The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [91]
And it wasn’t as if Jay was going to reinvent his show. Take away the Tonight title, adjust the network designation, and what else would change? Not the performance. One executive who had worked with Jay in the past laughed off the notion that a network transfer would set him back months, saying, “Jay would probably be ready to go after a weekend.”
His close associates knew the truth: Jay would do almost anything to avoid the prolonged nightmare of going without nightly monologues to prepare and deliver to millions on TV. Boiled down, Jay’s philosophy was: “Anytime you’re on the air, you’re winning.” Even a short absence increased the chances that people might forget about you and drift away. In Jay’s view, attention spans were simply too short to gamble with.
Debbie Vickers knew Jay best of all, and she had her own back-channel connection to Zucker. Her quiet message: Jay is a creature of habit. If anything tempts him at all, he will stay where he is most comfortable.
Jeff Zucker was known within NBC to be research friendly. He didn’t make calls strictly based on what the research department predicted the outcome would be, but he certainly wanted all the data he could get his hands on before he made those calls.
In support of his original idea of moving Jay to eight p.m. Zucker had commissioned research head Alan Wurtzel to answer one big question: Was the idea of Jay Leno in prime time something the audience would dismiss out of hand? Questions like that defied simple analysis. All Wurtzel could reasonably determine was if the notion would raise any flaming red flags, such as viewers indicating that they would simply have no interest at all in such a proposition.
What he found, in fact, was the opposite: An alternative to the traditional prime-time fare, like a new comedy show with Jay Leno, came across as intriguing and appealing when suggested to focus groups.
In March of 2008 Zucker had dispatched Wurtzel to try to sell Jay on the idea of the prime-time half hour at eight. Jay had been polite as always but direct. “Alan, I go into late night and I’m number one. That’s what I do. I don’t know how to do prime time.”
Wurtzel worked him as best he could. “Look, one of the reasons this makes sense to us is you really are iconic. And when people are in a surfing environment and go by and see Jay Leno, they know exactly who he is. They stop; they know where he comes from. If anybody could do this in prime time it would be you.”
Jay appreciated the flattery. But prime time didn’t look like it was going to be the temptation Debbie Vickers had prescribed.
When Wurtzel got back from Burbank, Zucker had some other questions for him to work on. A big one: What will happen if Jay is at ABC?
That was a concrete concept that Wurtzel’s department could quantify. The number they came up with looked very good for Jay. If he landed at ABC, he was still going to win. But more than anything, the research suggested, a three-way network pileup in late night would likely produce mutually assured destruction: diluted numbers, diluted profits. NBC might be left with the show with the youngest appeal—but perhaps also the least overall appeal.
When one of his top lieutenants kicked the situation around with Zucker, he came away convinced that Jeff’s goal now was two-pronged: find a way to retain Leno, yes, but also find a way to protect Conan. Of course, the executive concluded, Zucker’s protecting Conan translated to Zucker’s protecting himself. He was the father of the five-year plan, after all. If it all went wrong it would set up one easy—and unpleasant—paternity test.
So there was that daunting possibility to confront. There was also a raft of other information from Alan Wurtzel for Zucker to digest—information that could make the prospect of having to drag that last option out of his pocket a little more tolerable.
If Zucker solicited private advice, he usually went to Dick Ebersol, the man he had looked to for career counseling since his earliest days at NBC. They had a regular routine,