I’ve written on this before, but I’ll post my thoughts one more time. NBC was the problem, and even beyond NBC, the pursuit of the almighty dollar was really the issue. As many of us remember, once upon a time, NBC had the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, it lasted for 30 years, and for about the last 11 or 12 of those years, NBC had David Letterman in the time slot immediately following Carson, and it worked well. It worked because Carson was an extremely smart, funny, affable person who fit really well with the culture at the time, and because Dave was real, cutting edge, unpredictable, but also in possession of a strong sense of comedic timing. Dave was also extremely intelligent and had a natural affinity for a) interviewing people in an intelligent and interesting manner and b) managing chaos. Dave took risks that Carson never could have, he was edgy, he was for the younger generation, the generation which grew up to be me and my contemporaries. Carson was the accessible guy that anyone could get into….he used double entendre and would get racy from time to time, but he knew how to skirt the line between suggestiveness and blatant obscenity.
Dave and Johnny became great friends, and even though Johnny was Dave’s mentor, his idol, his whole reason for getting into late night comedy in the first place, for many, many years, Letterman joked about Carson getting hit by a bus so Dave could have the earlier time slot. Anyone who watched Late Night with David Letterman for more than about a week realized that Dave’s life long ambition was to take over for Johnny if and when he retired, and that he would have held on as long as necessary. Clearly, NBC wasn’t watching Dave’s show.
What NBC saw back in the early 90s was not this natural progression. They did not see how Dave could be successful in the 11:30 time slot…he was still too edgy, too unpredictable, but what Dave had done over his time at NBC was to really hone his skills. Dave KNEW how to put on the best damn talk show in the world, and had NBC hired him instead of Leno, he would have had a large audience follow him from Late Night to the Tonight Show, they would have kept both Dave and Johnny happy, and Leno would be just another has been stand up comedian today. CBS would not have created a late night talk show just for Leno, he wasn’t a proven commodity. But what he was to NBC was a safe bet. His humor was (and still is) very inoffensive, very whitebread, very non-controversial. Jay plays the game and does not ruffle feathers. He gives middle America the kind of safe, watered down comedy they look for while trying to get to sleep. Basically, Jay had the affability of Johnny, but not the comedic talent. Jay had the ability (and willingness) to deliver weak punch lines and cliched bits, and unlike Dave, he NEVER threatened to go outside the lines. Just try to imagine Jay donning a suit of Alka Seltzer and being dunked into a tank of water, or manning the drive through at a McDonald’s. These things are too off the wall, too dangerous, too much of a risk of offending someone for Jay to do them, he would never want to alienate his core audience. NBC could sense that Jay was basically like that corporate suck up who will take the job and say yes boss, no boss, whatever you say boss, and will never make waves or rock the boat. Jay is a stable, but predictable commodity, one which will never push an envelope…which is a double edged sword…on one side you run no risk of alienating your core audience, but on the other, you run no risk of innovation.
So, what happened? Well, for 17 years, Dave and Jay went head to head. Some times Dave won, some times Jay won. Overall, Jay got better ratings, which is what NBC knew would happen, because his humor is just more accessible to a larger audience. But all of the people who chose Dave, and a good share of the people who chose Jay would have become Dave watchers had he been given the tonight show. So instead of one show getting 2 million viewers and one getting 3 million, well Dave on the Tonight Show would have never gotten all 5 million, but he might have gotten 4. So actually, NBC shot itself in the foot big time with this one, and as a final fuck you to NBC, Johnny was feeding Dave jokes for the last several years of his life! There’s really never been a more clear case of poetic justice.
Now NBC, to their credit, has put forth some really cutting edge material. They hired Conan as a writer for SNL, and then they gave him Dave’s old job, and Conan was even more outside the box than Dave ever was. Conan clearly cut his teeth on Dave the way Dave cut his teeth on Johnny. His humor was anything but whitebread, middle American, safe, predictable tripe. But he was a product of his time. Look at what has happened in popular culture since Dave moved to CBS and Leno took over the Tonight Show. Could any of us have fathomed shows like South Park or Family Guy airing on network TV? Remember it was the late 80s when people were boycotting Married With Children because they made a reference to a dildo. Perhaps it was Clinton’s blow job being broadcast all of the news that made our culture a bit less prudish, but at some point in the 90s, the kind of outside the box comedy that Dave had pioneered and finessed to maturity during his Late Show years became more the societal norm than the play it safe, predictable inoffensive comedy.
