The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [20]
For some of them, even Jay’s sustaining success in the ratings was suspect. NBC had long since come down from its heights of prime-time dominance, to a point where CBS frequently trounced it in the ten p.m. hour that led into late night—and still Letterman almost never topped Leno in the numbers. But the Conan supporters questioned Jay’s record, wondering whether it was Jay himself who was really attracting viewers or the reflexive habit of those viewers to tune in to The Tonight Show.
In one of the harshest assessments, a member of the Conan team dismissed Jay’s performance utterly: “He’s there, and for some of those years, if you had a cinder block in that time slot it would have done a great rating.” And for good measure: “What do you want The Tonight Show to be? Please go find me the person under forty-five who’s like, ‘I’ve gotta leave this party early ’cause I gotta go see my Leno.’ What the fuck are we doing here?”
Early in 2004, with the issue of Conan’s long-term future unresolved, Jeff Ross got a call from Rick Rosen. Rosen asked him to set up a quiet place for lunch in New York with an executive named Andrea Wong, who was in charge of reality shows and late night for ABC.
This was the first time the letters ABC had appeared on the horizon, though Ross knew that nothing serious in terms of a new negotiation for his star could even begin until well into the following year. Still, having another network interested couldn’t hurt.
Ross was aware that ABCʹs entertainment executives had been agitating internally for several years, looking for an opening into late night. The network’s long-venerated news program Nightline had seemed to be heading for the end of its run, with its anchor, Ted Koppel, less involved, and the show’s original premise—live interviews on the news of the day—overtaken by cable news programs. In 2002 ABC’s entertainment division had pulled an end run around the news division, secretly seeking to replace Nightline by courting Letterman with promises and birthday cakes as the CBS late-night star’s contract neared an end. The talks had gotten serious by the time The New York Times broke the story of the negotiations, and the news division, poleaxed, released an anguished cry of betrayal. Although ABC didn’t back off, Letterman soon did, thanking ABC for its interest but re-signing with CBS after some timely last-minute concessions by that network’s boss, Leslie Moonves.
ABC responded by reaffirming its commitment to news in the eleven thirty time slot—even as it continued to chase entertainment talent. After making a run at Jon Stewart, hoping he might be induced to break away from his cable hit The Daily Show, ABC pursued a guy they thought represented a broader, more down-to-earth appeal, Jimmy Kimmel. Jimmy, best known at that point for the raunchy Man Show on Comedy Central and witty appearances on the NFL coverage on Fox, jumped at the network opportunity. In early 2004, he had been on the air for less than a year in the 12:05 time period, serving as the follow-up act to Nightline.
Conan was obviously not moving anywhere that wasn’t going to slot him at 11:35 (or 11:00 in the case of Fox). So when Andrea Wong asked for a meeting, Jeff Ross had every reason to conclude that Nightline wasn’t in the clear yet.
The pair lunched at the Café des Artistes, something of an alternate (and much more upscale) ABC cafeteria on West Sixty-seventh Street, not far from the network’s Manhattan headquarters. Ross found Wong, a willowy Asian-American woman in her mid-thirties, personally appealing and impressively smart. (She might have been the only network entertainment executive in history with an electrical engineering degree from MIT.) He wasn’t sure she fully comprehended the late-night television “thing,” but then again, Ross didn’t think many television executives really got late night, with the exception of the guy Ross dealt with most often, the one with real history in the genre,