Returning, but not yet scheduled
Hell's Kitchen
Kitchen Nightmares
Not returning
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Sit Down, Shut Up
King of the Hill
Prison Break
New Shows
Glee
Past Life
Human Target
Sons of Tucson
The Cleveland Show (for two seasons)
Brothers
The Wanda Sykes Show[/quote]
ABC
2009-2010 Schedule
* = New show
Fall
Monday
8 p.m. - 10 p.m. Dancing with the Stars (performances)
8 p.m. - 10 p.m. The Bachelor (after DWTS concludes its run)
10 p.m. - 11 p.m. Castle
Tuesday
8 p.m. - 9 p.m. *Shark Tank
9 p.m. - 10 p.m. Dancing with the Stars (results)
9 p.m. - 9:30 p.m. Scrubs (after DWTS concludes its run)
9:30 p.m. - 10 p.m. Better Off Ted (after DWTS concludes its run)
10 p.m. - 11 p.m. *The Forgotten
Wednesday
8 p.m. - 8:30 p.m. *Hank
8:30 p.m. - 9 p.m. *The Middle
9 p.m. - 9:30 p.m. *Modern Family
9:30 p.m. - 10 p.m. *Cougar Town
10 p.m. - 11 p.m. *Eastwick
Thursday
8 p.m. - 9 p.m. *Flash Forward
9 p.m. - 10 p.m. Grey's Anatomy
10 p.m. - 11 p.m. Private Practice
Friday
8 p.m. - 9 p.m. Supernanny
9 p.m. - 10 p.m. Ugly Betty
10 p.m. - 11 p.m. 20/20
Saturday
8 p.m. (ET) Saturday Night College Football
Sunday
7 p.m. - 8 p.m. America's Funniest Home Videos
8 p.m. - 9 p.m. Extreme Makeover: Home Edition
9 p.m. - 10 p.m. Desperate Housewives
10 p.m. - 11 p.m. Brothers & Sisters
Yet to be scheduled
Lost
Wife Swap
The Deep End
V
Not Returning
Cupid
In the Motherhood
Samantha Who?
Surviving Suburbia (ABC will air its remaining episodes)
Dirty Sexy Money
Eli Stone
Life on Mars
Pushing Daisies
The Unusuals
Pilots not picked up for fall
Empire State
Inside the Box
The Law
Romantically Challenged
CBS
2009-2010 Schedule
Fall * = New show
Monday
8 p.m. - 8:30 p.m. How I Met Your Mother
8:30 p.m. - 9 p.m. *Accidentally on Purpose
9 p.m. - 9:30 p.m. Two and a Half Men
9:30 p.m. - 10 p.m. The Big Bang Theory
10 p.m. - 11 p.m. CSI: Miami
Tuesday
8 p.m. - 9 p.m. NCIS
9 p.m. - 10 p.m. *NCIS: Los Angeles
10 p.m. - 11 p.m. *The Good Wife
Wednesday
8 p.m. - 8:30 p.m. New Adventures of Old Christine
8:30 p.m. - 9 p.m. Gary Unmarried
9 p.m. - 10 p.m. Criminal Minds
10 p.m. - 11 p.m. CSI: NY
Thursday
8 p.m. - 9 p.m. Survivor
9 p.m. - 10 p.m. CSI
10 p.m. - 11 p.m. The Mentalist
Friday
8 p.m. - 9 p.m. Ghost Whisperer
9 p.m. - 10 p.m. Medium
10 p.m. - 11 p.m. Numb3rs
Saturday
8 p.m. - 9 p.m. Crimetime Saturday
9 p.m. - 10 p.m. Crimetime Saturday
10 p.m. - 11 p.m. 48 Hours Mystery
Sunday
7 p.m. - 8 p.m. 60 Minutes
8 p.m. - 9 p.m. The Amazing Race
9 p.m. - 10 p.m. *Three Rivers
10 p.m. - 11 p.m. Cold Case
Midseason shows
(Schedule to be determined)
*Miami Trauma
*Undercover Boss
*Arranged Marriage
Flashpoint
Rules of Engagement
*The Bridge
Not returning
Harper's Island
Worst Week
Eleventh Hour
The Unit
Without a Trace
New shows
Accidentally on Purpose
NCIS: Los Angeles
The Good Wife
Three Rivers
Miami Trauma
Undercover Boss
The Bridge
Arranged Marriage
Pilots not ordered
Waiting to Die
Happiness Isn't Everything
Back
NBC
2009-2010 Schedule
* = New show
Fall
Monday
8 p.m. - 9 p.m. Heroes
9 p.m. - 10 p.m. *Trauma
10 p.m. - 11 p.m. *The Jay Leno Show
Tuesday
8 p.m. - 10 p.m. The Biggest Loser
10 p.m. - 11 p.m. *The Jay Leno Show
Wednesday
8 p.m. - 9 p.m. Parenthood
9 p.m. - 10 p.m. Law & Order: Special Victims Unit
10 p.m. - 11 p.m. *The Jay Leno Show
Thursday
8 p.m. - 8:30 p.m. *SNL Weekend Update Thursday
8:30 p.m. - 9 p.m. Parks and Recreation
9 p.m. - 9:30 p.m. The Office
9:30 p.m. - 10 p.m. *Community (moves to 8 p.m. after SNL run)
9:30 p.m. - 10 p.m. 30 Rock (premieres after Community moves to 8 p.m.)
