• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1605 0

younger NBC staff members who had always felt an affinity toward him. The decision to return to Jay—due to turn sixty in three months—struck them as a conscious choice by the network to shift its priorities in late night toward a mass-audience strategy and away from the more targeted let’s-play-young focus that had prevailed when Conan was named to the job. Jay could not be expected to change his own approach, and there was no way to “young him up.” NBC seemed to be conceding that the audience for late night was going to be considerably older for the foreseeable future.

The network signaled that shift in another way. In one of the first staff meetings about how NBC could relaunch Jay at 11:35, the gathered NBC employees wanted to know if a message that was going out that day was true: Was NBC really making the suggestion that any employees who had joined the “I’m with Coco” Facebook group were expected to unfriend themselves right away? The initial answer was yes. But then Jeff Gaspin, who was running the meeting, stepped in to say that if there were people who supported the page, he would not ask them to quit.

The truth was, a horde of young NBC staff members had joined the “I’m with Coco” page, especially in New York. For at least a time, NBC, if not the Borgata showroom, looked as if it would remain a house divided.

Certainly the posturing in the aftermath of the settlement did little to bring the snark between the two sides down to a murmur. Gavin Polone went out wide immediately, declaring that Conan had won “a big victory” and saying that his star “would be better off in the long run.” There might be a new set of affiliate issues at Fox, Polone conceded, but, unlike NBC, Fox knew it had the juice to stand up to its stations, juice that came from having shows its affiliates were desperate to retain, like American Idol and House. Gavin couldn’t resist pointing out that NBC actually owned the big-hit medical drama House but had allowed it to go to Fox because, he said, Jeff Zucker had lacked the savvy to see its potential.

Polone also restated his belief that Conan should have left NBC when he had had previous opportunities to go to Fox in 2001 and 2004, but he had felt the need to chase his muddled dream of The Tonight Show. Still, Polone argued, these things happen for a reason, and Conan would win in the end.

Jeff Gaspin put out a different message. On the one hand, he was conciliatory, saying that the agreement worked for both sides and granting at least one of Conan’s arguments—that his show had needed more time to grow.

“Could it have grown? Absolutely,” Gaspin said. “We just couldn’t give him the time.” Not, he said, with the affiliates demanding immediate change at ten p.m.

But NBC had a more stinging message to accompany the conciliation. The move made financial sense, the network said, because in Conan’s first year The Tonight Show, probably the most profitable program in television history, was going to fall into the red.

Gaspin didn’t offer a specific number to the press, saying only that it would amount to “tens of millions of dollars.” Later NBC offered a peek at some figures showing a projected $3 million loss early in Conan’s run that had grown to a $23 million loss by the time the decision to make a change came down. The revelation that The Tonight Show had in the middle of that a sort of startling financial turnaround stunned insiders across the television industry, especially those working in late night. Within the Conan camp, however, it raised the sense of outrage to paroxysmal levels.

Jeff Ross, who ran the show’s budget, communicated often with the NBC sales department, and even sometimes lined up special product placement commercials within the show, had an instant and violent reaction: “That is total bullshit.” He quickly speculated that NBC must have folded in the $60 million cost of constructing the new offices and studio, or else the overall start-up costs for the show. There was no other way, Ross insisted, that the figures could have come out on the minus side.

Conan himself