The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [196]
Polone remained on the phone in the theater lobby throughout the haggling. The movie ended; his date emerged. He was still on the phone. (The relationship didn’t last.)
At the Globes, amid a pelting downpour in LA, NBC threw a grand party on the roof of the Beverly Hilton. Gaspin dropped in and out of the festivities. He spent much of his time in a private room trying to get the deal finished. Issues of severance and details of what Conan could and couldn’t do the following week remained unresolved. It wasn’t happening.
Meanwhile, on the air, Ricky Gervais was introducing the show with the line “Let’s get on with it before NBC replaces me with Jay Leno.” Tom Hanks, presenting an award, remarked, “NBC said it was going to rain at ten p.m., but they moved it to eleven thirty.” And Tina Fey, accepting an award, said of the rainy night, “It’s God crying for NBC.”
For the increasingly besieged NBC, the online support for Conan had eclipsed the term “viral”; now it was more like a plague. Groups sprang up all over the Web and across the country in individual cities. The Facebook group “I’m with Coco” organized Conan rallies in New York, Chicago, and Seattle, as well as LA for that Monday, the eighteenth.
Along with Conan’s suddenly sizzling ratings, which continued to grow by the night, the rise of Coco mania served as additional annoyance for the pressed executives at NBC. Jeff Gaspin had an idea about what was happening. He theorized that when Conan moved to 11:35, he had stopped being Conan. He tried to be something he really wasn’t—a somewhat broader Conan without really abandoning the antic style that had branded him. The result was too soft for the hard-core Conan fans, but still not comfortable for the Leno fans.
But once he rose up to take a stand against NBC’s meddling with his career, once he went on the attack, Conan raised his game to a new level. Gaspin didn’t think this phase was something that could last, because it was built around a specific event, but while Conan was caught up in it, his show had clearly improved. Conan was now producing an irreverent show, a dangerous show, and the kids in the audience loved it. Gaspin could not help but ruefully admire the irony of the situation: NBC had given Conan his mojo back, just in time for him to take it somewhere else. That didn’t mean Gaspin had decided he’d been wrong, however. On the contrary, it seemed to him to prove that NBC’s evaluation that Conan had lost his mojo was exactly correct.
That Monday afternoon a crowd gathered outside the entrance to the Tonight studio, despite more rain, a deluge of the kind that usually paralyzes LA. Like something out of a sixties protest march, the fans came out carrying signs (“Conan Saved Me from Scientology”) and chanting slogans (“Jay Leno Sucks”). The star himself showed up and shook a few hands outside before making an appearance on the roof to wave to the fans, his famous pompadour doused thoroughly.
Conan was touched to his soul by the rally, which had hundreds of fans soaked to the skin chanting his name. As he stood on the roof, dripping, it struck him that this might be—appropriately enough—a water-shed moment, the first giant schism between the old broadcast world and the new electronic media dominated by the Internet. He believed NBC had tried in the old-fashioned way to undermine him, in the attack by Ebersol—whom Conan dismissed as one of the “silverback gorillas” still trying to rule television—and in the story about dissension on the staff.
The outpouring of support made Conan feel as if he was starring in his own version of the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, both because he was allowed to see a Tonight Show where he never existed and because the support made him realize he really was “the richest man in town.”
Beneath his feet, Conan sensed the ground moving, shifting finally from a baby-boom-centric culture to one controlled by Gens X and Y. Messages on sites all over the Web were rife with sheer anger at the