10 p.m. - 11 p.m. *The Jay Leno Show
Friday
8 p.m. - 9 p.m. Law & Order
9 p.m. - 10 p.m. Southland
10 p.m. - 11 p.m. *The Jay Leno Show
Saturday
8 p.m. - 9 p.m. Dateline NBC
9 p.m. - 10 p.m. *Trauma (repeat)
10 p.m. - 11 p.m. Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (repeat)
Sunday
7 p.m. - 8:20 p.m. (ET) Football Night in America
8:20 p.m. - 11 p.m. (ET) NBC Sunday Night Football
Midseason
Monday
8 p.m. - 9 p.m. Chuck
9 p.m. - 10 p.m. Day One
10 p.m. - 11 p.m. *The Jay Leno Show
Tuesday
8 p.m. - 9:30 p.m. The Biggest Loser
9:30 p.m. - 10 p.m. 100 Questions
10 p.m. - 11 p.m. *The Jay Leno Show
Wednesday
8 p.m. - 9 p.m. *Mercy
9 p.m. - 10 p.m. Law & Order: Special Victims Unit
10 p.m. - 11 p.m. *The Jay Leno Show
Thursday
8 p.m. - 8:30 p.m. *Community
8:30 p.m. - 9 p.m. Parks and Recreation
9 p.m. - 9:30 p.m. The Office
9:30 p.m. - 10 p.m. 30 Rock
10 p.m. - 11 p.m. *The Jay Leno Show
Friday
8 p.m. - 9 p.m. Law & Order
9 p.m. - 10 p.m. Southland
10 p.m. - 11 p.m. *The Jay Leno Show
Saturday
8 p.m. - 9 p.m. Dateline NBC
9 p.m. - 10 p.m. Southland (repeat)
10 p.m. - 11 p.m. Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (repeat)
Sunday
7 p.m. - 8 p.m. Dateline NBC
8 p.m. - 9 p.m. *The Marriage Ref
9 p.m. - 11 p.m. The Celebrity Apprentice
Yet to be scheduled
Friday Night Lights (will air on NBC after first run on DirecTV)
To be determined
Law & Order: Criminal Intent
Not returning
Life
Medium (moved over to CBS)
My Name is Earl
Kath & Kim
Kings
Knight Rider
New shows
Community
Mercy
Parenthood
100 Questions
Day One
The Marriage Ref
If you like Southland you should be happy. You can get way way way worse ratings on Friday and not get canceled than you can get away with on Thursday.
