight Show by fifteen minutes. Nobody wanted to skew Conan’s first-month numbers unfairly down as a result of delayed shows, so, though he had been doing Tonight for only a month, Conan took a dark week beginning on June 29.
Vickers noticed that for the week before the break Conan had hit a 1.4 rating in the eighteen-to-forty-nine demo—a still-massive .6 margin over Letterman—and he had beaten Dave for the week by about 227,000 total viewers. When Conan returned the week of July 6, his eighteen-to-forty-nine rating dropped precipitously, to a 1.1, and in so doing he lost exactly half his margin over Letterman in that category. The same week Dave swamped him in the total-viewer category, winning by 862,000 viewers. For the rest of the summer, as Vickers tracked it, Conan never got anything higher than a 1.2 rating among those young adults, and he hit that number only once. Every other week was either a 1.1 or a 1.0. Her conclusion: The Conan Tonight Show should not have taken a week off that early in its run, though she knew they were never offered that option.
She and Jay also examined in precise detail how Conan was doing minute by minute in his first half hour of the show. They knew from tracking their own show for so many years that the drop in the quarter hour between eleven forty-five and midnight—when the call of sleep grew insistent—should fall in a range of 18 percent to 23 percent. When Jay did “Headlines,” on Mondays, the falloff was minimal, only about 7 percent. Other bits lost a bigger percentage, but Vickers considered 24 percent high. (If a bit lost that much, it was in danger of being dumped from the regular lineup.)
Checking Conan’s numbers throughout July, Vickers detected drop-offs in the second quarter hour of the show of as high as 34 percent. His audience was still there for him at the top of each show, but they were checking out in alarmingly large numbers—at least as Vickers saw it. And she knew that, if she was seeing it, so were the number freaks in NBC’s research department.
When Jay was asked by reporters gathered at the NBC portion of the press tour that summer if he was following the ratings for his old show, he went big and boisterous: “It’s not my fault! I was happy where I was!” At other moments he did go out of his way to try to be reassuring, saying Conan would be fine—growing pains and all that.
Debbie still chatted frequently with Jeff Ross, as often as three times a week, and she enjoyed the exchanges. She had the impression Jeff was realistic about how the show was faring that summer—which, to her mind, thanks to those quarter-hour breakdowns, wasn’t all that well. More than once during those conversations, Ross, who liked Debbie enormously as well and was by nature a generous spirit, repeated to her his hope that