The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [224]
Conan, too, had belonged on that list—hip, urban, distinctive. Jeff Zucker and many others had always known that. Losing him was like losing another piece of NBC’s heritage, its DNA, much like losing Letterman had been.
Gaspin could not help but wonder how things might have been different: Perhaps if he had gone to Conan first, before approaching Jay with the late-night changes; perhaps if he had just been able to get more time with Conan himself, get him into a real negotiating session. Or maybe if Conan had really been able to shine a flashlight under his chin and really look into the future—like, later in the year 2010? Gaspin wondered if that might have altered the outcome.
“If he knew there was no Fox ...,” Gaspin mused. “If he knew he was going to end up on cable, do you think he would have done the same thing? The best you’re going to do is TBS? Do you think he would have swallowed hard and would have come to the table and just asked for a few things?”
Such as? Hadn’t NBC already offered him the big thing? Hadn’t they kept him around once with a promise he would move up in five years?
“A guarantee,” Gaspin suggested. “In three years, no question, you’ll get rid of the guy—you’ll shoot him; you’ll put an arrow through his head.”
But Gaspin already had the answer. “Who’s going to believe me, right? Who’s going to believe me after what we just did, right?”
Inevitably, the denouement involved dollars.
As NBC executives sorted through the impact and implications of the latest late-night tug-of-war, it was hard to find anyone who wasn’t either muddied or nursing a few rope burns. Those, at least, could be salved and bandaged.
The real cost, one that could be assessed accurately only over time, was in the damage that may have been exacted on what had been, for a generation, television’s most lucrative program. Soon after the pools of contract ink had dried, Jeff Gaspin offered a startling appraisal of where The Tonight Show stood financially.
To the charge from Conan’s people that, if their cheaper version was allegedly losing money, Jay’s Tonight Show surely must be, Gaspin had a forthright response: “Oh, we’re going to lose money—but what don’t we lose money on?”
The Tonight Show, which once generated profits of more than $150 million a year, no longer made money? That was Gaspin’s honest admission in the first months after the Jay-Conan contretemps. By spring both he and Zucker were rescinding that analysis, noting that the television ad business had demonstrated a significant comeback, and upfront sales for NBC’s late night had come in far more robust than expected.
But Gaspin had also raised longer-term questions, including a most ominous one. He suggested that within five years NBC might not necessarily even be programming a Tonight Show, or anything else for that matter, in what the networks labeled the late-night day part. “While we have this heritage in the day part, you know, we also all used to be in daytime,” Gaspin said, recalling the days when networks filled the daytime hours with soap operas, fewer and fewer of which were surviving. “We all used to be in Saturday morning programming,” he added, referring to the days when the networks made money on children’s cartoons. “The broadcast business is changing.”
It was not hard to find others who shared Gaspin’s gloomy late-night forecast. Six months after the tempest over The Tonight Show, the ratings picture turned darker—and starker. Nobody was doing well; Leno’s winning numbers were down by about a million viewers—more than 20 percent, and both he and Letterman had dropped to their worst audience levels ever. None of the late-night