I like jay Leno as I've watched him for 17 years on the Tonight Show, but having him on 5 days a week at the 10 p.m. hour, I feel is a bad move.. NBC is only doing this because ABC was gonna hire him and put him on before Kimmel.. Some of Jay's skits that he's done may not work for primetime
On a chilly Thursday night in late January, four weeks from his last show as host of “Late Night,” Conan O’Brien was strumming a guitar behind his beat-up desk in his cluttered office at Rockefeller Center, figuring out how to say goodbye. After 16 years and 2,725 shows, O’Brien would be moving, along with almost all his staff, to Universal City in California to take over “The Tonight Show.” He’d had time to ponder his farewell. In 2004, when O’Brien’s contract was up and other networks were aggressively wooing him, NBC promised him their flagship. “But they wanted me to wait five years to be the host of ‘The Tonight Show,’ ” O’Brien told me. “And in 2004, 2009 sounded absurdly far away. I thought that in 2009, we’d be flying around with jet packs and our dinners would be in pill form. It was like being given a car when you’re 11 years old and being told, When you’re 16, you get to drive it. So I put my blinders on, and I went back to work. And, then, two years ago, I began to feel the barometric pressure changing. When it was a year away, I sat bolt upright in my bed. And now. . . ” O’Brien’s voice trailed off as 3 of his 15 writers arrived for their weekly meeting. “And now, we’re stuck between two worlds. We’re putting on a show here while we’re imagining another show there.”
O’Brien began playing “Dazed and Confused” on an unplugged aqua blue electric guitar as his staff assembled. When he’s not on camera in a sleek suit and tie, O’Brien nearly always wears a uniform of jeans, T-shirt and V-neck sweater in various shades of blue, brown or gray. He is skyscraper-tall, with most of his length in his legs, and his red hair rises above his forehead in an elongating airborne pouf. Because of his pale skin, freckles and college-dorm wardrobe, O’Brien, who is 46, looks boyish, but his off-camera manner is almost scholarly. He was the president of The Harvard Lampoon for two years and started his professional career as a writer for shows like “Saturday Night Live” and “The Simpsons.” O’Brien’s approach to comedy and television is analytical and exact. There’s a split in his psyche: he can be goofy, but he obsesses over the nuances of that goofiness. He’s constantly trying to puzzle out how best to be funny five nights a week for an audience of millions.
He learned on the job. In the early days of his show, O’Brien, who had almost no experience as a performer and was plucked from obscurity by Lorne Michaels, the producer of “Saturday Night Live,” was constantly at risk of cancellation. At one low point in 1994, NBC threatened to put him on a week-to-week contract. “There were so many doubters the first year,” says Jeff Zucker, the president of NBC Universal. “They said Conan jumped around too much in front of the camera, that he was too smart, too East Coast, too sophisticated, too young and even too tall to be successful. But Conan proved everybody wrong. We learned that you underestimate Conan at your own peril.”
Within a year, O’Brien began to work out a kind of comedic formula for “Late Night.” In addition to the usual glittering array of guests, the show combined the lewd and wacky (regulars included a masturbating bear and Triumph the Insult Comic Dog) with more elegant, narrative-driven short films (which are called remotes) in which O’Brien left the studio and reported on, say, a historic baseball league or a station in Houston that refused to carry his show at its normal hour. The apotheosis of the “Late Night” remotes centered on the realization in 2006 that O’Brien bears a striking resemblance to the (female) president of Finland. “We took the show to Helsinki for five days,” O’Brien recalled, “where we were embraced like a national treasure.” After that first year, his audience, which was largely young and male (a coveted demographic), grew steadily, and, for the last 15 seasons, “Late Night” beat all competitors. “Lorne always says, ‘The longer you’re there is the longer you’re there,’ ” says Jeff Ross, an executive producer of “Late Night.” “Meaning, if you can weather the storms — and we had major storms — over time other shows will disappear and you will start to seem like part of the family.”
O’Brien’s office was a living scrapbook of his show. Leftover props (a Hillary Clinton can opener, a Bill Clinton corkscrew) leaned against caricatures of Conan sent in by fans. There were framed photos on the walls (his wife, Liza Powel O’Brien; their two children; Johnny Carson). Above a shelf full of awards for writing hung a large cork bulletin board. The board, which was once devoted to blue index cards denoting guests and comedy bits scheduled for “Late Night,” had been colonized by a battalion of yellow index cards, on which were written ideas for “The Tonight Show.” The suggestions, most of them for remotes, offered glimpses of a new mentality: “Conan as car valet,” “Conan as Mexican-wrestling star,” “Conan cleans pools,” “Conan goes canoeing on the Los Angeles River.” Most of the ideas utilized the notion of O’Brien as an outsider, alien to the ways of Hollywood. “Conan takes a cheerful spin on the ‘Psycho’ set,” read one card; “Conan tries to be a stunt man,” suggested another. “Conan has 2,318 dollars and tries to get in on the California bailout.”
