Monthly Archives: November 2010

The overnight ratings for Conan O'Brien's second show were, as everyone expected, way down from his first night when he beat both Letterman and Leno. Last night, both of them beat him even though his main guest was Tom Hanks, who is about the biggest name Conan's likely to have on for a while. I assume they didn't book Hanks for Show #1 because they figured they didn't need him then and that putting him on the second night might minimize the inevitable drop. Mr. Hanks was, as usual, very funny but mostly talking about Conan's recent job relocations. One measure of whether the new show will work is whether Conan and his guests can soon drop that topic and find anything else to talk about. I think his Tonight Show for its first few weeks spent way too much time talking about how Conan O'Brien was hosting The Tonight Show.

Of course, O'Brien isn't really competing with Dave or Jay. He's competing against the cost-effectiveness of TBS having his show there as opposed to more reruns of The King of Queens. If that's the game and everyone understands it, I think he'll win.

Tonight, Jay Leno's big guest is Christine O'Donnell, which will probably give him the biggest tune-in. I have this awful feeling that we're in for a cold opening that'll go something like this: Jay runs into Christine in the hall and thanks her for agreeing to do the show. She says it's her pleasure. He says, "Hey, I hope you don't mind all those jokes I told about you being a witch." She says, "No, they didn't bother me at all." Then he starts to go off to do the show and the lights flash and she turns him into a frog or otherwise puts a curse on him. Something like that.

Rudy Panucci operates PopCult, a fine popular culture blog that focuses on but is not exclusively devoted to West Virginia. He writes…

I enjoy your balanced take on the Leno/Conan mess, but something hit me — if Leno had agreed to "retire" at the end of his run on The Tonight Show, instead of trying the move to 10 PM, his reputation would be amazing now.

Just think, he'd be the the guy who left Late-night, and as a result the entire broadcast time-slot and talk show genre collapsed. He could look back and say, "The whole thing fell apart when I left."

By sticking around, and then returning to The Tonight Show, he proved that it wasn't just him leaving that lead to the collapse. Of course, it could still be that his seven months away from the time slot "broke the habit" for millions of people, and hastened late night's decline, much the way that the O.J. trial mortally wounded Soap Operas.

I realize that it's an unlikely scenario, since Leno was more interested in continuing to work, rather than burnishing his reputation, but if things had played out that way, it's fun to speculate on how the landscape would look today.

If he had just retired to Vegas, people might even miss him. Then what would've happened. Would Carter have gotten a new book out of the deal?

Would Conan ever over-take Letterman? Would Letterman announce his retirement? Would it have been a bigger deal when The Daily Show beat both Tonight and Late Night, like they did last month?

It'd be fun to see what Leno would think of this idea. I get the feeling that he's way past the point of caring about his reputation, but it might at least get a comical forehead-slap as a response.

I'd wager big that all the players in the little Late Night dramas have long lists of things they wish they'd done differently. In Jay's case, I don't think he was that concerned about not having anything to do after Tonight. The guy loves standup and I'm sure he could have worked every night for the rest of his life doing that…and maybe even for better money than he was making on NBC. (Knowing he always had that to fall back on is probably one of the reasons he got through some of the more tempestuous times in late night. A lot of people marvelled at his cool or even faulted him for a seeming lack of emotion. But it can have a very calming effect on you to know you always have another great job waiting…one that no one can take away from you.)

I suspect Jay had two factors driving him to the 10 PM slot — three if you count the fact that they paid him an awful lot of money. One was the simple desire to not be kicked off TV against his wishes. The other, which would be especially significant if he really imagined Conan would fail and he'd be asked to go back to 11:35, would have been to keep his staff together. It takes time to put together a team like that and if he'd gone out of production, he never would have been able to quite reassemble that operation again. Some folks would have gotten other jobs. Some would have moved away or retired. He couldn't have stopped doing TV altogether for seven months, then gone back to The Tonight Show as he knew it. Then again, he couldn't have anticipated that his rep would take the hit it did…so he might well wish he'd done what you say.

Meanwhile, Rog Blaine asks…

So my big question is this: What if you'd been Conan or Jay? What would you have done different?

At times, I feel like that that's fun in this: Reading these accounts and thinking, at various points, "If I'd been in that guy's position, what would I have done?" In hindsight, I think O'Brien should have gone to Fox, from which he apparently then had a serious offer, instead of bumping Leno and taking The Tonight Show. Yeah, I understand the allure of hosting the show that the very sacred John W. Carson hosted but that's over. It was over the moment Johnny left and it stopped being that Tonight Show. And then I think Leno made a mistake by being too good a sport when he was ousted from that job, acting too much like he agreed with the transition. He should have said something like, "Hey, I don't like that they did this to me but if they had to, they couldn't have picked a better guy than Conan." That would have been (apparently) closer to his true feelings and it would have made it easier for him later to go back to the 11:35 slot without looking like he was reneging on a promise.

