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to question his initial read that Conan’s representatives would steer the star toward the sensible resolution of accepting the deal and staying. Zucker had continued to have occasional interaction with Ari Emanuel, but now he started to wonder if that was of any real value. Ari certainly didn’t seem to be as involved as the rest of them in the strategizing going on at Conan’s house; if it was true that he had been pushed out, Zucker suspected it would surely have been because Ari was on the side of looking to settle the dispute and keep Conan at NBC. That likely put Ari—and maybe Rick Rosen, whom Zucker still considered a steadying influence and a voice of reason—at odds with the engineer he believed was driving the runaway train: Gavin Polone. Zucker always believed it said a lot that Polone had named his production company Pariah.

On Sunday morning Jeff Gaspin walked into the ballroom of the Langham Huntington Hotel in Pasadena, where an extra-large gathering of media waited like wolves outside a chicken farm. Surely this was going to be a merry bloodbath: a new NBC executive trying to confront questions about what now looked like the unmitigated disaster of the failed Leno show at ten, an affiliate revolt, and the apparent demotion of the star NBC had touted as the future of late night.

At about ten a.m. Gaspin took the stage, accompanied by Angela Bromstad, who ran the Universal television production studio. He opened the session with straightforward confirmation of the news most of the group had already been reporting. The Jay Leno Show would end just before the Olympics, and he had made offers to Jay to move to a half-hour show at 11:35 and to Conan O’Brien to slide The Tonight Show back to 12:05. The barrage followed; Gaspin took each question calmly, responding with complete thoughts and apparent confidence.

“What is important to me,” he said, “is that I gave Conan something that is very important to him, which was The Tonight Show. So when I asked him to move to 12:05, I made it very clear The Tonight Show was moving with him. What’s important to Jay is telling jokes at eleven thirty. . . . I obviously couldn’t satisfy either with 100 percent of what they wanted. That’s why I came up with this compromise.”

Gaspin claimed complete ownership of the idea—though he said Jeff Zucker “let me pull the trigger”—and he tied it to the concerns about the affiliates, which he declined to call a threat “so much as it was a dialogue.”

He didn’t call Jay’s show a failure, suggesting only that it hadn’t done as well as NBC had hoped. As for his plan, he said his goal was to keep all three late-night stars, and “much as I’d like to tell you we have a done deal, we know that’s not true.” He added, “The talks are still ongoing.”

The comments came across as unusually candid, just as Gaspin came across as remarkably unflinching. He impressed the reporters, many of whom noted in their stories that, contrary to some recent NBC experiences with the press, this one was handled with honesty and professionalism.

Gaspin took a lot of pride but not much solace in those reviews, because nothing was settled. The intelligence he was receiving, primarily secondhand from contacts with Rosen and Emanuel, was that Conan was having good days and bad, and the agents were not sure they could control the outcome. Gaspin still interpreted that message to mean the agents wanted Conan to stay at NBC, but they certainly weren’t guaranteeing it. Polone clearly had a different agenda, Gaspin heard, and the X-factor was Liza O’Brien. She seemed to be in the camp guiding Conan away from NBC’s plan. Frankly, that made sense to Gaspin, who knew his own wife’s strength of character and how she would respond if he came home declaring his bosses were trying to screw him over.

That afternoon the Conan cadre met again in Conan’s study, though not much could be advanced until that night, when Patty Glaser would arrive. Conan remained restless and unhappy, eager to find some way out of the olive press. As the group was breaking up for the evening, with Rosen