“None of those ideas are certain yet,” O’Brien explained, as the rest of his writers piled into his office. “It’s Darwinian on the board and Darwinian in our meetings. What I learned about this show when we were struggling is that ideas have to fight for survival.” But before the new show could begin, “Late Night” needed a send-off, a proper ending. The head writer, Mike Sweeney, and his team of guys in their 30s and 40s (there were no women on the writing staff) were sprawled around the room on a beat-up sofa and stained chairs. Some were sitting on the carpeted floor. “We have to remember that we’re not going off the air forever,” O’Brien said, playing the guitar. “You could end the show,” Sweeney said, “by leaving the studio and getting into a cab and saying, ‘I want to go to Los Angeles,’ and the driver says, ‘WHAT?’ ” O’Brien continued to play. He said nothing. “How about,” Sweeney went on, “a locker-room celebration? Bob Costas comes into the frame and does a play by play of Conan O’Brien leaving his show.” O’Brien shook his head. “That’s maybe a little too sketchy. We don’t want to be too ha-ha.” The room was silent. “I keep thinking of something happening at night on the street,” O’Brien said. “It might be nice if it didn’t require dialogue. What would Jacques Tati do? What would our parents think was really funny? What has never been done?” There was a long pause. Finally, a writer wearing an Illinois sweatshirt suggested that O’Brien casually crawl into the trunk of a car, which prompted another writer to suggest that O’Brien steal a car, and “then we see a road sign that says, ‘Los Angeles, 3,000 miles.’ ”
No one spoke. “What if we shot three different endings,” Sweeney finally said. “Fake endings, rejected endings, emotional endings.” O’Brien liked that notion. “That’s a really funny idea,” he said. “I don’t really want to end with a joke. And I want to make sure they know I’m not retiring.” O’Brien looked over at the corkboard. The yellow cards were beckoning. “Why do I suddenly have 9,000 ideas about the tour bus at Universal?” he joked. “It’s like Eskimos writing jokes that involve snow.” He paused. “I think we’re ready to leave. We’ve scraped the ice cream container clean in New York. There’s maybe one chocolate chip left, and it’s the last show.”
While O’Brien was concentrating on his final show and his plans for “The Tonight Show,” Jay Leno was becoming more and more unhappy about the idea of retiring from late-night television. Nearly five years ago, in September 2004, he honored NBC’s wish to replace him with O’Brien. Leno made the announcement on the 50th anniversary of “The Tonight Show,” saying that he would exit the stage in 2009, when he would be nearly 60. “You can do these things until they carry you out on a stretcher, or you can get out when you’re still doing good,” Leno told the audience. “I’m not quitting show business, but I realized I’m not spending enough time with my cars.” Leno, who has more than 100 vintage cars, which he stores in an airplane hangar in Burbank, began to reconsider his farewell two years ago.
“We’re still on top,” Leno told me when I visited him at “The Tonight Show” in early May. Leno was dressed in a blue work shirt tucked into worn jeans, and we spoke in a small, anonymous backstage dressing room. His dark green, sharklike car (he drives a different one every day), a rare model called a Tatra, was parked right outside the studio; its exoticism provided a vivid contrast with Leno’s regular-guy-ness.
“Five years ago,” Leno continued, “I think they thought we wouldn’t still be on top. Back then, I said, ‘Whatever you want.’ I don’t have an agent. I don’t have a manager. If the girl doesn’t want to sleep with you, that’s O.K. I’m not one of those guys who says, ‘Why don’t you want to sleep with me?’ I say, ‘O.K., great — let’s be friends.’ You want to make a change? That’s great — we’ll make a change.”