Now, Leno’s audience is skewing older and older, while Dave’s audience skews younger, and younger folks have grown up with 150 channels, multiple gaming systems, the internet and cell phones, they’re just not going to as a percentage of their population watch quite as much late night television as are older folks who grew up on late night programming. But what the younger audiences will tune in for is the cutting edge, different humor that doesn’t play it safe. That’s never been what the Tonight Show was about, but you have to realize the same guy had it from the early 1960s (when you couldn’t show Lucy and Ricky sleeping in the same bed, or Elvis’ gyrating hips) to the early 1990s, so it didn’t have a chance to evolve all that much and the first chance it really had to evolve rapidly by having Dave take over, they gave away. But what they did was to give a safe haven to those who still live with an old school mentality, who are still more comfortable with inoffensive, play it safe humor.
The problem is, that audience will die off, and it will be replaced by the Family Guy generation. To grab the audience of today, you need a masturbating bear, not someone asking people easy American history questions on the street and playing back the stupidest answers. Like Dave 17 years before him, Conan was the choice for the future. Conan was the guy who could have breathed new life into the franchise. It would be expected that Dave plays it safer than Conan these days and therefore a lot of the older folks would have migrated his way. Conan would not have succeeded by recapturing the audience that Dave would naturally cannibalize from him. Conan would have succeeded by bringing a younger audience to late night television, he would have ensured the future of the Tonight Show as a long lasting institution and built his audience from the ground up. Jay’s success depended on status quo.
But even Jay wasn’t a hit at first, it took some time for him to consistently beat Letterman in the ratings, which given how non status quo Letterman was and is was really surprising. And a lot of that came from bad PR. Letterman put in his time and had earned the Tonight Show….he knew it, Johnny Carson knew it, all of Dave’s viewers knew it, the only people who didn’t seem to know it was NBC. There was never any question in anyone’s mind that if Dave were ever to be passed up for the Tonight Show, he would not simply sit back in his 12:30 time slot and say, “well, maybe when Jay retires.”
But NBC didn’t realize that. They were short sighted. They thought “it’s just business,” they thought because they could essentially show on paper that Jay would probably bring in bigger numbers than Dave would off the bat that this was all they needed, a simple fact that they could point to and say, “well, it’s just business.” But it was myopic, it didn’t go into what ifs…they were paying Dave well, they had let him have creative freedom in his show, he had created something big, and they didn’t see him walking away form that, because from their perspective, the Tonight Show is a moneymaking venture, whereas to a comedian like David Letterman, the Tonight Show is a hallowed institution which represents the pinnacle of success if you are given the chance to host it.
But when Dave did leave and did set up a competing show, well, they realized that nearly half their audience was going bye bye, and that their calculations about Jay bringing in more money than Dave would have would only have worked IF Dave didn’t compete directly against Jay. But he did, and what Dave did was to build excitement. He brought his core audience to CBS, he won over some of he older folks with his charm and intelligence, and he brought new viewers to Late Night TV. Those were the keys to Dave’s success, but NBC only learned half of their lesson. They learned that the person on AFTER the Tonight Show expects to be next in line, and that if you piss him off, he’ll compete against you and your market share will drop. So, in turn, they realized that it might be better to put on someone who couldn’t pull in as big of ratings, than to keep the guy with the ratings and have the other guy pull some of those ratings away. Jay vs. Dave maybe meant Jay 3M viewers, Dave 2M, while Conan vs. Dave maybe meant Conan 2M, Dave 3M, but Jay vs. Dave vs. Conan probably meant Jay 1.8M, Dave 1.7M, Conan 1.5M.
So, NBC wanted to make sure Conan never entered that fray in a competing position. And as it happened, other networks realized that Conan was a bankable commodity, so when other networks started making offers to Conan, NBC took the wrong lesson from the Dave situation and panicked. What they didn’t consider was that certainly in the 80s, Dave had offers from competing networks, but why would he take them when the Tonight Show was his some day? Conan was in the same boat as Dave…he had offers, and he had time to bide, he would have been foolish to take another network’s offer, because even if Jay lasted 30 years, well, Conan would still be reasonably young and able to put in his own 30 at the Tonight Show, and what’s more, he knew NBC wouldn’t want to make the same mistake twice. He had a great show with a loyal and growing audience and complete creative freedom. And had NBC realized that to some people, there’s just more to life and success than money, they would have realized that even if another network would have paid Conan more, he would not have wanted to leave NBC…NBC gave him a chance, NBC was good to him, and NBC was where he knew he could make his legacy as the future host of the Tonight Show. He wouldn’t have given that up for a few million more bucks. He was already a millionaire, sure he would have loved to have had Jay Leno be a decade or two older, but he would have stuck it out, the same way Dave stuck it out until Johnny was ready to go, even though Johnny had “almost” retired several times by the time he actually pulled the plug.
