The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [149]
Gaspin told Fiorile that he understood the stations’ concerns, but it was still relatively early. What he didn’t tell him was that the network had some incipient jitters as well.
Conan OʹBrien saw no reason to be nervous yet for himself, but he and his staff certainly had noticed what was happening in the ten p.m. hour and the concomitant fallout during the local newscasts—in other words, his lead-in.
Before Jay joined the fray at ten, Conan’s Tonight Show had never failed to beat David Letterman by at least two-tenths of a point in that eighteen-to-forty-nine-year-old group NBC so favored. But since Jay had pitched camp at ten (not counting his curiosity-fed first week), Conan had never even once beaten Dave by more than .1 among those younger adults. Dave had won outright three times (including his big Obama week), and the two shows were tying many other weeks. By now Dave was also routinely running away with the mass audience, winning every week by well over a million viewers.
As Conan’s team saw it, no explanation could account for this scenario other than that the weak performance at ten was infecting everything that followed. Conan also noticed he was no longer getting any calls from Jay.
Over in Burbank, Debbie Vickers was getting some calls, and they were informing her the affiliates were starting to quaver. She made up her mind not to say anything to Jay—because you don’t burden the talent with extra worries.
One important NBC observer, however, who had no dog in the fight but an intense interest in seeing the network survive, had, even in early October, already rendered a definitive judgment on Jay’s relocation to ten. “The show is awful,” the influential network player said. “It’s not a case of
‘This needs to change, or that part’s not working.’ This is a situation where a nine-year-old at the back of the room stands up and says, ‘It’s awful.’ It’s not ten p.m. or anything else. It’s just not a good show. It’s not going to work. By March, it’s over.”
Another significant player, Dick Ebersol, equally appalled, did not pin the blame on Jay. After containing himself for a month, he finally let loose during a video conference call with West Coast executives, asking, “Has anybody really looked at the minute-by-minute of what’s going on with Jay’s show?”
Someone in research said they had determined what was working, and that included the monologue and the late bits, like “Jaywalking.”
“That’s my point,” Ebersol replied. “You’ve got to move those segments up. The show is losing people because they never get to those segments.”
It couldn’t be done, he was told; the affiliates were already grumbling. You couldn’t pull a strong segment away from the start of their newscasts.
Ebersol continued to complain about that and another point: the way the show was using its primary guests. He pointed out that in the Tonight days, when Jay had a guest he clicked with, like Terry Bradshaw, he could keep him around and bounce things off him through the other segments. Here—thanks to some overly polite decision to ensure the interview segments looked different from those on The Tonight Show—he was on for just six minutes and gone. “That’s just fucking crazy,” Ebersol said.
But nothing got changed. Outside NBC the situation took on the look of one of those slow-motion implosions of a crumbling old building. A new term got passed around the TV industry: the Leno effect. Beyond its impact on the local news, and Conan, and Jimmy Fallon after that, the decision to replace the full