As he became increasingly disgruntled, Leno began entertaining offers from other networks. Although viewership on network TV is shrinking and advertising is migrating to cable and (to a lesser degree) to the Web, topical shows with comedy and celebrity guests are inexpensive to produce and maintain a consistent appeal. Leno is a name brand — he could easily move to ABC or Fox and become O’Brien’s competition, which is what NBC feared. “It became clear that Jay wanted to continue telling jokes on television at 11:30,” Zucker said. To entice him to stay at NBC, Zucker offered Leno a daytime show, a cable show, a series of specials. When Leno turned all those down, Zucker proposed a half-hour show, five nights a week at 8 p.m. The idea was that Leno would just do his monologue, riffing off the events of the day. “Eight p.m. doesn’t work,” Leno explained to me. “I never assume anyone is watching because I’m good-looking. You’re selling a product. In my particular instance, the product, hopefully, is jokes. With ‘The Tonight Show,’ you have the jokes plus Angelina Jolie, and that’s a little more enticement. A half-hour monologue every night doesn’t seem like enough enticement.”
Zucker made his final plea: an hourlong show at 10 p.m., five nights a week. To Zucker’s surprise, Leno agreed. “I have believed, for a long time, that there should be a daily prime-time program with a topical format,” Zucker told me. “I’ve never said this publicly before, but I approached Oprah Winfrey about her doing a daily hourlong show in prime time. She turned me down, but I rekindled the idea with Jay. The advantage of a show like that is it’s easy to join, DVR-proof due to its topicality and different. Too much on television is the same show recycled. This will be a show that can provide an answer for the changing times we live in.”
It’s also cheap to make. “We can do five of my new show for the cost of one ‘CSI: Miami,’ ” Leno bragged. “At 10 p.m., the shows on the other networks will be about murder and killing people. I’d like to beat ‘CSI’ when it’s in reruns. When they’re on the murder for the second time, we’ll be doing original shows, talking about what’s happening right now.” Leno would not reveal how his new show would be different from “The Tonight Show.” He told me he didn’t plan to have a desk, that the desk belongs to “The Tonight Show.” (“I guarantee he’ll have the desk,” says someone close to “The Tonight Show,” who asked not to be identified for fear of offending Leno.) And that bands will not perform on the last segment of the show because they traditionally are thought to contribute to ratings drops. “Research tells us that the audience expects a bigger show,” said Rick Ludwin, the NBC executive who will oversee Leno’s new show and has worked with every late-show host from Carson on. “But viewers say loud and clear, Don’t change our Jay. They want that same blue-collar guy who could be their next door neighbor. That’s what has made ‘The Tonight Show’ so popular all these years.” Leno’s popularity will be tested at 10 p.m. Senior-level executives at NBC, who requested anonymity because they work for Zucker, say they fear that his new show will be trounced by hourlong dramas (especially on CBS) and viewers will venture elsewhere, well before 11:30 and O’Brien. Many see Leno’s move to 10 p.m. as a boost for David Letterman. Leno and Letterman have been rivals since NBC chose Leno to be Johnny Carson’s successor and Letterman moved to CBS. Letterman was Carson’s pick — when Carson retired, he appeared twice on Dave’s show and never on Jay’s — and he’s revered in the tight-knit community of comedy writers, many of whom, like O’Brien, grew up watching him. Letterman’s cool irony (especially when compared with Leno’s genial demeanor) can make him seem unkind, but it can also create thrilling comedy out of unexpected situtations. On Feb. 11, Letterman’s interview with a heavily bearded, quasi-comatose Joaquin Phoenix not only offered up Letterman at his best but demonstrated why talk shows endure even as the TV audience becomes increasingly fragmented. By allowing Phoenix, who was unable to speak for stretches at a time, to dictate the pace of the interview, Letterman created strange, uncomfortable and riveting live television. “When Dave is good,” O’Brien told me the day after the Phoenix episode, “no one is better. At moments like that, I can’t touch him.”
While Letterman is his direct competition at 11:30, O’Brien also has to contend with the double bill of Jon Stewart and, to a lesser degree, Stephen Colbert on Comedy Central. Topical humor has proved to be popular, especially with young men. That’s why Zucker wanted Leno to do a nightly monologue, riffing off the events of the day, and why the network just scheduled “Saturday Night Live Weekend Update Thursdays” as a half-hour prime-time show. Last fall, during the presidential campaign, “Weekend Update Thursdays” specials averaged nearly two million more viewers than the Emmy Award-winning “30 Rock,” also on NBC. Audiences preferred to see Tina Fey as Sarah Palin rather than Tina Fey as a character on a funny sitcom. “They want reality,” Zucker told me.
