The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [77]
One week in April 2008, just over a year from the expected date when Conan O’Brien would take over The Tonight Show, the late-night ratings arrived as usual, and a few eyebrows popped up inside offices at two addresses on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan.
At CBS, on Fifty-second Street, they looked at the numbers and saw a headline: Craig Ferguson Beats Conan O’Brien. At NBC, down the block between Forty-ninth and Fiftieth streets, they looked at the same numbers and saw a need for a rapid response: Big Deal, Conan Trounced Him Where It Counts—As Usual.
Both versions of reality had the virtue of truth. For one week, for the first time ever, Ferguson, the third and latest CBS 12:35 a.m. host to take on Conan during his fifteen-year run, had got his Scottish nose ahead of Conan’s Irish pompadour in the category of most viewers. That this meant less than it seemed was a quirk of the television business, where having the most almost always mattered less than having the most select. So the fact that Ferguson had more viewers than O’Brien—1.88 million to 1.77 million—was thoroughly mitigated by the fact that Conan still ruled big-time with the under-fifty crowd.
But still . . .
NBC had already broken ground on the Universal lot in LA, commencing its capital investment of tens of millions on a grand new studio for The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien. It still had no answer to the oft-repeated question “Are you really going to allow ABC to steal Jay Leno?” other than “We believe in Conan.” Craig Ferguson’s just happening to have more people watching him in a week than the guy NBC had that massive a bet riding on had to be worth at least a Huh?
The official line from NBC was: No worries. A blip.
Craig Ferguson had been called a lot of things in his turbulent life, including “Bing Hitler,” but “a blip”? Not bloody likely.
The path of most late-night hosts traversed familiar terrain: watched a lot of Carson/Letterman; decided “I could do that”; found an agent/manager /producer who could open the right door; jumped on a break and made it happen.
Craig Ferguson’s path touched none of those mileposts—except the last. Instead, his course followed no familiar pattern at all, having started in Scotland, of all places. The fact that his accent sounded so alien, at least to most Americans, was one more reason why Ferguson’s successful entry into the world of late-night television had a hint of hallucination to it.
Ferguson had done enough alcohol and drugs in his youth to hallucinate just about anything, but not this. This was the product of accidental timing meeting unforeseen talent. That he did have abundant talent was apparent in his résumé: rock drummer, stand-up, sketch satirist, film actor, stage actor, screenwriter, director, sitcom actor, novelist. And much of that had been accomplished while he was barely able to stand on his feet.
Ferguson had a theory about why Scotland was such a drinking society, and its climate was a major factor. “Anywhere you go where it’s cold, people drink like crazy,” Ferguson observed. But his homeland was different, in that the drinking there was all but pathological. “It was excessive; it was ridiculous,” Ferguson said. A Scottish politician Ferguson once met offered an explanation Craig came to embrace as telling. “Scotland is a country in mourning,” he said, “ever since World War II. So many died. It changed the society.”
The Glasgow of Ferguson’s youth—he was born in 1962—was a sorry place, riven by animosity between Protestants and Catholics and prone to casual violence that seemed impossible to escape. Ferguson often cited getting beaten up