Bungled Late Night Programming… Again

In Australia we are somewhat distant to the wars of late night television in America. We have developed no real culture for the genre that became an institution through the legendary late Johnny Carson. NBC owned late night because of Johnny Carson and later on David Letterman came on to follow with his show at 12.30

It was the early 90’s and the retirement of Carson was imminent. No one had any idea what had been going on behind closed doors, not even Johnny Carson.

To cut a long story short, Jay Leno, a regular guest host had already signed a deal to take over the tonight show after some dirty tricks by his manager, unbeknown to Letterman who had been auditioning for the top job for the last 10 years.

Mistake after mistake from NBC executives led to Letterman leaving to do a similar show at rival station, CBS. They really didn’t manage the situation well from the beginning.

Well it happened again, you’d think they learned something from those events captured so well in the book, ‘The Late Shift” by Bill Carter.

Since 1994, Jay had been doing well despite Letterman dominating the timeslot for his first few years on CBS. NBC approached Jay in 2007 and said that Conan O’Brien, who had taken over Letterman’s old show, had received offers from other networks. NBC executives didn’t want to lose him and wanted to give him the Tonight show as they thought Jay was on the wane and could not sustain his ratings that had been very good up to that stage.

Conan was to take over the tonight show in 2009, but Jay was to stay as he was still under contract and NBC stated he was still a valuable asset despite effectively firing him from the show he had hosted continuously for 15 years. Jay moved to prime time and Conan was on Tonight.

Ratings weren’t good for Jay at 10pm and Conan was not maintaining Jay’s old ratings. Affiliate stations were disappointed and demanded something be done to rectify the situation.

The original idea by the NBC executives to please the affiliates was to put Jay at 11.30 for a half hour show and the Conan to do the Tonight show at 12, even though technically it is no longer tonight.

Conan quite rightfully didn’t go for that. This put NBC in a sticky situation that they wanted to just go away. It did go away, only after Conan was payed out $32 million. Jay would once again host the Tonight show.

The good side of this very avoidable set of events is the comedy gold that has been demonstrated in David Letterman’s opening monologues. He now feels somewhat vindicated for getting out of NBC.