Similarly, last year, Stewart and Colbert reached their biggest audience ever. Their popularity may have contributed to a decline in O’Brien’s ratings on “Late Night”: he went from 2.6 million viewers in 2007 to 1.9 million in 2008. Networks, in general, are scrambling to retain audience share, but no one believes that “The Tonight Show” should adopt Stewart’s faux-news format. “I’ve always wondered why Conan lost the Emmy to Jon Stewart,” Michaels told me ruefully. “I think it’s because they think this generation gets their news from Jon Stewart, that he’s doing important work, while Conan is only doing comedy.”
The biggest competition for “The Tonight Show” may come from NBC itself: Leno’s continued nightly presence makes it more difficult for O’Brien to assume full ownership of the show. Their back-to-back time slots set up an inevitable comparison between O’Brien’s more upscale persona and Leno’s heartland approach. “There is a reason President Obama went on with Jay to promote his plans for the economy,” Ludwin boasted. “It was the best way to reach the middle-class voters.” In addition to doing his nightly show, Leno does 160 stand-up engagements a year — usually 3 a week — all over America, and he recently organized and performed at a free show in Detroit. “It’s the best way to take the temperature of the country,” Leno said. “When you live in L.A. or New York, you realize that a funny joke about the president is a smart-ass Hollywood-y joke in the rest of the country. On the show, I never called President Bush an idiot. I’d say, ‘I don’t think the president quite understands.’ That’s the sensibility of 200 miles in on either coast. And that’s what tends to work for ‘The Tonight Show.’ ”
The not-so-subtle message here is that O’Brien (like his time-slot adversary, Letterman) does not have Leno’s cozy relationship to the Middle American viewer. While Carson deftly married sophistication, topicality, sophomoric humor and sex, today’s late-night talk shows rarely have that range. In Carson’s day, there were also vastly fewer choices on television — he hosted the best dinner party around. It’s much harder now, and the search for a loyal constituency (which Leno seems to have) forced NBC to scramble.
And yet, after waiting all these years for “The Tonight Show” to be his, O’Brien was surprised when Zucker told him in December that Leno would be back on the network at 10 p.m. “My first reaction was to calculate my self-interest,” O’Brien said a month later, over dinner at a restaurant near his apartment on the Upper West Side. “It took me about 45 minutes of, ‘Really?’ I think, realistically, that Jay will be doing the same show he’s doing now. I knew that there was this thing that was starting to brew that poor Jay was being pushed out by Conan. Jay was clearly becoming unhappy, and it had the makings of a situation that would make me unhappy. I like Jay. I don’t want to be an unpleasant chapter in his life. Or he in mine.”
O’Brien paused. “What I realized is, I’m still doing ‘The Tonight Show.’ That was my dream. When I can’t sleep and it’s 3 in the morning, I’m not thinking about Jay. I’m thinking about all the things I want to do on the show. And I’m not thinking about how I’m going to change myself to fit a certain demographic. I just have to block that nonsense out. In entertainment, you have to stake out what you think is right, you have to put out that signal, make sure it’s pure and then do it and do it and do it and know that they will come. And if they don’t, you have to pack up your bags and say: ‘I enjoyed my time here. Sorry it didn’t work out.’ But the biggest mistake would be to alter my signal to make sure that I reach all these different people. Because then you’re lost.” Conan O’Brien was exhausted. It was 3:20 on Feb. 20, less than two hours before O’Brien would be taping his final “Late Night” show in Studio 6A, and he was pacing around his soon-to-be destroyed set, the set he lived in for the past 16 years, in a strangely calm state. “I’m too tired to be nervous about tonight,” he said, while friends and family sat in the studio audience and sought refuge in his dressing room. Andy Richter, O’Brien’s sidekick until 2000, was sitting behind the show desk talking to Robert Smigel, the first head writer for “Late Night” and the man who doubles as Triumph the Insult Comic Dog. It was a reunion mixed with a wake. “Everything big that’s happened in my life has been a result of this show,” O’Brien said. “But now we have to go. I feel like I’ve been in high school for 16 years. A great high school, but it’s time to graduate.”
