The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [92]
“The only thing left in my drawer is ten o’clock,” Zucker told him.
Zucker saw the situation as a confluence of events, all coming together to compel him to move in a direction he had strenuously resisted. He needed something to offer Jay Leno that would keep him at NBC, while at the same time he had in front of him a ratings track for prime-time shows at ten p.m. dating back to the 2003-2004 television season. Its message seemed clear: Ten p.m. had become a graveyard for network series. Few or none qualified as real hits anymore. Where onetime giant hits like Law & Order and ER averaged audiences at ten that surpassed 25 million viewers, now few ten p.m. shows were topping 10 million. And the news was worse in that advertiser-preferred eighteen-to-forty-nine-year-old age group.
In 2004-2005, CBS’s ten p.m. shows had averaged a network-best 4.17 rating in the age group eighteen to forty-nine. The same year NBC’s ten p.m. shows had averaged a 3.9 rating and ABC’s a 2.82. Every year since, the numbers had dropped precipitously, to the point where Wurtzel’s department was projecting the ten p.m. shows in 2008-2009 to fall below a 2.0 rating for both NBC and ABC, with CBS at just 2.43. Those were massive falloffs of approaching 50 percent for each network. And this shrinkage was affecting shows generally among the most expensive in television, cop and medical dramas, with high-cost actors and writers and demanding production values.
It only figured to get worse. The widespread and increasing use of DVRs was wreaking havoc on network schedules, and nowhere more so than at ten p.m. Viewers had clearly developed the habit of playing back favored shows from earlier in the evening, or earlier in the week, at that hour instead of watching the offerings on the three networks (Fox being an eight-to-ten network only). The last real hit show airing at ten p.m. was CBS’s CSI: Miami, and that had been introduced in 2002. NBC had ridden those warhorses ER and Law & Order almost into the ground. It still had Law & Order: SV U, but beyond that it looked bleak for the new entries that first Kevin Reilly and then Ben Silverman had selected for ten p.m.
What the data suggested to Zucker was that he might be on the cusp of another paradigm shift. Maybe he could perceive the groundbreaking changes that would have to be made earlier than other network executives precisely because of NBC’s long travails in prime time. As he had often said before, “It’s sometimes easier to see the world when you’re flat on your back.”
The other flow feeding into the confluence came from Conan’s direction. Zucker had an unsettling nervous twitch regarding Conan. Nothing seemed drastically wrong and yet something felt unmistakably off. Conan had yet to show real signs of transforming his act into something more mainstream. And there were those more competitive numbers that continued to be put up by CBS’s Craig Ferguson, who was never far from Conan now in viewers. Conan always won easily in the contest for the young demos, but taking all these factors into account, it seemed to Zucker that signs were growing that the heat under Conan, so intense in 2004, had been turned down to a simmer.
Zucker certainly didn’t like continually getting reports from Ludwin that Conan and his team were resisting the notes he was giving them about breaking away from behind the desk, getting out into the audience. Was it arrogance, Zucker wondered, that fed the urge to reject the network’s suggestions? Or maybe just an inability to make the changes because