The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [16]
Fox entered this scene with verve—and a big offer. Chernin took Conan and Ross to several dinners. Between courses, he laid out Fox’s plan for a Conan late-night show: It would start at eleven, getting the jump on both Jay and Dave; it would receive precisely targeted promotion on youth-oriented shows like Family Guy and The Simpsons and on Fox’s NFL games on Sundays; Conan would become the signature star of the network.
While O’Brien was flattered and hugely impressed with Chernin on a personal basis, he and his team had concerns about Fox—not so much the network itself, but its lineup of stations and the hour-long newscasts those stations ran from ten to eleven p.m. Those newscasts had a different audience makeup from Fox in prime time—older, less affluent—and they would be serving as the direct lead-in to Conan at eleven. But that was not the only hang-up. Could Fox also deliver on station clearances—in other words, how many stations would actually jump in to carry a Conan show? Did too many of them have deals with syndicators for reruns of sitcoms like Seinfeld? Would they be willing to drop those for Conan? Could Conan compete on equal footing with the big boys, Jay and Dave?
The Conan team commissioned a consulting firm to look into the clearance issue specifically. The report was encouraging: Fox did have the right in its affiliate deals to push through the clearances across the entire network.
For the hired guns in charge of Conan’s career, the resolution of the clearance issue meant the Fox offer had to be taken very seriously, especially after Chernin laid down his marker. His opening offer to Conan was $21 million a year—seven times his NBC salary, a figure so impressive that the agents didn’t even consider a counteroffer. Chernin also argued persuasively that Conan’s hanging around waiting for Jay Leno to leave the stage was only an invitation to long-term disappointment, and potentially a path toward undermining a promising career.
“Jay’s not going anywhere,” Chernin told them decisively. “And if you wait for The Tonight Show, it won’t be worth what it is today.”
Jeff Ross heard Chernin’s impressive spin, contrasted it with the halfhearted stroking they were getting from NBC, and he felt the wind shifting hard in Fox’s direction. That concerned him, because he knew one thing better than the money guys working for Conan. His guy had the bug, the congenital disease that had afflicted virtually every comic of the baby-boom generation—and, yes, that still included O’Brien, born in 1963: a craving to do the job Johnny Carson had defined so indelibly, to host The Tonight Show.
Conan didn’t speak about it in public—his young fans, who didn’t know Carson from carpeting, would have been baffled by it—but Conan had the dream, the same one that had inspired and infected Letterman and Leno. As a serious student of the history of American television, and a devotee of its classic programs, he could not help himself. He was in thrall to the dream: He wanted The Tonight Show. He wanted to be the guy at the head of the franchise, the show that, when he was twelve, he had watched with his dad, taking in the things Carson said and did that his father laughed at and enjoyed so much late at night in their home in Brookline, Massachusetts. That shared memory had a powerful pull on Conan.
Ross himself could not deny the seductive appeal inherent in being the guy who produced The Tonight Show every night; for a late-night producer, that was still the mountaintop, as well.
And both men had such links to NBC that tearing themselves away, just as Conan was steering into the fast lane of his career, would be personally wrenching. Bob Wright, the NBC chairman, had built a true connection to Conan, who sparked to Wright’s genuine interest and human touch. Lorne Michaels, the impresario of Saturday Night Live, was show-business godfather to both of them; he had plucked the unknown OʹBrien and installed him in the Late Night chair, and he had