The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [152]
NBC didn’t really get the breathing space through early November that it had wanted, in any case. The stations that were receiving daily numbers were still there, questioning the network—having noticed, for example, that Leno had played against some repeats during the last week in October, but the ratings hadn’t budged. By now the affiliate noise level was growing loud enough that Zucker started hearing it in New York.
As Gaspin’s anxiety level began to tick up, he checked his development slate. What did he have? One drama, Parenthood, was ready and looked kind of promising. It could fill one night at ten. But what else? He began to contemplate alternatives. Could Jay go down to four days a week? Three? Would the affiliates accept that?
Inside The Jay Leno Show the messages were coming fast and confusing. NBC had guaranteed them two years at the start, but Jay and his staff realized that really meant just one for sure. So the show’s strategy, based on advice from the network, had been geared toward getting through the expected rough early patch and into summer, when they could flex some muscle competing against repeats. Then, after the faltering start, the advice had shifted: Focus all your big guns on December. You can score then because the ten p.m. shows would go to several straight weeks of reruns during the holidays.
Debbie Vickers pressed her booking department: Chase after every big name you can dredge up and confirm them for December. The Jay Leno Show would stand and fight in December.
On November 4 Rick Ludwin came to see her. The rules had changed again. “You have until the end of November,” he told her.
Vickers felt poleaxed. She had just moved every big name on their booking board to the following month, because she had been told it was going to be life or death for the show in December. Now they had concluded: Forget it—it’s all or nothing in November. This was bullshit, Vickers decided.
But it wasn’t as if she had any choice. Well, she did have one. She didn’t tell Jay that their show, less than two months in, had just had its yearlong guarantee reduced to four weeks.
On November 6, with some research analysis on the ten p.m. situation just starting to come in, Jeff Gaspin opened up an e-mail from the sales division and read a suggestion: What about cutting Jay back to a half hour, moving him to 11:35 again, and pushing Conan back?
At first blush this idea sounded far short of viable to Gaspin, not with all the complications it would entail. Would Jay even consider a half hour? Would that necessarily mean Conan also shrank to a half hour? And then what—an hour of Jimmy Fallon? That made no sense. What about forty-five minutes of Jay, forty-five minutes of Conan, and then a half hour of Fallon? Absurd. Gaspin quickly dismissed this wispy notion that somebody had floated out there with little thought.
In New York, meanwhile, Jeff Zucker was meeting for some private dinners with someone whose judgment he had long trusted: Lorne Michaels. The main topic of discussion: the ten p.m. problem. Zucker described the mounting pressure from affiliates to do something—as well as his ongoing concerns about Conan’s numbers and the show’s apparent unwillingness to listen to suggestions for changes.
Michaels knew Zucker came from a place of affection for Conan and Jeff Ross. The whole ten p.m. plan for Jay, gone so precipitately wrong, could be traced back