The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [46]
Conan had the predictable growing pains—the learning curve was proving expectedly steep. But it occurred to him that even on the nights when the show seemed to be spinning out of his control—or else lying there like a beached tuna—something happened, one little moment, a witty remark or a shtick he tried with the camera—and the promise flashed through. To make Conan more comfortable they had installed one of the show’s new writers, Andy Richter, as a sidekick. It came about organically. The two of them had hit it off screwing around before the test shows. Jeff Ross saw that and guessed having somebody on set who Conan could “fuck around with” would help steady his jittery host. What they were all trying to do was different, even breakthrough, and some nights they did push it too far. “We were cocky,” Smigel said. “We really set out to do weird stuff. We just wanted to blow people away with how different the show was.” To Ross the whole show seemed to be “flying by the seat of our pants.”
In October, after only five weeks on the air, the Chevy Chase show was canceled. One of the writers broke the news to Conan, with a note of glee in his voice: They had already outlasted one of the big guys. Conan didn’t see it that way. “Oh, shit,” he said. “They’re going to reload.”
The mocking fusillade did begin soon after—not in a concentrated way, but more with a random shot here and there. The most persistent assault was coming from a high-profile voice. Tom Shales, the TV critic of The Washington Post, who had gained a reputation as the wittiest (if sometimes most purposefully astringent) assessor of the medium, with a special interest in the late-night arena, had already fired a few salvos toward Conan. He was one critic who had hated the opening night, having labeled Conan “a living collage of nervous habits—he giggles and titters, jiggles about and fiddles with his cuffs. He has dark, beady eyes like a rabbit.”
But five weeks later, Shales had poured a new store of powder into his cannon, and Conan was about to walk headfirst into the line of fire.
Looking to capitalize on the demise of Chevy Chase, NBC had set up a round of interviews for Conan, with Charlie Rose of PBS and a host of morning-drive radio DJs, which he would do from a studio in a single marathon session. Blissfully unaware of what had been printed that morning in Washington, he arrived for the round of publicity and discovered that every one of the questioners had seen Shales’s latest commentary about the show, and every one of them opted to read selections from it.
Such as: “Chevy Chase has done the honorable thing. Now Conan O’Brien should follow him off the cliff. . . . Let the host resume his previous identity: Conan O’Blivion. Hey you, Conan O’Brien! Get the heck off TV.”
The piece also managed to brand Andy Richter a “nitwit sidekick” and declared the show “as lifeless and messy as a road kill.” Shales suggested that Conan was “out of his head if he thinks the show is working” and had a firm recommendation for NBC: “Cancel O’Brien now.”
All Conan could do was pretend to find some humor in this drubbing, making as many self-deprecating jokes as possible. For hours worth of interviews the pummeling went on. When it was over, O’Brien walked outside in the rain to a waiting car. It was a weekday; he had a show to do. He slouched into 30 Rock, and in the Late Night offices the staff watched him slink past, afraid to say anything. O’Brien, the man who could fly high on comic inspiration, was also capable of the deepest of lows when he spiraled all the way down. He walked into his office, passed his assistant, and closed the inner door behind him. He made his way behind his desk, stood there for a second, then bent, went to his knees, and crawled down under it.
He rolled on his back and just lay there until after a while