Leno on at 10 PM was obviously a mistake for him and for NBC…but I might take issue with those who say a show like that could never have worked at that time, no matter what. I think the big problem was that neither NBC nor Jay really had a concept for a 10 PM Jay Leno Show. It was basically: "Well, we'll do The Tonight Show but it can't exactly be The Tonight Show because Conan's doing that so we'll chop down the interviews (which comprise most of The Tonight Show) and we'll get rid of the musical numbers (which supply another large chunk) and then we'll expand the comedy bits but we'll move the ones that work to the end where they'll seem out of place…and then we'll fill most of the show with comedy bits by other people even though we don't really have a crew of good people to do that." It all reminds me of that quote from a theater critic who wrote of one of Neil Simon's weakest entries, "Mr. Simon didn't have an idea for a play this year but he wrote it anyway."

I'm guessing that since Jay had this "firm" pay-and-play two year guarantee, he thought he had enough time to invent the new program while doing it. That's kind of what he did on The Tonight Show when he took over from Johnny. He couldn't have thought they'd leave him on for two years of bad ratings but I'll bet he didn't think they'd bail after four months. There was so much talk of NBC being in it for the long haul; about how they knew he'd fare poorly against first-runs of CSI-type shows opposite him but would start to show strength once the opposing shows were in steady reruns. Based on that standard, his show didn't do badly. The trouble for him was that nothing about it — not the numbers and not the content — gave the network or the affiliates any reason to think things might get better.

Then again, it's hard to disagree with those who note that if Leno hadn't gone on at 10 PM, the five shows NBC would have put there instead would probably not have done much better…and would have cost five times as much. Apart from Law & Order SVU, what has NBC had lately that could have gone on at that hour and gotten significantly better numbers? What they have there now is doing worse…and at a much higher expenditure. NBC just plain has an unfixable 10 PM problem at the moment. They could have put the World Series on in that time slot and even people in San Francisco and Texas wouldn't have watched. Even before Jay got there, it was scorched earth and nothing's going to grow there for quite a while.

But I'm pretty much pointing up weaknesses without suggested remedies…kind of like they do in Washington, these days. A friend of mine read the Carter book and called to swap observations. He kept saying, "What a train wreck" and I asked him, "Once the decision to replace Jay with Conan was firm, what could anyone here have done to prevent a train wreck?" And apart from doing much better and more popular shows, we couldn't think of much, not even with the benefit of glorious hindsight.

One other point on Bill Carter's new book, The War for Late Night: When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy: In his 2006 book, Desperate Networks, Carter covered the part of the story where NBC Exec Jeff Zucker engineers the delayed departure of Jay Leno and the installation of Conan O'Brien as host of The Tonight Show. It's a very different account there, one in which Leno is given a new contract in 2004 that will keep him at that job through the end of 2009…then a few months after that, Zucker approaches Leno about the possibility of making that the last contract. Jay is given the choice of handing the show over to Conan after that and he agrees.

In the book released last week, Leno knows when he gets the 2004 contract that it's his last and he's pissed about it but he doesn't have any choice. Not the same thing at all. Presumably, Carter learned more when he researched the latest chapter of this whole tawdry drama.

As busy as I am lately, I've somehow found time to work my way through a book and a half. The half is Finishing the Hat, the first volume of Stephen Sondheim's lyrics, heavily annotated by the man. For those who prize and study his work, it's an absolute treasure trove not just of lyrics but of insights dispensed in his commentary. Getting through the entire volume will take a while and I'll probably be reading and re-reading for some time…with some effort since the tiny font makes that difficult. (I have 20/20 vision and I'm having trouble with it.)

My awe of Mr. Sondheim's facility with words and his dedication to making them perfect has always been grand…and it's nice to have so many examples of cut or rewritten songs and to see that even he's had trouble at times meeting the standard he set for himself. So have a lot of people, apparently. It says on the cover that the book contains, "Attendant comments, principles, heresies, grudges, whines and anecdotes" — and it does contain all that. He might have also tossed in something about snarky criticisms of lyricists who don't follow his rules for how a song has to be written.

