When the announcement came down that David Letterman was going to take over “The Tonight Show” for Johnny Carson, everyone except for Team Jay Leno was happy to see Johnny’s choice actually win. Despite pressure exerted from Jay that he was in talks to host his own late night show, the execs finally did something right in the eyes of Johnny for a change. Dave’s willingness to come to Burbank to do the show was the final piece that clinched the choice. Dave immediately took over in June of 1992.
NBC wanted Jay to do Late Night, but Jay accepted an offer to host his own show on Fox, titled “The Late Show with Jay Leno” which originated from LA, starting in Sept. of 1992. And so the long-awaited Late Night War to succeed Johnny began.
It wasn’t much of a contest. Letterman crushed Leno every years for 3 years, thanks to NBC’s stronger Prime-Time lineup lead in. After 3 years, Leno was let go from Fox, and Letterman was victorious. Leno would appear on “The Tonight Show” 6 months after being let go to throw in the towel and apparently make peace publicly with Letterman.
Letterman’s Tonight Show, and Late Night with Conan O’Brien (which debuted in October of 1992) would control Late Night Talk Shows for the next 5 years, with only an occasional challenger showing up and trying to battle the duo unsuccessfully. But, like in the days of Johnny, cracks began to show between NBC and its top late night star immediately after Dave signed his second 5-year deal in 1997. Dave thought that he had been short-changed in the deal, which continued to allow all intellectual property rights to his version of “The Tonight Show” to be controlled by NBC. NBC had learned hard lessons during Johnny’s negotiations and was not going to allow Dave to get similar treatment.
A second problem was that Dave hated the LA lifestyle. Yes, stars were easily in abundance to talk to, but Dave was a NYC guy. He wanted to return The Tonight Show to its Manhattan roots badly. And so, in January 1998, Letterman staged a sick-out of his show for 3 weeks in the hopes of getting NBC to at least cave on moving the show back to New York. It got ugly between the two. Ultimately, Dave won the fight as NBC promised to return The Tonight Show with David Letterman to New York beginning in 2002, but both he & NBC lost the War. The sick out occurred around the time that the President Clinton sex scandal was emerging. The loss of Dave allowed ABC’s Nightline to reclaim the top spot among late-night audiences and by a healthy margin.
Dave’s return in February of 1998 didn’t help. Dave refused to joke about Clinton’s woes, aiming his sharpest barbs at Republicans. The slant backfired as NBC lost a total of 60% of its Tonight Show audience from the start of the sick-out. Throughout 1998 and 1999, Letterman continued his anti-Republican rants about the sex scandal while refusing to go after the Philanderer in Chief. Ultimately, late in 1999, Letterman finally began to bash Clinton, as he realized he finally had to start bashing the President over his Library plans. The audience who had left never really came back, and Letterman lost more of his audience than he had gained trying to win back conservative viewers.
The Election of 2000 proved even tougher. George W. Bush refused to appear on The Tonight Show, and Letterman unloaded a vicious mean-spirited rant on his show in Sept. of 2000. A lot of journalists thought the rant was over-the-line and it developed sympathy among thousand of voters’ eyes. Letterman would apologize, but it was too late. Bush would go on to win the Presidential election by 4% and 78 electoral votes over Al Gore. Letterman, in an attempt to bury the hatchet, had the victorious Pres.-elect Bush on his show two weeks after the election, and showed genuine contrition. It also allowed The Tonight Show to beat Nightline in the ratings for the first time in nearly 3 years.
Letterman finally had some momentum at the end of 2000. The show was going to be going back to New York, and he had won back a good chunk of his audience thanks to the Bush interview. Things were looking up for Dave.
Then Dave died suddenly of a massive heart attack on January 15, 2001. The strain of the previous 3 years finally got the better of the comic. He might have been able to save his life had he gotten early detection, but without his New York friends encouraging him to look into his health issues, Dave never found the time to go see a doctor. That mistake proved fatal.
Immediately, NBC turned to Dave’s old rival, Jay Leno, to fill in while they figured out their next move. Leno and Letterman had a gentlemen’s agreement after Leno’s failed stint at Fox that if something happened to Dave, Jay would step in. For three months, Jay did a magnificent job filling in—so much so that NBC actively began negotiations to make Jay the next Tonight Show host. Even Johnny gave a vote of confidence to Jay in a rare public statement.
Jay, though, had other ideas.
Leno conducted secret negotiations with ABC to host his own Late Night show following an abbreviated Nightline. The announcement became official in May of 2001 and stunned the Entertainment industry. Finally, Jay would get revenge on NBC for shafting him on the decision nearly a decade earlier. “Jay Leno Live’s” first show was scheduled for Sept. 11, 2001, so as not to interfere with Monday Night Football.
Two weeks after the scheduled start of the show, Jay Leno Live finally debuted at 12:35 am. It was a disaster from the get-go. The 9/11 terrorist attacks crushed any momentum Jay had going into the premier. Stuck behind an hour Nightline, Leno only survived for one year before he was let go by ABC. Leno decided to leave late night for good and headed off to Las Vegas to do stand-up.
NBC wasn’t in much better shape. Betrayed by Leno, the network rushed Conan into the 11:35 slot immediately. It was a failure. Conan was not ready for the promotion, even though he thought he was ready. Worse, Conan was upset that NBC execs thought Jay Leno was initially a better choice. When Conan’s contract expired in October of 2002, he bolted for CBS to try and jump start their late night talk shows. It went worse than the NBC experience, and CBS canned the experiment 6 weeks in. Conan went back to writing for “The Simpsons”, his time at late night over.
In desperation, NBC turned to Bill Maher to host The Tonight Show. For a time, it actually worked. Bill was a little raw, but he provided some stability, even though he was liberal in his view. Then came 2009, and Bill made a horribly insensitive comment about former VP candidate, Sarah Palin, and NBC immediately fired him. The Tonight Show would then go on hiatus for the rest of 2009.
When The Tonight Show returned in 2010, Jimmy Fallon was its new host. After taking several months to get his bearings, Fallon actually started to show he was the guy. He has been doing the show ever since—from New York, of course.
CBS finally found a winning late night formula with Jimmy Kimmel in 2010. The Late Show with Jimmy Kimmel would battle Jimmy Fallon from day one, and the healthy competition finally gave hope that late night talk shows were emerging from a decade of disaster.
Both CBS & NBC still trailed ABC’s Nightline, however. In the end, ABC stuck to their news format, and it continues to win in Late Night to this day, though the gap between Nightline, Fallon, and Kimmel is closing. Perhaps by the end of this year (2014), Fallon and Kimmel might top Nightline.
It’s a shame the Late Night Wars went the way they did, but that’s what happened. Besides, no one ever thought Leno would be a better choice to host The Tonight Show. After all, it wasn’t like NBC was going to let Letterman go to CBS, as it was rumored, and start a rival Late Night Show.
No, that would have been crazy…
No comments:
Post a Comment