The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [222]
“Nobody ever uses these show names,” Jerry said, his voice hitting the high register familiar from his routines when he addressed the most mind-boggling absurdities of life. “These names are bullshit words! How do you not get that this whole thing is phony? It’s all fake! There’s no institution to offend! All of this ‘I won’t sit by and watch the institution damaged.’ What institution? Ripping off the public? That’s the only institution! We tell jokes and they give us millions! Who’s going to take over Late Night or Late Show or whatever the hell it’s called? Nobody’s going to take it over! It’s Dave! When Dave’s done, that’s the end of that! And then another guy comes along and has to do his thing. That, to me, is an obvious essential of show business that you eventually grasp. Somehow that seems to have been missed by some of the people here.”
Obviously Seinfeld directed most of his amazement toward Conan O’Brien and his team for taking a position that Jerry, a contemporary comic with distinctly old-school values, simply couldn’t fathom. “I don’t really understand why they were so offended,” Jerry said. “Jay’s show isn’t working; your show isn’t working—how about a new idea? To me, when I see the numbers those two guys were getting, yes, it’s time to sit down at the idea table.” And why put a career on the line over a shift of thirty minutes, he wondered. “A half hour is a half hour no matter where it is. It goes by forty-eight times a day! Who cares where it is?” As for the passionate defense of the tradition of The Tonight Show, Seinfeld observed, “There is no tradition! This is what I didn’t get. Conan has been on television for sixteen years. At that point you should get it: There are no shows! It’s all made up! The TV show is just a card! Somebody printed the words on it!”
Jerry admired Conan’s talent, wished him the best, and predicted he would do well “because he’s great.” But why on earth it had come to a point where he felt he had to leave NBC for TBS—that simply made no sense. “I couldn’t believe he walked away,” Seinfeld said. “I thought he should just say, ‘Yeah, let me go at midnight. Let me work this differently. Let me hang around.’ Here’s big point number two in show business: Hang around! Just stay there, just be there! The old cliché: 95 percent is just showing up. OK, I’m on at twelve; I’m still showing up. You never leave!”
At least one Conan loyalist, Lorne Michaels, found that argument sound. Lorne had never stopped believing in Conan, in his talent and his wit, and never wavered in his certainty that, left alone with his imposing intelligence, Conan would have composed his show as well as he composed his matchless comedy writing.
Michaels was convinced that the Conan he knew and had worked with would have reacted differently had NBC’s approach been better planned—if only it had been Jeff Zucker who turned up on Conan’s doorstep, saying, “Listen, what do I do here? I did this to protect you. Whether I was right or wrong, I did it for what I believed were the right reasons. I need your help now.”
The earlier Conan, Lorne believed, would have responded to that plea, because he was nothing if not pragmatic. In the panicky early days at Late Night, Conan had told a previous crew of bomb-throwing colleagues to stay calm, and they’d weathered that storm.
This time, it seemed to Michaels, Conan had been too beaten up to maintain perspective, and he had no one around him to provide the perspective he needed. Lorne didn’t know Gavin Polone at all; his frame of reference on managers was dominated by his own, the legendary Bernie Brillstein. Bernie, as Lorne recalled, used to say there were two kinds of managers: the ones who walked through kitchens and the ones who didn’t.
“The ones who walked through kitchens” referred to old-time managers who made a point to show up in every grimy club where a client performed, to the point where “they