The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [209]
“Could this be any more insane?” Reilly asked, opening the conversation. He laid his cards out quickly. Fox had an intense interest. But there were likely to be complications.
“Back of the envelope, my instinct is, I don’t know if we’re going to be able to clear the show,” Reilly said. By “clear,” he meant get the full complement—or close to it—of Fox stations to commit to carry a Conan O’Brien late-night show. “I’m gonna do the math and we’ll see where we end up.”
Reilly’s enthusiasm fell on welcoming ears. Team Conan knew that, in the current landscape, if they were going to find a new network home for their man, Fox represented the only real option. Polone had tried to argue that a new kind of deal made sense for Conan—maybe he didn’t need a network play at all, given how much of his audience found their entertainment choices online now. Many of Conan’s younger viewers already watched him only in highlights the following day on the Web (a factor that had hardly helped with the ratings impression he wanted to make with NBC). But others on Conan’s team leaned heavily toward locking up a base that was an actual television show and building the new media possibilities from there.
Back in his own jurisdiction, Reilly began his sales job. Chase Carey, who had replaced Peter Chernin as the top executive overseeing all of Fox’s entertainment operations, made it clear he simply didn’t get Conan, but he accepted that his was a business perspective more than a creative one, and he remained open to the idea. Reilly had the unqualified backing of Peter Rice, the chairman of Fox Entertainment. Rice, who had previously headed Fox Searchlight films, had forged a reputation as a keen evaluator of breakthrough material (Bend It Like Beckham, Slumdog Millionaire ). Rice became Reilly’s partner in the pursuit of Conan.
Rice and Reilly had reason for their enthusiasm. A talent of Conan’s stature simply did not fall into a network’s lap so conveniently. On any checklist of qualities most appropriate for a late-night host on the Fox network, Conan would have filled in virtually every box: hip, creative, irreverent, youth oriented, special appeal to male viewers. It was no accident Conan had truly broken through as a writer on The Simpsons. He was all but the embodiment of the Fox comic sensibility.
As the Fox team saw it, Conan most definitely did not embody the Tonight sensibility. The fit was just off, in some fundamental way, beginning with that big Vegasy stage and the long, traditional monologue. He might have gotten there over time, but the whole traditional format didn’t seem built for the scrappy, off-the-wall Conan, in their view. But if he came to Fox, playing the underdog again, they were sure he would get the magic back, overnight.
Rice and Reilly were well aware of who represented the main impediment to a quick annexation of Conan: Roger Ailes. An imposing figure internally at the News Corp., Fox’s parent, given the spectacular financial results for his personal baby, the boisterous Fox News Channel, Ailes had added the portfolio of the stations owned by Fox Broadcasting. He could be expected to apply his customary aggressiveness to representing the interests of the stations, no matter how rapturous the network guys might be about Conan.
Reilly knew the easiest way to get Conan in the door at Fox. All it would take would be the ultimate voice at the network, News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch, delivering one simple message: “I don’t give a shit. This is another Wall Street Journal. I want it.” That always produced results at Fox. But Murdoch remained noncommittal on Conan. His position boiled down to: “If you can make it work.”
That quickly proved a prodigious challenge.
Though Fox in earlier years had a clause in its contracts mandating that its affiliated stations