A friend of mine who's quite literate in the theater doesn't sing the praises of Sondheim the way some others do, likening him to an author whose characters all speak in exactly the same voice — that of the author. I never felt that criticism was true…or at least to the extent it was true, one could overlook it the way one overlooks the wire attached to Peter Pan or the fact that a character in Act Two is obviously just an actor from Act One back in a different costume. Experiencing so many Sondheim lyrics in any one sitting, and watching him lecture the world on how lyrics must be written, I'm starting to see what my friend meant.

This is not a firm opinion on my part…just something that's on my mind every time I pick up this book. It's subject to change as I read more…and will probably change — in what way, I do not know — Monday evening when I attend an interview of Mr. Sondheim up at UCLA. I still admire the man. I just may need to rethink the limits of that admiration.

And I've thought a lot about all the central players in The War for Late Night: When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy, the new book by Bill Carter about the whole mess with Jay and Conan and time slots and such. There will be folks who'll read this book and decide that whichever host they find less funny was the villain. I think it makes a strong case that neither Jay nor Conan did anything unethical…nor anything particularly noble. They were just two guys trying to get or hold onto the best possible jobs as others moved them clumsily around a big chessboard.

O'Brien, like Leno and Letterman before him (with Helen Kushnick and Mike Ovitz, respectively) had killer agents and attorneys running around trying to nuke anyone or anything that stood in the way of their client(s) getting Johnny's old time slot. That's kind of the way the game is played — it kinda has to be since the network is certainly lawyered-up — and I guess I lost a little respect for Jay, Dave and Conan whenever they used the old "It's not me doing that, it's my agent" excuse. One of the worst things said in this book about O'Brien is that a lot of the anti-Leno rhetoric that turned up on the Internet was planted there by Conan's reps…and not even to try and help their client keep the 11:35 job but just to hurt Jay as much as possible. I suspect Conan will be unhappy to be associated with that.

What I think most will take away from the book is that Jeff Zucker made a bad mistake to shove Leno aside and give the Tonight Show to O'Brien. At one point in the book (I can't find the exact quote at the moment), Lorne Michaels makes a comment about how fortunes have been lost underestimating Jay Leno. That may be a pretty good summary of the entire affair…although the book also makes a credible case that for all the angst and ill feelings engendered, the shuffling-about of hosts still made financial sense for NBC.

Near the end, Michaels and Jerry Seinfeld both make the argument that O'Brien should have taken the offer to do his Tonight Show at 12:05 following a half-hour Leno program…an argument also made to me by a friend who worked for O'Brien and lost a job he'd counted on because Conan said no. I don't think I agree…but then I also don't buy that he turned it down because of some principled stand against despoiling the heritage of The Tonight Show. I think it was just plain a humiliating demotion and a lose/lose proposition for Conan: If the ratings didn't improve, the next step was to fire him or shove him back to 12:35. If they did improve, he'd (at best) forever be the guy who couldn't make it in the big time…and execs would be wondering how much better the numbers would be with a full hour of Leno before him. My friend on Conan's staff sort of agrees with me and says, "If Conan had really been concerned about preserving the glory of The Tonight Show name, he wouldn't have handed it back to a guy he thought did a crappy program."

Carter's book certainly does not support the proposition, which members of Team Coco will probably believe as long as Obama haters insist he was born in Kenya, that O'Brien lost the 11:35 gig because Jay's 10 PM show tanked and Jay demanded his old time slot back. Nor does Carter make it sound like Jay was particularly Machiavellian in any of this. I suspect the player who'd be most upset with how he comes across if he reads the book (which he probably won't) is David Letterman.

It is also interesting to note some developments that have happened since this book went to press. All of the ratings for the late night shows are down and Leno has been hurt more than most. He's now being tied or occasionally beaten by Dave, which can't make anyone at NBC too happy or confident. Also, the shows now ensconced at 10 PM on NBC are all tanking. Much was made throughout this drama about how Jay's bad numbers in that slot were hurting Conan. I never thought that…and not just because Conan's ratings were poor before Leno even went on at that hour. In the book when O'Brien complains about "shitty lead-in" ratings, I wonder if anyone said to him and it just wasn't quoted, something like, "Yes…and what was there before got shitty ratings and what we can replace him with is going to have shitty ratings and recovering from them is part of the job description of hosting the Tonight Show. Jay usually had bad lead-ins and managed to win the time slot in spite of that." What happens with Conan's ratings on TBS in the next few weeks will further advance this whole drama beyond where Carter's narrative leaves off. One gets the feeling the story wasn't over. They just wanted to get the book out in time for Christmas.

In fact, I'm starting to think that there's a whole 'nother chapter coming in this story and that none of these central players will be in the same job five or maybe even three years from now. Bill Carter may get a trilogy out of this yet.