• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Still, in every way, a terrible experience, as Zucker saw it.

Jeff Zucker had produced thousands of hours of news shows, and the key to staying fresh in news was moving, always moving. Here he knew he had to move on; everybody had been diminished a little by this episode, but they all needed to move on to the next phase in their lives.

Of course, making sure Jay could move on unscathed became an intense preoccupation, which was why Zucker called in his chief emissary.

Dick Ebersol was due to fly west in mid-January to plant himself in Vancouver to prepare for the big push of the Winter Olympics, starting in February. Zucker asked Dick if he would stop in at Burbank on his way and have a sit-down with Jay and Debbie Vickers to discuss what their return to Tonight could be—and should be—especially in terms of bringing back old elements and adding some new ones.

Ebersol would have taken on the assignment in any case, because of his relationships with Zucker and Vickers, and his confidence that he could add something of value to the discussion. But he understood that NBC also needed an executive presence with Jay, because Rick Ludwin was not going to be able to perform that duty.

One of the chief inside casualties of the Jay-Conan pileup had been the man serving as NBC’s executive liaison to its late-night shows for more than two decades. The episode had fractured Ludwin’s long relationship with Jay, simply because Jay blamed Rick for having fired the gun that started the demolition derby in the first place. Others had tried to persuade him that Rick did not rank high enough to make a decision as big as moving Jay Leno out of The Tonight Show—that it had to be the master plan of someone as high up as Zucker. But Jay continued to cite Ludwin as the source of this genius idea.

Ebersol knew from Debbie that Jay felt Ludwin had betrayed him: not just by pushing for Conan to get the 11:35 job, but also because he thought Ludwin had disappeared on him during the ten o’clock mess at a time when they were so vulnerable.

It made for an uncomfortable position for Ludwin. Jay had returned as the centerpiece of NBC’s late night and he was no longer speaking to the network executive in charge of late night. Ludwin, brutally aware he was being iced out, decided to give Jay space and hope they would eventually get back to their old interaction.

In the meantime, Dick Ebersol had become the network’s main conduit to The Tonight Show. The night before he was due to fly to Burbank to meet with Jay and Debbie, Dick sat down to a dinner with the managers of the NBC affiliate board, finally in town for their long-delayed semiannual conference with the network. Now that all had been resolved in late night, the mood among the affiliates was warm, especially toward Ebersol, whom the station managers credited with providing some of the biggest, most reliable numbers NBC still attracted: NFL games on Sunday night and the Olympics, now right around the corner.

But Ebersol had more on his mind than receiving congratulations. As he sat down with the board, he told them, “The one thing I want to say about all this is that this has all worked out the way you guys wanted it to. I understand all that. But you have to remember that you’re complicit in why Jay’s show didn’t work. We are, too. We put so many restrictions on what his show could be that it had no chance in hell to be what the audience expected it to be.”

He lectured them on the wrongheadedness of the demand that Jay save his second-best comedy element until the end of the show. He acknowledged that NBC had fumbled with the idea that Jay could have only one guest each night because somehow that wouldn’t be fair to The Tonight Show. Ebersol then returned to the unreasonable insistence on burying the established comedy bits—“Headlines,” “Jaywalking,” etc.—at the back, because it destroyed the rhythm of the show and forced Jay to put on what he called “unknown comedy” right in the second act.

“Let’s not lose sight of that,” Ebersol