The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [54]
In early 2005 one major financial decision in particular was generating significant fallout for the entertainment division. Ebersol had put NBC in position to grab the prime-time NFL package, and move it from Monday to Sunday night, where it would steer clear of interrupting NBC’s lucrative late-night lineup. But Ebersol gave it to Immelt straight: The deal, if the network could step up to it, would provide a huge, dependable audience that could be introduced to NBCʹs other shows, but it would mean a $150 million loss on the books every year.
Immelt told Ebersol that wasn’t tolerable. But Dick said he had a way to account for $100 million of the annual loss. He explained that he had worked it out with Zucker that the entertainment division would give up $100 million a year out of its program development budget. The rationale: With twenty weeks worth of four-hour-long football coverage every Sunday in the fall, NBC would not need nearly as much money to develop shows for the rest of the week.
Immelt agreed to accept the deal (and the loss of $50 million) as long as the entertainment division was audited every year to make sure it was cutting that $100 million from its budget. Although Zucker was thrilled to get a Sunday night of guaranteed huge ratings every week, some of his West Coast executives worried about how starved they were going to be for development funds, especially at a time when NBC desperately needed to find hits to drag itself out of the ratings basement.
But by then Zucker was convinced that NBC wasn’t really a network-based company anyway. With a portfolio of assets that included the USA Network, Bravo, MSNBC, and CNBC, Zucker pushed for a new emphasis. “We’re a cable company,” he began to proclaim, with more and more frequency—and to more and more dismay among those trying to revive that network business. Or star in it.
Jay Leno certainly fit that description. To him only the network business really mattered. The game that ultimately counted was the daily comparison between network late-night shows. He knew he was number one; then came the other guys. Few if any other late-night hosts broke down the numbers—and every other clue to potential adjustments they might provide—the way Leno did. He knew what percentage of his audience stayed only for the monologue, when exactly they left, how many people he retained for each of the bits in act two (the comedy act after the monologue). He broke it all down to the minute.
“He’s a real student of this stuff,” said one of the principals at a competing show, who marveled at the detailed analysis Leno could offer for every one of the network late-night shows. “He loves the game. He really understands the ratings. He knows the lead-ins and how they affect his audience.”
Leno found it amazing that he was considered some kind of oddball or sellout for paying attention to the minutiae of the ratings. He had spoken to at least a half dozen hosts of late-night shows that had failed since he’d won the job in 1992, and invariably they told him the same thing: “We just do our shows. We don’t look at the ratings. We don’t even want to know.” To Jay that attitude meant you might be able to develop a niche audience, but there was no way you were going to grow to be widely popular.
For years Leno brushed off the plaints coming from the camp of his main competitor, David Letterman, about how Dave was losing chiefly because he suffered under the handicap of dreadful