The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [96]
Their idea was to bring this guy to New York to a legitimate ad agency for a commercial makeover. On the segment, Conan walked into the agency with his Houston friend and started riffing with several of the ad execs about what they might be able do for him. Very quickly he noticed the stunning blonde behind one desk. She wound up featured in the bit and soon in his life. (Conan boasted that he was one father who truly could show his kids footage some day of “How I Met Your Mother.”)
Conan knew NBC was already deep into the construction of his new space in LA on the Universal lot, an investment of $50 million, which certainly spoke to their confidence in him. Given all that was happening to television, OʹBrien found himself wondering how long a building like 30 Rock would still be in use for television, whether within only a few years everyone would be doing television shows out of their own living rooms.
Even in the hallway outside his studio on the sixth floor, the resonance was unmistakable for Conan. He had only to look at the studio across the hall, 6B, where for years NBC’s local station, Channel 4 in New York, had produced its newscasts. (They had been relocated to NBC News’s state-of-the-art studios on the eleventh floor.) Now 6B was being remade back into a late-night studio, as it had once been for the young Johnny Carson, with new seats and a proscenium-style arch, all for the next tenant.
It was always going to be up to Lorne Michaels to pick Conan’s successor. Though his day-to-day connection with it had long since ended, he still had production rights to the 12:35 show (and still carried an executive producer credit on Conan’s show).
When NBC signed Jimmy Fallon to a holding deal in early 2007, speculation spread that Michaels, still close to Jimmy from his days as one of the most popular players on SNL, had made his choice. The sniping quickly followed. Fallon had gotten on the wrong side of some Internet snarkmeisters on sites like Gawker and Defamer, mainly for his penchant for breaking up during sketches and for his short-lived movie career.
But Michaels had supreme confidence in Fallon, mainly because he had a quality that could not be either manufactured or faked. “People really like him,” as Lorne put it. “When he was on Saturday Night Live, he had enormous appeal to young girls. That means young men are going to be a bit ambivalent. But they’ll come around.”
James Thomas Fallon Jr. was born in Brooklyn in 1974, a year before Saturday Night Live went on the air. Recognizing they had a funny kid on their hands (actually two, counting Jimmy’s sister Gloria), his accommodating parents, who enjoyed SNL themselves, taped segments of the show (the safer ones) in the mid-1980s to replay for their kids, who would try to re-create some of the sketches. The family, just as Irish Catholic as Conan’s (if more black Irish than red), had moved to the upstate New York town of Saugerties, just up the Hudson from Kingston, where Jimmy’s dad, James Sr., worked at the IBM plant. Fallon attended Catholic school (St. Mary of the Snow—not a joke) and was popular and clearly talented. He learned guitar quickly and demonstrated an early facility for voices and impressions.
His mother had heard Jimmy do killer knockoffs of enough celebrities to know that when the Bananas Comedy Club down the river in Poughkeepsie announced it was holding an impressions contest she had a potential winner in the family. Fallon got inspiration from a high school graduation gift of a troll doll. He put together a routine based on celebrity endorsers of troll dolls—and he killed. He won the contest, of course, and jumped