The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [84]
Kimmel believed he fit Fox even more snugly than Conan would have. His audience was also young, and more male than any other network’s late-night show. Kimmel also retained some of his connections from his days needling the Fox jocks on Sundays, including the most important one of all—David Hill, who ran Fox Sports and who had hired him for the Sunday football gig. Hill had once headed all of Fox television and still played a powerful role behind the scenes at the company. The welcome at Fox could be sweet.
And maybe sweetly lucrative. Kimmel and Dixon had heard about the $20 million plus that Fox had offered to Conan in 2001. If the network was going to make Kimmel some crazy offer like $50 million over three years, sticking around for less than $5 million a year to play behind Jay Leno was not going to have much curb appeal. Still, none of these balls was going to be put in play unless and until Jay made his move to ABC.
The bottom line for Kimmel was: Follow a guy likely to keep winning big in late night, or move on and roll the dice at another network. Kimmel realized the smart play was to stick around as the next act after the top guy; that path promised security and a steady paycheck. If Jay took 11:35, Kimmel didn’t foresee himself falling into the Conan role and asking, “When the fuck is this guy going to retire?” Sure, it might come to that someday, but there was an even bigger age gap between him and Leno: seventeen years.
In their phone conversations Kimmel would try to press Jay on whether he really had committed to make the jump to ABC. Leno would not say—and couldn’t really, because no firm deal could even be discussed—but Kimmel always came away with the strong impression that Jay was either taking the ABC option seriously or at least pretending to do so.
As usual Jay mostly kept his own counsel. Aside from his real counsel, Ken Ziffren, he had no hired help to kick the options around with. He had the general sense that ABC presented the best choice for him. It had, at least, a lineup of stations that competed hard in the late local news. But Jay didn’t swallow ABCʹs blandishments whole. While the network touted its potent lineup of prime-time hits, Jay knew that Desperate Housewives was on Sunday and of no help to him there, that Grey’s Anatomy played at nine, not ten, and that Lost was on the air for less than twenty weeks. The truth was, ABC’s ten p.m. lineup—his network lead-in—was barren. NBC, in its sorry state as the fourth-place network, had more strength at ten with the solid Law & Order: SVU on Tuesday and the ancient but still viable ER on Thursday.
Fox was still out there with an offer as well, but even some Fox executives questioned whether Jay would be interested in a show that started at eleven p.m. Not only was that alien territory for him, but it meant he would not be facing off head-to-head with Dave and Conan on The Tonight Show. The ratings might get parsed; the leader might not be clear cut. At ABC he could win big and make NBC face the full consequences of the decision to evict him.
As one of the top executives who was then chasing Jay put it, “I expect money will play a secondary role to revenge, and Jay will look to prove to everybody that NBC was wrong. In whatever deal Jay takes, there has to be a big, badass ‘fuck you’ to NBC.”
Even as he leaned toward ABC and away from Fox, another possibility floated Jay’s way. Sony Pictures Television was looking for a big syndicated late-night franchise to match what it had in the daytime hours with Oprah, with whom the company had a distribution deal. Sony laid a goody-laden package under Jay’s nose: the biggest payday in late night, more than $40 million a year; ownership of his own show and a companion twelve thirty show (the match of Letterman’s deal with CBS); and a landmark new studio on Sony’s Culver City lot. “When he walks on the lot,