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“I can’t wait for you guys to come on,” Ross told her.

The Jay Leno Show opened on September 14, 2009, with a flourish, proving, if nothing else, that America would still respond to a frequently repeated message: Something big is happening on television tonight.

With good pal Jerry Seinfeld as a comfortable first guest (Jerry tweaked Jay, “You know, in the nineties, when we quit a show, we actually left”) and a fortuitous appearance by Kanye West, just days after the singer’s rant against Taylor Swift at the MTV awards (Jay asked him—not in a funny way—what his mother would have thought of his behavior), the premiere hit an extraordinary number. Ranking as the biggest show in all of television for the night, Leno attracted 18.4 million viewers, with a huge 5.3 rating among the young demos. By contrast, Conan’s spectacular debut on The Tonight Show in June had reached 9.2 million people and got a 3.8 rating in the all-important demo.

NBC resisted the urge to call Jay the “New King of Prime Time,” and critics were largely unimpressed, dismissing the show as mostly a remake of the old Tonight formula, a rehash, and “a bore.” But critics had never left bouquets on Jay’s doorstep, so he was hardly surprised.

The show also introduced its first correspondent, Dan Finnerty and his Dan Band, singing their way through a car wash. The segment did not find many enthusiasts. But it soared compared to bits from others in the group of largely unknown comics and improv artists who began filling up act two of the show.

Debbie Vickers quickly realized that NBC, in its desire to appease the concerned stations with a strong end to the show, had effectively built in failure as a regular—and early—element. The contributors were mostly tepid young performers executing uninspired ideas. And they were on in prime time—at about 10:12 p.m. (when defectors could still pick up the thread of the cop shows on the other channels). All her instincts about how to retain viewers after the monologue went on alert: This material threatened to devalue the entire show.

But she couldn’t cut the segment from the show. A “comedy hour” ate up material like a ravenous beast. It seemed that every time Vickers looked up, more material they had put on the schedule had already been used. As much as she wanted to bail on some of these weak contributor spots, dropping them would start a chain reaction—and by the next day three acts would be missing. Jay couldn’t physically fill up the whole hour on his own. As it was, the demands on him had escalated. Any bit Jay did outside the studio had to be shot during the few spare minutes of his life. He had committed to performing just as many gigs around the country—160 or so—as he ever had, making no concessions to his increased workload on the prime-time show. Bits inside the studio that involved Jay also demanded rehearsal time—further diversion from his primary mission: putting together twelve to fourteen minutes of monologue daily.

The contributors had to contribute—lame performances or not. Vickers soon realized she was approving material to go in act two of the prime-time show that she would never have allowed to air in late night. How did that make sense? And all because the better act two material—“Headlines” and the rest—had to be saved for the last segment to lead into local news. The bad agreements Debbie believed the show had made to win the stations over looked worse every day. Jay, usually a rock onstage, showed signs of losing his rhythm. He knew well that the key to performing successfully on a daily show was flow—flow of jokes, flow of segments. Splitting the best comedy bits off from the monologue was diverting the flow into a sad little pond.

On the morning of October 1, 2009, David Letterman, looking less like a TV icon than a visiting rancher from Montana, stood up in front of a grand jury in Manhattan, sheepish and ashamed, and revealed the details of what the district attorney’s office was branding as a case of extortion. For Letterman,