The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [226]
Maybe not yet. Another late-night leader of long significance, Lorne Michaels, refused to capitulate to the notion of inevitable extinction—or diminution. “They’re wrong,” Michaels said of the late-night eschatologists. “Of course these shows can still make money.” Michaels could hardly believe anything less, having just thrust Jimmy Fallon upon the world. Lorne was convinced that Fallon had the rare talent to establish an audience, build it, and then emerge as their personal star, the way Letterman had, the way Conan had.
If nothing else, Michaels pointed out, the events of January 2010 had proved the continued relevance and impact of late night. They accomplished something for Conan that he had not quite been able to do for himself. “The big thing this did, at the end of the day, was make Conan O’Brien truly famous,” Michaels said. “He wasn’t famous before.” It was the Hugh Grant comparison expressed a different way. But of course Jay Leno had been able to ride his Hugh Grant moment to long-term triumph. Conan had ridden his right out of NBC. And that was unfortunate, as Michaels saw it. Justified, perhaps, but still unfortunate.
Lorne looked at the situation from the truly long view, the view of the hardened, occasionally scarred veteran of many network conflicts. “The fact that the network behaved badly?” Michaels said. “If you read the charter, that’s what they do. Their thing is, they behave badly, and you can’t go, ‘Really? They did this?’ Because they’re the network. That’s what they do.”
Resigning in the face of network ingratitude, Lorne said, does not provide the anticipated satisfaction—an experience, he stressed, he knew well. In 1979 Michaels quit Saturday Night Live and NBC. He was unhappy with his treatment at that point, tired of battles with the network over things Lorne knew far better than they did would only improve the show. At the time, the executive in charge of NBC Entertainment was Irwin Segelstein, a small bear of a man, a generation older than Michaels, who was then not yet thirty-five. Lorne walked into Segelstein’s office, sat down, and laid out all the reasons he had decided to resign. And Segelstein, who had a sardonic streak, listened patiently, not uttering a word until Michaels had finished. Then he launched into a story, a parable of sorts, one that touched on the religion of television.
“Let me just take you through what will happen when you leave,” Segelstein began. “When you leave, the show will get worse. But not all of a sudden—gradually. And it will take the audience a while to figure that out. Maybe two, maybe three years. And when it gets to be, you know, awful, and the audience has abandoned it, then we will cancel it. And the show will be gone, but we will still be here, because we’re the network and we are eternal. If you read your contract closely, it says that the show is to be ninety minutes in length. It is to cost X. That’s the budget. Nowhere in that do we ever say that it has to be good. And if you are so robotic and driven that you feel the pressure to push yourself in that way to make it good, don’t come to us and say you’ve been treated unfairly, because you’re trying hard to make it good and we’re getting in your way. Because at no point did we ask for it to be good. That you’re neurotic is a bonus to us. Our job is to lie, cheat, and steal—and your job is to do the show.”
Lorne’s reaction had been a solitary word: “Whoa.” The speech had left him mostly speechless because he realized that Segelstein was exactly right. Being in charge of Saturday Night Live or The Tonight Show or the Nightly News, Michaels concluded, was not an entitlement—it was a job. That got confused at times because the people involved in these shows put so much emotion and passion into them—and it was these very qualities that made the shows so good.
With that insight and all his own experience behind him, Lorne Michaels did his best to stand back and