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For years Conan had told his few opening jokes in the same almost throwaway manner. He would stand at center stage and read the setup off his cue cards in a kind of singsong delivery.

“Despite protests from conservatives, President Bush today appointed an openly gay man as his assistant secretary of commerce. . . .”

Stop, pause, head nod, and throw each hand out to the side, as if to signal in a kind of stand-up semaphore: OK, folks, the punch line is on the way. . . .

“Yeah, Bush claimed a gay man is perfect for the commerce department because ‘those people love to shop.’ ” Outthrust hands brought together with an audible clap.

Conan executed this exercise so routinely that few on the show were even aware he told most jokes this way. With the longer monologue, however, varying the delivery became imperative, and Conan set to work on it.

Rick Ludwin still sent notes, of course, and Conan and staff dutifully read and considered them. Mostly, the suggestions—still always along the lines of more interaction with the audience—did not result in any changes. Not that Conan didn’t appreciate Ludwin’s efforts. He knew how important Rick had been in steering The Tonight Show into his hands. But comedy writers and performers are rarely disposed to believe that “civilians” know what’s best in comedy.

The NBC suggestions all had a whiff of mothballs to them: Be broader, be more traditional, more eleven thirty than twelve thirty. “I think people are overthinking the twelve-thirty-to-eleven-thirty shift,” O’Brien said. “Because television is so different now.” The younger people who favored Conan were more and more watching the show in new ways: on DVR playback, where they sped through to the favored moments, or catching up to it online rather than watching every night. As Conan analyzed it, he needed to kick-start The Tonight Show into a new century with new media and new audiences. He had to put his own stamp on the show, no matter how much tradition was draped all over it.

He didn’t accept that the show had to be stodgy or hidebound. In several published accounts he compared the show to a classic but sleek, fast, and sexy sports car. “They’re handing me the keys to this beautiful Ferrari of The Tonight Show,” Conan told the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “I’ve been driving around in a Jeep Wrangler called the Late Night show. A fine Jeep Wrangler with a busted radio, but now they’re handing me the keys to a Ferrari called The Tonight Show. And I don’t want to just gently put it into gear and drive it at fifty-five miles an hour down the highway so I don’t burn out the clutch.”

No, he had other plans. “I want to see what this baby can do. I want to get this thing up over a hundred miles an hour. I want to clip some fire hydrants. I want to get it up on two wheels, on its side, like James Bond in that alley.”

As the days of 2008 dwindled down, the ever nearing prospect of losing Jay Leno cast a threatening shadow over every other decision on Jeff Zucker’s plate. After all his masterful maneuvering—the coup of keeping Jay and Conan together for five more years as the network’s late-night profit juggernaut—Zucker and NBC were back where they had started. They still found themselves on the verge of playing the sad-sack victims in an old familiar horror movie, menaced by the same intractable bogey-man, apparently every bit as unkillable as Michael Myers in a Halloween movie: the chair that two men wanted, but only one could sit in.

Where the hell did Zucker go from here? That last option, the one he’d kept in reserve, had not quite burned a hole through Zucker’s pocket, but it had been in there smoldering for a long time. Before he gave in, pulled it out, and threw it on the table, he needed backup, and so he commissioned some special studies from NBC’s research department.

Out in Burbank, Jay was still telling his pointed jokes. He did a bit about car navigation systems and the programmed voices they used. The conceit was that the voice, rather than some disembodied