The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [218]
At TBS the budget would be slashed as well, but there certainly would be no issue with stations. TBS was on every cable system. In terms of reach it wouldn’t quite match that of The Tonight Show, but it looked as though it would surpass the initial hodgepodge Fox was talking about putting together.
“So what do we know about TBS?” one of the Conan guys finally asked. “What’s the channel really like?”
Nobody really knew, and someone finally suggested, “Let’s turn it on now and see what’s on.” Reaching for the remote to flick on the set in his office, Rosen stopped and asked, “Uh, what channel is TBS?”
The rest of the group looked around at one another asking, “Do you know?”
None of them did. Rosen called in his assistant and asked the same question.
The assistant had no idea either.
At almost the same time, over in the Fox offices in Century City, Kevin Reilly took stock of the Conan situation. What he and Rice faced included a huge capital expenditure, stern resistance from a host of stations, and ratings prospects that likely would not have generated profits for a year or two, maybe longer. He and Rice had heard from New York that Roger Ailes had stiffened his opposition and likely would not be moved. To force through a Conan deal now would surely create a raft of ill will inside the company—and, not incidentally, be a risky political maneuver internally. A misstep here could well lead to vulnerability against a dangerous adversary of the likes of Roger Ailes, and maybe an unexpected career change.
Reilly e-mailed Rice, who was on vacation: “Look, this thing is going nowhere. I’m starting to feel like we’re in bad faith. We’re wasting a lot of our time and theirs. Let’s pass.”
When Reilly made the call to inform the Conan forces of Fox’s decision to withdraw, they told him things had gotten close with another party. It would only hurt their leverage if Fox publicly passed now. Would Kevin mind sitting on this, just for about a week? Kevin said sure.
He couldn’t for the life of him guess who the other party might be.
When the news broke on April 12 that Conan had signed with TBS, it rocked the television business. It was shocking enough that such a huge, news-making deal could be consummated under complete radio silence, but the match itself—Conan and TBS? How would that work?
It worked for Jeff Ross and the other Conan backers because it afforded a national platform and a network that would truly commit all it had to making Conan successful—and it didn’t hurt that Conan would now have complete control of the show, including ownership.
But surely some Team Coco fans, in the words of a writer on the New York magazine blog Vulture, let loose “a dejected sigh.” Instead of creating a new paradigm for the digital age, “Conan will now be featured as a lead-in for Lopez Tonight (a show you don’t watch) on TBS (a cable channel you don’t watch, or at least never notice when you’re watching it). It’s not just basic cable, it’s unsexy basic cable.”
That was certainly not how Jeff Ross viewed it. On TBS, accessible in more than 85 million homes, enough viewers would be available to go out and beat Letterman, especially in the key demo, and maybe even—if things broke right—Leno. That would never be a stated goal, of course, and cable versus a network still constituted an unfair fight.
That didn’t mean Team Coco wouldn’t be thinking about it.
As Conan headed out on tour, arenas from Eugene, Oregon, to Los Angeles, from New York to Manchester, Tennessee, were packed with screaming, ecstatic fans. They waited in the rain, bought Team Coco T-shirts and posters, crawled over one another to touch Conan as he worked the aisles with his guitar. It was the full rock star treatment, one difficult to imagine any other late-night star matching.
Except maybe the pair on Comedy Central. And in a shift certain to add to the intrigue surrounding Conan’s return, he would now be going