The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [207]
Jay took his own first step to push the rehabilitation effort. Possibly out of the tradition of host logrolling—you come on my show, I come on yours—Jay agreed to sit down for his first big post-blowup interview with Oprah Winfrey. As she often did, Oprah skillfully combined chumminess with a somewhat pressing interrogation.
Jay went through his account of the events that had led to the shake-up of that fall, including how NBC’s decision to oust him “broke my heart.” He admitted to telling “a white lie on the air” when he said he’d retire at the end of the five-year waiting period. And he professed no hard feelings toward Conan, whom he said he “very much” considered a friend.
But he also bluntly denied any responsibility for Conan’s disappointment. “It had nothing to do with me,” Jay said. He also repeated NBC’s claim that Conan’s show was going to lose money for the first time in Tonight Show history. And he fired off his most direct and pointed response when Oprah cited Conan’s assertion that moving to 12:05 would be destructive to the franchise. “If you look at what the ratings were,” Jay said, “it was already destructive to the franchise.”
When Oprah chided Jay about the joke about Letterman and his wife, saying it was “beneath him,” Jay defended it as funny and characterized the back-and-forth between the comics as “big-time wrestling.”
He also speculated that almost anything NBC could have done would have been better than the eventual outcome. “If they’d come in and shot everybody—I mean, it would have been people murdered. But at least it would have been a two-day story. I mean, yes, NBC could not have handled it worse, from 2004 onward. This whole thing was a huge mess.”
Seeking further advice, Jay also reached out in a much more unexpected direction: He called Lorne Michaels.
No one at NBC had a longer or deeper connection to Conan than Michaels, but Jay had reason—possibly as a result of his and Debbie’s conversations with Ebersol—to suspect Lorne had not bought a ticket on the Jay’s-to-blame train. He was right about that.
Leno and Michaels had interacted little over the years; Jay’s style of comedy hardly matched Michaels’s sensibilities. Lorne saw him as more of a Bob Hope-like figure—a safety valve for viewers. And while Jay’s brand of setup-punch line humor would never have landed him in the cast of Saturday Night Live, Michaels realized that people in America tended to admire and accept a “well-made one-of-those, even if it isn’t a one-of-those that they liked.” And Jay had obviously been making a good one-of-those for a long time.
Lorne had made no secret to Jeff Zucker what he would have done with the late-night plan had it been his decision to make. He was the one whispering in Zucker’s ear to let Jay go, because the ten o’clock show was so awful. Everyone would understand the move in that context, Lorne had told Zucker, and now you put your bet on the younger guy, give him a full run, and stand behind him.
But when it didn’t fall that way, Michaels understood the rationale: Jay would still make a good one-of-those. As much as he understood the facile comparisons of Conan and Jay as Harvard versus the garage, Lorne recognized that, every once in a while, Jay was not quite the garage and Conan not quite Harvard. Jay did smart jokes as well as dumb ones. He just did a lot of jokes because, well, that’s what he did. Conan remained, like Letterman, more of an attitude comedian, as Lorne saw it.
Lorne also understood on a personal level Jay’s mind-set about wanting to keep working until either he dropped or they changed the locks. That was Lorne’s intention as well. As long as NBC continued to pay the electricity bill for 30 Rock, Lorne would produce Saturday Night Live.
More than anything else, Michaels dismissed as nonsense any suggestion that the actions of recent years and months had been driven by Jay’s Machiavellian genius. Lorne did not believe in the puppets moving the strings.