The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [82]
But he couldn’t help tweaking Zucker with a little counterproposal: Suppose NBC moved Jay to eight; then surely Dave would come back and take over The Tonight Show. Zucker dismissed that idea as the joke both men knew it really was.
A short time later Burnett did run the NBC proposal by Letterman, and they discussed it briefly. Mostly, Burnett reported, “Dave had a good laugh over it.”
Zucker had never completely abandoned the eight p.m. strip idea. He later even ran it by Oprah Winfrey, trying to lure her away from syndication and onto NBC. She hadn’t been tempted, either, though she let Zucker down gently, telling him that if the offer had come ten years earlier in her career she might well have jumped at it.
Now it was Jay’s turn.
When Zucker sat down with Leno in Burbank, he started out with an earnest expression of the network’s undying commitment to keep their biggest star in the NBC family.
“Why do you want to keep me?” a skeptical Jay replied. “I already got canned.”
Zucker had heard that kneejerk response before, whenever he had casually suggested to Jay that NBC still loved him and wanted him to stay in the family; he regarded it no more seriously than he did the jokes Jay was telling about NBC every night on the air. Zucker plowed on, telling Jay the network would come up with something right for him, something that would keep him happy.
“I mean, why?” Jay shrugged off the solicitous words. “You should have kept me before.”
Zucker assured him that NBC still had big plans for Jay. He pitched Jay his new wrinkle on the five-night-a-week show at eight: not an hour-long show, but a half-hour one. Jay could do his monologue every night, maybe even a slightly longer one, then go to commercials, then a second comedy piece, another commercial, followed by a short piece, either an interview or, even better (since the interview portions were not Jay’s strong suit), something with a corps of comedy correspondents, and then—we’re out. Done. No forced chat with some starlet hawking one of those movies Jay didn’t like having to see anyway; no music act that never pulled in viewers because music tastes had become so stratified.
Jay listened politely; even though still carrying a grudge for what NBC had done to him, he was unfailingly polite to management. But his instant reaction to the eight p.m. idea was that it was “way wrong.” The idea of just doing the monologue and a second comedy bit may have seemed to play to Jay’s predilection for those parts of the show, but Jay actually did worry about trying to make each individual show stand out. That’s what the guests were really for. You brought in different people on different nights because audiences wanted to see the hot young actor, or the latest American Idol winner (or loser). On a guestless show there would be no chance for a Hugh Grant moment, that famous guest appearance in 1995, right after the British film star’s arrest for doing business with a prostitute. Grant’s willingness to show up for his long-scheduled appearance and take Jay’s questions—most famously, “What the hell were you thinking?”—turned things around in one big night for Leno.
As Jay analyzed it, ʺIʹm not vain enough to believe that people want to watch a fifty-eight-year-old guy every single night. There have to be other elements in the show.”
At the end of this meeting and all his conversations where he expressed his commitment to finding a new place for Jay at NBC, Zucker would always ask if Jay had any suggestions for what might tempt him to stay with NBC; what else did he want to do? Jay always had the same reply: “I tell jokes at eleven thirty at night.”
Back in New York, Jeff Ross kept in touch as usual with his friendly