So, NBC decided to lock in the future, and they told Conan that in 5 years, he could have the Tonight Show, figuring Jay would say, OK Boss, whatever you say Boss, but Jay wasn’t ready to leave. So they told Jay he’d always have a home at NBC, and figured they’d find that home when the time came. THAT was where NBC made its mistake. In their urge to play offense and not defense, they basically forced their cash cow out of where he wanted to be, and expected that it wasn’t a function of Jay’s personality PLUS the Tonight Show that made it a winning formula, but that Jay possessed some sort of mystical power that would have kept him from failure.
So now, you’re left with this new guy who is a little cutting edge for the Tonight Show, and he’s got this monumental task of competing against someone who’s now been on Late Night TV for as long as Johnny Carson was. He was bound to suffer in the ratings, but NBC figured they’d just make up for it by having their cake and eating it too, so they put Jay on at 10. Well, Jay didn’t work at 10, and just as he was no Johnny Carson, he was certainly no Ed Sullivan, and the days of a variety show are over 3 decades gone now, so his show had no chance of survival. But it made money for the network because of low production costs. Unfortunately it wasn’t what audiences have ALWAYS expected at 10pm, drama shows. Drama shows are costly to produce, but they draw audiences. And people are lazy, they’ll watch the news on whatever station they were watching at 10, and then watch whatever Late Night show is on. Now there are a LOT of people who don’t watch like that, but there are more than enough who do that the 10pm time slot is considered a strong factor in the success of what’s on at 11:30.
Now, in the ideal world, NBC would have never offered Conan the Tonight Show until Jay left, but that bridge was burned. So, when the affiliates said that the lack of drama shows at 10pm was killing their news ratings, rather than connecting the dots and realizing that hey, maybe that’s part of the reason Conan’s not doing better has something to do with this, again they only realized half of the lesson. They realized that Jay worked better at 11:30 than he did at 10, but that’s ALL they saw. That and the fact that they didn’t want to lose their corporate yes man cash cow. So, they knew that what was going to be important to Conan was keeping the Tonight Show, they learned that from the Dave fiasco, but what they didn’t learn was that just like Jay + 10pm does not equal the Tonight Show, neither does Conan + 12:05.
When you keep a show in one slot for 60 years, and when television history is littered with the corpses of TV shows that worked in one time slot, but were moved and then didn’t do as well and got canceled, it’s obvious that you don’t move a show from where it’s always been, because it’s no longer the same show. NBC has shown for 2 decades now this unbelievable ability to miss the big picture in favor of the short term gain. This year’s Olympics were a prime example…they bid big money for the games when the economy was good and ad rates were high, then lost money on the deal because the economy collapsed and ad rates collapsed as well. They were thinking about today, not about one step ahead. Basically, I’m betting NBC execs would be horrible chess players.
When 5 years before, they decided to lock in Conan, it was because they didn’t want to lose Conan, that was an in the now decision which didn’t consider other factors. When Jay failed at 10, they acted by trying to keep Jay, priority 1 and keep Conan priority 2 they panicked.
So, where does that leave us. Well, as much as I dislike Jay’s humor and don’t think he’s a good comedian, he never wanted to leave the gig, he never wanted the 10pm slot, and he of course was going to take the offer to go back to 11:30. And if they’d learned ALL the lessons they should have with Dave, they would have known that there was no way Conan was going to let them mess with the Tonight Show to accommodate one person (oh, and their own bottom line). What NBC SHOULD have done was to give Jay a choice between developing something new (like they’re doing with Seinfeld), or taking a payout to walk away. But they feared Jay would go to another network, but it’s hard to imagine someone going from the Tonight Show to competing against it from a competing network which never had a late night presence.
At the end of the day, Jay did exactly what everyone should have expected him to do. I mean, your boss demotes you and comes back to you and says, “I made a mistake, I want to promote you back where you were,” you don’t say no. And Conan did what anyone who has a deep reverence for the Tonight Show would have done….rather than participate in the destruction of a 60 year institution, and make NO mistake about it, moving a show after 60 years would have been a HUGE mistake, he stuck to his principals, and negotiated a good settlement for himself, but also for all his staffers. And he bowed out with grace and dignity and made an impassioned speech, not berating NBC for their current short sightedness, but praising them for giving him such a long career and so many opportunities.
So, for me, it’s not about Jay vs. Conan. If the two were on against each other, I’d watch Conan. I never watch Jay and the few times I have, he hasn’t made me laugh. He’s too vanilla for me. And he can probably be successful for several more years, but Jay’s at the top of the bell curve and has nowhere to go but down, Conan was at the bottom and had nowhere to go but up. It was poor long term planning on the part of a network known for poor long term planning.
And that’s why NBC was #1 forever and now is #4, behind a network that didn’t even exist 25 years ago.
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