The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [52]
Jeff Zucker had always emphasized the importance of the transition process at NBC and took pride in how he handled each one. When he ran the Today show, he steered the onetime dominant anchor of the morning, Bryant Gumbel, to the sidelines, replacing him with Matt Lauer, who became even more dominant. More prominently, he helped smooth the reset in an area long afflicted with contentious changes of ownership: the evening news anchor chair. Brian Williams bloodlessly took over for Tom Brokaw on the NBC Nightly News in December 2004, with Tom still ruling in the ratings.
The success of those decisions reinforced Zucker’s philosophy on big changeovers: You didn’t wait until the incumbent leader had slid into second place; you made your moves when he was on top. The Tonight Show should be no different.
By 2005, transitions were much on Zucker’s mind, because he had every reason to expect he himself would be part of one. The long and hugely successful tenure of Bob Wright as chief executive of NBC Universal—Wright had skillfully orchestrated NBC’s acquisition of Universal in 2003—was winding down. Zucker, now president of the NBC Universal Television Group, clearly sat in the successor seat. This, despite a record in his previous posting as chief of the entertainment division that even friends labeled mixed and detractors labeled mucked. While it was true that with Zucker at the helm NBCʹs prime-time fortunes collapsed after a long run at the top, his defenders cited his efforts to shore up what had already been a sinking sand castle of programs when he arrived in Burbank in December of 2000. Still, by his own acknowledgment, Zucker had not won any congeniality awards in Hollywood while he was there. With his journalism background he simply didn’t take to the place, its pretensions, its posturing, its moguls, its agents, or its style; and Hollywood returned the sentiments. Still, Zucker retained the respect and support of the only mogul that counted, Jeff Immelt, the chairman of GE, NBC’s corporate boss.
The network entered 2005, however, beset by a precipitous downturn in its prime-time ratings and profits. Having tumbled from first place to last in the space of one season, NBC’s take in that year’s annual upfront ad sales, which determine the bulk of revenues for each network, would plunge by a staggering $1 billion.
Fortunately its portfolio of cable networks was proving to be a cash fountain, and increasingly Zucker would point to them as the future—and even the present—of the company. Even with prime time in free fall, the big profit areas of morning and late night seemed secure because of the steps Zucker had taken to facilitate the big transitions. If the Tonight transfer of power worked as well as the Today one had, NBC would maintain ratings dominance even as a new face replaced the old. This strategy would also likely please GE, famous for its corporate personnel policy that demanded successors always be identified.
As one of the midlevel executives under Zucker explained, “Jeff tends not to project very far into the future and he likes to be a can-do guy. He looked at late night and asked, ‘What’s a win-win scenario where I can put this off, but on paper it looks very smooth and I’m going to keep everybody locked in?ʹ GE loves transitions, so this was going to be a very big thing on the scorecard.”
Another West Coast executive, unsurprised by Zucker’s heavy emphasis on transitions and lines of succession, described his policy as “Jeff always likes to carry a spare.”
But moving executives in and out of position was one thing; playing chess with the future of performers was a completely different game. According to one experienced developer of entertainment programming, “Jeff got everyone signed on—it will be a baton handoff. On paper that sounds great, and it sounds very GE-like. Except