The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [81]
What Conan should take from this story, Ebersol explained, was to emphasize the opening monologue and make sure he pitched his show to appeal to middle America.
Ross received the advice equably. He said that everyone on the show knew they had to adjust when they got to eleven thirty and predicted Conan would adapt organically, cutting back on the jumping around because he would recognize this was new territory. “Did you have a problem with how he did the Emmys?” Ross asked.
Ebersol said he hadn’t, but Ross wondered if Dick had actually seen Conan that night. In the end, the men felt the lunch had gone just fine. It was completely friendly. Like everyone else, Ebersol found Ross open, smart, and generous of spirit. They both went back to work.
That spring, on one of his usual trips out to the West Coast, Jeff Zucker called Jay Leno and said, “Hey, I’m coming out and I want to come by.”
By now Zucker knew two things for certain: Jay was being fervidly wooed by ABC and Fox, and time was starting to get short if he was going to dredge up that brilliant idea that might induce Jay to stay. Not that Jeff lacked confidence that he could do so; he just had to find a way to breach Jay’s resistance to any kind of change in his life or routine.
What Zucker meant to propose that spring was actually a relic from his trunkful of unused notions. As early as 2002 Zucker had stood on the sidelines of Letterman’s negotiations for a new contract, looking for an opportunity to spring if Dave showed the slightest sign of being willing to bolt CBS. When he did, with ABC entering the picture, Zucker leapt into back-channel action and logged in a call to Rob Burnett at Letterman’s shop.
Zucker pitched an intriguing concept: a comeback for Dave to NBC—only not in late night. What Zucker proposed for Dave was an hour each night of prime time, at eight p.m. (except for Thursday, because in 2002 NBC still had the hit Friends there). The plan had several beautiful angles for Zucker. Besides removing Letterman as a late-night competitor, it would address what had become one of Zucker’s bêtes noires since taking over the entertainment side of NBC: the network’s chronic issue with finding eight p.m. shows. Friends, he had to admit, had little life left, and after that it was a lot of questions for NBC at eight.
Zucker believed that NBC’s core audience of young professionals brought with them certain limitations—namely, they weren’t really available to watch much television at eight p.m. (seven p.m. central). Instead they were just getting home from work, or having a late dinner in town, or putting kiddies to bed. What was needed, Zucker decided in one of his first potential game-changing solutions for network television, was a less expensive show that could be slotted in at eight p.m. multiple nights of the week. But it had to be a reliable show that would generate steady if not necessarily spectacular ratings at that hour. Zucker might have publicly written off Letterman as an old-hat loser in late night, but he wasn’t blind to his talent, or to his smart, sophisticated following, which had always fit NBC’s profile better than it had CBS’s.
Had he studied Dave closely, Zucker might have also discovered that Letterman had a lifelong aversion to prime time, believing his act was strictly a late-night animal. Some forays in prime for anniversary shows at NBC had done well, but not so well that Dave was likely to risk his career on so great a gamble at age fifty-five.
Still, Burnett listened to the pitch with interest. At the time he was in business with Zucker on a side project, a prime-time hour-long comedy drama he had cocreated called Ed—which, ironically enough, was then parked at eight p.m.