The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [215]
Jay certainly didn’t want to go through anything like that again, but this situation was clearly different. Conan at seven months obviously wasn’t Johnny at thirty years. But more than that, Jay was now facing a torrent of acrimony from Conan’s fans. To give Conan even a tiny nod of recognition would surely be seen by some as shameless pandering.
They felt damned either way, so they decided to pass.
Other than that bit of awkwardness, Jay slipped comfortably into his old seat at Tonight. In a real way, the show was his baby, his only baby. His family—other than Mavis—was the staff. His personal relationships outside the show remained minimal.
Just before he resumed his old position, Jay stepped back to consider the events of 2009. One rationalized way he looked at them: He had been off the air for eight months. That other show? Somehow, that didn’t constitute being on the air for Jay—not when matched against being on The Tonight Show. From that perspective, Jay realized he was back home in less than a year.
The numbers for the first night back reflected the continuing fascination with the rumble in late night. Jay pulled in 6.6 million viewers, a massive bump over Conan’s average (but nowhere near the 10.3 million who turned out to blow Conan a kiss good-bye in January). What was notable, of course, was how big Jay’s margin was over Letterman, who attracted 3.8 million that night. Of course, there was curiosity value in Jay’s return, but he won the week as well, with 5.58 million viewers to Dave’s 3.66. Jay cleaned up among those precious viewers eighteen to forty-nine as well, landing 1.94 million to 1.3 million for Dave.
As the weeks passed, Jay’s margin held. It looked a bit like a replay of two years earlier: Jay won every week and most every night. “It’s as if a collective erase button was pushed,” said Robert Thompson, professor of television at Syracuse University, “with the usual suspects back in their usual locations—except Conan is gone.”
Week by week Jay’s total audience numbers remained about 50 percent higher than what Conan had been scoring. But he was down sharply from his own previous performance on Tonight two years earlier, and the edge in the younger audience groups was far less impressive. The evidence was quickly overwhelming: NBC had exchanged a smaller, mostly younger audience for a larger, mostly older audience. The median age of the Jay viewer, just over fifty-six, represented growth, virtually overnight, of more than a decade over what it had been for the Conan viewer.
The results played more ominously for Letterman. In a flash, with Jay back as his chief rival, Dave lost the number one status he had enjoyed during Conan’s brief run. And a sizable slice of the additional audience he’d collected during Conan’s tenure seemed to drift away and not come back. The erase button had wiped out the short, happy reign of David Letterman in late night.
Conan O’Brien had once read a story about Lyndon Johnson. After he had decided not to run for reelection and was spending his days down at his ranch in Texas, the former leader shared a day with a journalist, who noticed almost immediately that Johnson had not been able to shake the mantle of the presidency. He was no longer tackling problems of poverty or ordering the carpet bombing of Cambodia; instead he was applying the same energy and authority to fixing a small water pump that filled a cattle trough.
Though he hardly qualified as an ex-president, Conan, in the first weeks after being untimely ripped from his Tonight Show womb, found himself similarly diminished. Accustomed to heading a staff of people all devoted to a single cause—getting