EXCERPT: 'The War for Late Night' By Bill Carter
Nov. 8, 2010 — -- It was the scandal that divided the nation into Team Coco and, well, everyone else. Comedian Conan O'Brien, who had been promised the lead job on "The Tonight Show," was booted from the chair after a few months in when NBC's bid to move the show's previous host, Jay Leno, to an earlier hour turned sour.
Leno resumed the show in his old time slot and O'Brien, after a giant payout courtesy of NBC, took some time off before moving to a new show on TBS.
In his new book, New York Times media reporter Bill Carter explores the whole debacle and how it changed late-night television for years to come.
Read an excerpt from the book below and then head to the "GMA" Library to find more good reads.
On a mid-March afternoon in 2004, Jeff Zucker found himself facing a meeting with real trepidation—and he was not by nature a trepid man.
By that point in his career Zucker had made the convoluted daily machine of the "Today" show run as smoothly as a Swiss fire drill; he had produced with distinction the endless election night of November 2000 for NBC News; he had navigated his way -- not unbloodied, but certainly unbowed ,through the piranha-filled water of Hollywood during a three-year stint running NBC's entertainment division; and he had beaten cancer -- twice.
So what was so unnerving about having to walk down to Jay Leno's dressing room at NBC's headquarters in Burbank, California, and hand him a closing notice for his long run as the host of "The Tonight Show"? Maybe it was knowing that Leno could not possibly have seen this coming, not with his ratings still dominant in late night, not with his compulsion to do this job -- and only this job as long as there was still breath in his lungs -- undiminished in the slightest. Or maybe it was the private conversation he'd had with Jay's executive producer, Debbie Vickers, two days earlier.
In her office at "Tonight", Zucker had run the scenario by Debbie, a kindred spirit because of their shared experience producing the two most famed franchise programs in television history, "Today" and "Tonight". Zucker's affinity with Debbie, built over the course of many one-on-one chats about the challenges of dealing with daily deadlines and the care and feeding of talent, had led him to trust her as one of his few real confidantes during his fractious sojourn running NBC's West Coast operations. It only made sense to run the plan by Debbie -- sound as rock, smart, dependable, patient, levelheaded Debbie -- before taking it to Jay.
