The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [154]
This sounded to Gaspin like a significant, but not critical, concern. He did not get the sense that Conan and his team were simply refusing to listen, only that some of Rick’s and Nick’s suggested changes had met with real resistance.
But the research department had some intriguing data for him, too. When they broke down Conan’s results in the key category of viewers between the ages of eighteen and forty-nine, they discovered an eye-catching statistic. Conan’s strength in that group was highly concentrated in the eighteen-to-thirty-four portion. (That was often broken out as a separate segment for advertising sales, especially for youth-oriented channels like MTV and Comedy Central.) Fully half of Conan’s audience in the large eighteen-to-forty-nine group fell within the eighteen-to-thirty-four segment.
Having the breakdown tip that way was highly unusual—50 percent was about twice the norm for a television show. Certainly this helped explain how Conan had so drastically reduced the median age for The Tonight Show, from fifty-six to forty-six. In big swaths of television that would have been considered a sensational development. NBCʹs research department didn’t think so. For them it only seemed to confirm the growing suspicion that Conan might be that dreaded item: a “niche” talent. At 12:35, that sort of hyperyoung profile was ideal. But coming in the earlier hour, it signaled to the researchers a weakness in the show’s breadth of appeal: People over thirty-five had significantly less interest in it.
One NBC executive floated a notion that some others had only whispered about to that point: Was a show-business version of the Peter Principle at work here? Had Conan been perfect at the 12:35 level and mistakenly pushed himself to a level where he couldn’t quite succeed?
Jeff Gaspin wasn’t buying that. He resisted any scenario that posited that Conan couldn’t be a winner on The Tonight Show and so they needed to go crawling back to Jay. NBC had designated Conan O’Brien the future of late night five years earlier, and Gaspin had no intention of reversing that decision now. There had to be a better way.
Robert Morton, long gone from the employ of David Letterman, retained many friends in the late-night world, but none closer than Jeff Ross. The two producers shared the short-hand of warriors who had been in the trenches and seen and heard things no one outside their tiny band of brothers would ever know. Morton had experienced the tumultuous ride from 12:35 to 11:35 when he was Letterman’s executive producer and close adviser in the 1990s. Now his good buddy Jeff was in the middle of the same bumpy transition with Conan; naturally, they had much to talk about.
Morton had moved to LA after his ouster from Worldwide Pants, which made it convenient when Conan’s show moved west. As the waters deep beneath NBC’s entertainment division were just beginning to bubble and stir that holiday season, Morty and Jeff set a date to meet for dinner. Jeff said he would bring along Rick Rosen, who by that point had become much more Jeff’s intimate friend than merely Conan’s principal agent.
Much of the talk at that meal, as might be expected, centered on The Tonight Show. Ross expressed just a little sense of uneasiness about relations with the network. NBC’s notes didn’t seem onerous; he couldn’t quite put a finger on it, but something about the situation felt a bit weird to him.
That tripped a wire for Morty. Back in the days when the Letterman team had been haggling