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“No, Conan would keep Tonight,ʺ Gaspin said. Jay stared at him during another extended silence. “Look, we have a tough situation here,” Gaspin finally said. “NBC is in trouble. If you leave or Conan leaves, it gets worse. We really want both of you. We think both of you are big talents. We’re trying to figure out a way to keep both of you.” He tried to appeal to their long loyalty to a network, now facing a real crisis. The company could fold, Gaspin told them. “We can’t afford for this to fall apart.”

Jay paused again, considering it all. “You think Conan will go for this?”

Gaspin indicated they were confident they could make him come around, though nothing with Conan was settled yet.

Leno told Gaspin that he didn’t want Conan to be hurt, but he was still trying to get his head around what this half-hour-at-11:35-not-The-Tonight-Show really meant. “I’ve done an hour for eighteen years,” he reminded Gaspin.

Vickers’s head was also spinning. She pressed again: How would they do a half hour?

Gaspin said that would be an issue for another day if they could all agree on the overall plan. “I don’t need an answer tonight,” he said. “Think about it, and let’s talk more tomorrow.”

Vickers had one final question, something she had to know before she committed even to thinking about switching to a half-hour format: What would happen if they said no? “Would you release us from our contracts?” she asked. Jay wanted to know the same thing.

“No,” Gaspin said. “We’re not going to release you.”

After his discussion with Jay, Jeff Gaspin felt sufficiently confident to bring Marc Graboff into the tight circle aware of the new late-night strategy. He needed Graboff because as NBC’s chief deal man with talent, Graboff would be the one in direct talks with Ken Ziffren about any redrafting of Jay’s contract.

Graboff, like most of the other top NBC executives, had spent the holidays wondering which of the several suggested scenarios to resolve the ten p.m. dilemma would be put into effect. He was mildly surprised that they had decided to take this option, but the train was leaving the station and he knew what his next stop would be: a call to Ziffren.

As Graboff set off to contact Ziffren, the small retinue of NBC executives on both coasts who were now briefed on the plan mulled over the increasingly interesting sidebar to this big news: that it was Jeff Gaspin and not Jeff Zucker driving the action.

It seemed to this group that, besides the obvious inference that Zucker probably wanted to maintain some distance from this decision, Gaspin’s willingness to ride this plan to completion had much to do with his wanting to establish himself as “the guy”—the executive truly in charge of resolving this crisis.

The corporate dynamics at work fascinated some of the close NBC observers. Just as new owners were appearing on the scene, Jeff Zucker had appointed Jeff Gaspin to a job that had previously defenestrated two other promising executives, Kevin Reilly and Ben Silverman, in quick succession. Gaspin, a shrewd insider, had clearly observed this development and decided he couldn’t allow himself to be seen as another puppet of Jeff Zucker in the job. In almost every move Gaspin had made since taking over the entertainment division, he had seemed to be sending a message: I’m running programming; I’m running scheduling. For the first time since he had moved back east, Zucker was not attending—or running—every NBC prime-time scheduling meeting. Gaspin had agreed to bring Zucker into a monthly overview of scheduling, but he had emphasized that Zucker was not leading NBC Entertainment day to day anymore.

That had struck a sizable portion of the staff as both a good and a necessary development. Somebody had to build a firewall against what the staffers saw as incessant intrusion by New York. Now, with the Comcast takeover imminent, the dynamic grew even more intriguing for the Gaspin-Zucker analysts. Gaspin had even more incentive to separate as much as possible from Zucker, because he needed to