The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [216]
He had things do to, like taking care of remaining issues with the staff and, more than anything, planning the live tour that would get him back to doing what the fire in his blood demanded: standing in front of people and making them laugh. One small task, writing a daily Twitter feed, had come to amuse and inspire him a bit. Though initially dismissive of the trivial nature of most items on Twitter, O’Brien could not help but be impressed by the impact of its social connections, and he came to enjoy the discipline of writing something funny every day in 140 characters or less. As long as the tweets stuck to jokes, he was able to continue doing them; NBC monitored Conan’s daily messages to make sure he was not sprinkling them with anti-NBC or anti-Jay material, because its deal with him included no Internet presence for several months. But they weren’t going to enforce that for a stream of funny lines.
“I just celebrated the end of Lent by eating twenty-two sleeves of Peeps. My religion rocks!”
Conan needed to flex his comedy muscles because his psyche was still lacerated. It was too soon to have any perspective on what had just transpired in his life, but he had no uncertainty about the choices he had made, dating all the way back to his turning down Fox in 2001. Chasing The Tonight Show had been something he had to do. Giving it up had been the hardest thing he had ever done—or likely would ever do—professionally, but that sacrifice was better than holding on to a compromised version of it.
Fox remained on his mind, though, because, in terms of future moves, there was the tour and then . . . if not Fox, what? For the most part Conan left such considerations in the hands of his representatives. He had learned of a few possibilities: Did HBO have interest? That would be only once a week, though. Conan had also heard rumblings that Leslie Moonves, the head of CBS, had made a pitch for Showtime, the pay cable channel he also supervised. Rick Rosen thought it might be either Les’s way of parking a potential successor to Dave or else maybe just another move by Les to give Jeff Zucker a professional noogie.
While all that sounded mildly diverting, Conan still expected a push from Fox—though it was starting to feel awfully slow in coming.
In early April Conan began rehearsals for his tour show, which got his adrenalin pumping again. Jeff Ross was around supervising it all. Like everyone else on Team Conan, Ross assumed the Fox deal would get done. The process seemed slow and painful, but his impression was that it was far enough down the road that it was going to happen—the situation just wasn’t going to be great.
Unexpectedly, just after noon on one of the first rehearsal days, Ross got a call from an old friend. Richard Plepler, who had ascended to the post of copresident of HBO, went back years with Ross, who respected Plepler as a smart guy about the business, besides being a fun guy to hang with.
Plepler said he just wanted to make a little pitch on behalf of Steve Koonin. The name rang a bell with Ross, but not too loudly. “I know you guys are meeting with him today,” Plepler continued. “And I just want to urge you to take him seriously. He’s got good ideas. You may wind up at Fox and all that, but hear the guy out.”
The appointment had totally slipped Ross’s mind; they were scheduled to meet with Steve Koonin, the head of the cable channel TBS, that same afternoon. TBS shared a corporate parent, Time Warner, with HBO, which was why Plepler was touting Koonin. Ross now recalled that when the agents had initially told Conan and him about the TBS pitch, they had both kind of shrugged, lumping TBS in with the vague offers they had been getting from the syndication crowd.
When Conan got back from lunch, Ross told him they would have to break from rehearsal early that afternoon. They had to head over to Beverly