The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [211]
Conan, naturally, expressed reservations, given what he’d just been through, largely due to pressure from NBC’s stations. “I’d want to be with you,” Conan said. “But frankly, I don’t want to be in a place that has to jam it through.” If Kevin and Peter couldn’t look him in the eye and assure him this was going to work, he didn’t know if he wanted to pursue it.
They all agreed to keep at it.
Reilly did have a recommendation he wanted to run by Gavin Polone: Put Conan first on Fox’s sister cable network, FX, an ad-supported entertainment channel on the basic cable tier. Maybe after a year or so there, they could make a shift over to Fox on broadcast. Reilly couldn’t actually guarantee that would happen, but he thought FX would be a good home for the show, and having it in the Fox family would certainly make a transfer easier. For Polone that was a nonstarter; they were not going to entertain offers from basic cable channels.
The biggest player on the other side of the retransmission issue happened to be in the process of acquiring its own broadcast network. But even though Comcast’s top executives were making the rounds in Washington that winter, shaking hands, giving public testimony, doing the whole regulatory dance, their opinions on the current NBC leadership remained opaque.
Media analysts on Wall Street, in the press, and online believed one coming decision was totally transparent: Jeff Zucker had to be a dead man walking. How could he hope to survive with his GE patron, Jeff Immelt, going out the door and two media professionals like Brian Roberts and Steve Burke coming in? Surely the latest NBC misfire, this late-night fizzle—purely Zucker’s handiwork—could only have hardened the resolve that big changes had to be made in the new Comcast-led NBC Universal.
But if the Comcast executives had a judgment to make about Zucker’s fate or the late-night train wreck they had at least partially witnessed, they did an exceptional job of keeping it to themselves.
Although no one admitted it directly, more than a few NBC executives welcomed a management change, because GE’s parsimonious ways, especially as NBC was being readied for sale, had squeezed the network dry. Gaspin believed NBC’s entertainment properties simply had no future without significant new investment. He conveyed that opinion to Zucker, and the CEO approved a plan to spend much more freely, acquiring new programs from some of the top television creative talents.
That seemed consistent with Comcast’s message to Washington: They wanted to be in the business of content. They signaled that they knew that took money.
What most NBC executives presumed was that Comcast had a plan; they just didn’t know what it was or who would be affected. Upon examining the broad spectrum of NBCU, they would have seen cable channels running at high efficiency, a news division that remained a dominant leader, theme parks that seemed about to post big results thanks to a new Harry Potter attraction, and a broadcast network on the skids but showing a few glimmers of financial turnaround.
How any of this would affect Zucker’s future, no one inside NBC ventured to guess. Jeff himself seemed serene; he spent a lot of time with Roberts and Burke, selling NBC’s strengths—and by extension his own.
Two weeks before the end of The Jay Leno Show, Debbie Vickers returned to her office after completing a taping and found a message waiting from