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By Root 1416 0

with NBC over their exit, much turned on whether NBC, which had retained the right to match any financial offer Dave had received, could really equal CBS’s terms if NBC didn’t guarantee Dave the 11:35 time period—which it couldn’t do, of course, as it had already filled that slot with Jay Leno. CBS and Dave’s representatives had hammered out a contract that stated in explicit detail that Dave would be programmed each night directly following the late local news on CBS’s stations. The time-period stipulation remained a standard part of Dave’s deals, and Morty knew Jay had the same guarantee.

“You guys got that for Conan, too, I’m sure,” Morton said.

He waited, while watching Rosen and Ross exchange a little look.

“You didn’t?” Morty asked, holding back his next thought, which was, You’ve got to be kidding me. He was stupefied by this revelation. Why on earth take a chance like that? No fully stipulated time-period protection?

Both Rosen and Ross indicated that they knew it could be a risky situation, but they didn’t dwell on it. Neither did Morton. But as he left the dinner that night he made a point to remember the conversation. There might be consequences down the road.

The end of the November sweep brought no relief for Jeff Gaspin—on the contrary, the gang with the torches and pitchforks gathering outside Jay Leno’s ten p.m. castle had grown larger and louder.

As the November sweep ratings books began arriving, the spate of affiliate calls became a slew. Now the messages began to carry a note of hysteria: “Oh my god, we were killed!ʺ

Gaspin, still promising something would be done, had to make his own plea to the station managers: Please do not go public. Several of the stations were threatening to open up to their local press about what a disaster Jay Leno had turned out to be at ten o’clock and how they would take action if NBC did not. The affiliate board urgently requested a conference call, which Gaspin joined in, accompanied by Rick Ludwin. The appeal from the board members was completely professional, but their stance was unequivocal: NBC needed to act on ten p.m., and whatever the new plan was going to be, it could not wait. The affiliates were demanding the action take place in January. They would not even wait for the natural break in the prime-time schedule that NBC had coming in February with the Winter Olympics from Vancouver. If something wasn’t done in January, the stations themselves would seek their own remedies. They would begin preempting Jay—either by moving their newscasts up to ten and pushing Jay back into late night or by acquiring some syndicated hour to stick in at ten—and they would go public with their plans.

Gaspin realized that it was one thing to fight the preemptions with threats to place NBC programming elsewhere, but once the complaints started getting aired in public, the situation would surely descend into nastiness. If the affiliates started bad-mouthing Jay and the decision to put him at ten, Leno would surely be damaged, perhaps irrevocably. Even if the protest started with only a few stations, as few as five or ten, the blood would be in the water. And battling your own partners? What kind of place was that to be in?

Gaspin appealed to Michael Fiorile, the board chairman, to keep the complaints inside the circle for just a little while longer while NBC pursued the alternatives. Fiorile promised to try to control the station bosses as best he could. He and the other board members were pleased that NBC had taken their concerns seriously enough to acknowledge that there was a crisis. But the answer had to come soon, he stressed: “From what I’m hearing, you could start losing stations any day.” What Fiorile had been hearing specifically was that stations might not dump Jay every night of the week, but they would certainly look at a few nights where they could find something higher rated.

Conan was hardly mentioned, but when the station leaders broached the idea of sliding Jay back to late night (some wanted to start him at eleven, after an hour of local news), they argued