The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [148]
In retrospect, when Jay Leno assessed how long it had taken him to realize his ten o’clock show was in a little trouble, he concluded: maybe twenty minutes in.
That represented only slight hyperbole. Within about a month a sense of uneasiness had begun to drift low and slow along the corridors of NBC’s executive offices. Objectively, not much looked shockingly different from what the network had been expecting. Jay finished third at ten most nights, but wasn’t he supposed to have done so for a while, until some repeats came on the other networks? In fact, Jay was managing to beat ABC on several nights, mainly because that network had again handed NBC the gift of some dreadful ten p.m. entries like Eastwick and The Forgotten. On Tuesdays, when NBC was able to deliver a healthy lead-in number to Jay from the nine p.m. hour, thanks to its reality weight-loss hit, The Biggest Loser, Leno was regularly grabbing second place, and often with a demo number that started with a two.
Jay was on the whole keeping his famous chin above the water line. Admittedly, NBC had set that line as low as credibility would allow. Before the show launched, Jeff Gaspin had publicly established the viability number for Jay at a 1.5 for the eighteen-to-forty-nine audience. By averaging that number, Jay could have made money, but it was still a minuscule performance for a prime-time show, far below what would be grounds for cancelation anywhere else. NBC would have had to import a barrelful of snake oil to convince anyone Jay was a success at that level, no matter what the financial breakdown said.
Privately, NBC executives conceded they were playing the lower-the-expectations game. In truth, they had been hoping for an ultimate average that started with a two, and they believed they could get there over the course of a year because the indefatigable Jay would produce so many more weeks of original shows than the dramas he was competing against—maybe even twice as many. For that fall, the realistic demo number the network wanted to see Jay average was a 1.8. That looked respectable, especially with ABCʹs expensive new dramas already free-falling below that level; it was also a number Gaspin believed the NBC affiliates could live with.
The stations had already become pestiferous bystanders, reading every number over the network’s shoulder, offering an occasional nudge and a question: “Is that really all he’s going to do?” Clearly the stations had not believed Gaspin’s 1.5 target. By mid-October, in the big markets that received ratings figures daily, high anxiety was setting in. Some stations were already seeing their eleven p.m. newscast numbers slide. Gaspin and Zucker both started to hear from Michael Fiorile, the head of the affiliate board, which represented the entire body of NBC stations.
Fiorile, who ran Dispatch Broadcasting, based in Columbus, had backed Jay Leno with the enthusiasm of a true fan leading up to his ten p.m. debut and did not want to send out a message of panic. But Fiorile had no choice but to clue his NBC partners in to the increasing rumbling among the stations.
Gaspin examined the numbers carefully and concluded NBC had made a wrong assumption going in. The network had expected Jay to be a second choice at ten p.m. If your favored show at that hour, on either network or cable, wasn’t offering a new episode, Leno would provide a pleasant alternative. But the DVR, which was wreaking so much havoc across the medium, seemed to be devastating the