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But Conan was seeing no equivalency on the fairness meter. He could not quite see how the situation could be construed as unfair to Jay. Leno had hosted The Tonight Show for seventeen years. He had handed it over and immediately shifted to ten o’clock, voluntarily. How, Conan asked himself, could any of this be construed as unfair to Jay?

“I know how hard I worked for this,” Conan told the NBC executives. “It was promised to me. I had a shitty lead-in.” His tone was soft, but the words were clipped. Graboff knew this was Conan in the raw, speaking from the heart.

Conan asked if Lorne knew; how about Jimmy Fallon? Gaspin said he had spoken to both of them already.

Graboff tried to shift the conversation, move it away from all the emotion. He said to Jeff Ross, “Come on, Jeff. Just do this show for a couple of years and then move back.”

It was the only time in his experience with Ross that he had ever heard the producer really raise his voice. “That’s bullshit, and you know it!” Ross said, directly to Graboff. “The only way Jay leaves now is being carried out feet first!”

Gaspin countered by continuing his soft approach, urging Conan to give the idea some time, take it in, think about it.

Listening to Gaspin, still with a faraway look in his eye, Conan began to perceive an executive who had been in the world of cable, made a lot of money for the company by being in the right place at the right time, and was now under the impression that he was smarter than he actually was—like a guy who happened to live in Texas oil country around the time the internal combustion engine was invented. To the money counters, an executive like this came across as a genius. But unlike the best entertainment impresarios, like NBCʹs own Brandon Tartikoff, Gaspin wasn’t somebody who lived and breathed network television. And so, Conan intuited, Gaspin had little chance to understand how late night worked, the emotions of its performers, the loyalty of its audiences.

As Conan saw it, Gaspin was in over his head. He simply didn’t get what he was doing here: He acted as though late-night shows were just a few board pieces to be moved around. Conan pictured Gaspin as a guy who walked into an atomic bomb factory, had never been in one before, and just started swinging a wrench around.

The one thought Conan had on the spot about the half hour at 11:35 was that it likely would exacerbate the problem he already had with Leno. “So at least now, Jay does his show, but there’s the break of the news, and that’s kind of a reset button,” Conan said to Gaspin and Graboff. “At 11:35 Jay’s going to come out and do twenty jokes. And then what’s he going to do?”

When they replied that it seemed likely he would have only one guest, Conan said, “OK. And then I come out and do what?”

The NBC guys didn’t really have any answer to that other than what Conan had already been doing: his own monologue. That this now seemed like a late-night pileup—three shows with monologues lined up end to end—was the implication no one had really addressed.

Finally Conan did have something he really wanted to say, something that had been almost burning a hole in his chest. “What does Jay have on you?” Conan asked, his voice still low, his tone still even. “What does this guy have on you people? What the hell is it about Jay?”

Neither of the NBC executives had an answer. They cast their heads down. Conan thought they were working at looking sympathetic, following some lesson that had been taught at corporate school.

After a pause, Gaspin suggested again that they take some time to figure out what they wanted to do. NBC would be patient. He repeated the network’s desire to keep Conan in the family.

Conan listened for a bit, then stood up. Jeff Ross followed suit. They walked out. The meeting was over; it had lasted fifteen minutes.

The walk back to the Tonight offices required less than two minutes. In that expanse of time both Conan O’Brien and Jeff Ross realized the same thing. NBC wasn’t asking if this move would be OK. They