He huddled briefly with Jeff Ross, one of the executive producers, who was already dressed for the show in a suit and tie, and then settled behind the drum kit of the “Late Night” band, the Max Weinberg Seven. O’Brien began drumming as the band played “On the Road Again.” “Music and comedy are so linked,” O’Brien said earlier, as he walked up and down the halls of his offices, playing one of his many guitars. “The rhythm of comedy is con_nected to the rhythm of music. They’re both about creating tension and knowing when to let it go. I’m always surprised when somebody funny is not musical.” O’Brien smiled. “And, you know, Johnny loved to play the drums.”
The third of six children — “It’s the role he can’t escape: Conan is always the middle child,” Lorne Michaels said, when he heard that Leno was moving to 10 p.m. — O’Brien grew up in Brookline, Mass., watching Johnny Carson with his father, a microbiologist. “He would let me stay up for the monologue,” O’Brien told me earlier. “I was interested in this guy who made my dad laugh. In the ’70s, Johnny was a harmonious place for me and my dad: the show was such an American ritual that it covered the mainstream and the counterculture. Everybody laughed at Carson — they all watched him. I started analyzing the show then. Since I was a teenager, I have been thinking about what’s funny and what’s not funny almost all the time. Not much in my life has changed since I was a kid.
“When all the writers are packed into Sweeney’s office,” Conan continued, “it’s very comfortable for me, because that’s how I grew up. My older brothers, Neal and Luke, slept in twin beds, and I was in a cot at the foot of their beds. I loved it. When you’re Irish Catholic, you learn to do comedy at the foot of your brothers’ beds. It’s all about trying to make your family laugh. And I employ the same muscle today. It’s just that now I make a living out of it.”
O’Brien wrote his thesis at Harvard on Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner (“Let’s just say that during my discussions with Pauly Shore, it doesn’t come up much”), and in 1983 and ’84 he was elected president of The Harvard Lampoon for a rare two consecutive terms. After graduation in 1985, O’Brien and Greg Daniels (who went on to produce “The Office” for NBC) became writing partners and moved to Los Angeles. They immediately got a job on HBO’s “Not Necessarily the News.” “Greg Daniels and I were shackled together like ‘The Defiant Ones,’ ” O’Brien recalled. “We shared an apartment, a car and an office with iron desks that faced each other. You quickly become a married couple. If one of us had a chance at having a date, we would have to ask the other to borrow the car.” While he was writing for television, O’Brien began performing with the Groundlings, a comedy troupe in Los Angeles that jump-started the careers of, among others, Pee-wee Herman and Will Ferrell. In 1988, he moved East to write for “Saturday Night Live,” and in 1991, he moved West again to work on “The Simpsons.” With his 30th birthday approaching, O’Brien decided he wanted to reinvent himself as a performer. He got a new agent, Gavin Polone (who is now his manager), and he began thinking about hosting a talk show. I met O’Brien around this time; he was well regarded as a writer in the concentric comedy circles of “SNL,” “The Simpsons” and “Seinfeld,” but he had virtually no experience performing on television. It was audacious to think that he could host a nightly show. He had never even been a head writer.
And then, on April 26, 1992, after a whirlwind courtship, O’Brien was picked to replace David Letterman. “It’s fair to say that it was unprecedented,” Lorne Michaels told me, calling from his office one evening. Michaels was obligated, as an executive producer, to find the “Late Night” host (just as he eventually picked Jimmy Fallon to replace O’Brien). “I liked that Conan was young, intelligent and that he had, like Johnny Carson, good manners. A good host always obeys the rules of hospitality, and Conan has an essential decency and work ethic that were obvious from the start. Sadly, talent and character do not often reside in the same person, but they do in Conan. And that was never more evident than when his show was fighting for its life.” Critics attacked him (Tom Shales suggested in The Washington Post that “the host resume his previous identity, Conan O’Blivion”), and the NBC executives were anxious to replace him with Greg Kinnear, who was on the network at 1:30 a.m. “One executive,” O’Brien recalled, “particularly despised Andy [Richter]. He told me I’d never succeed until I ‘got rid of that big fat dildo.’ That was the tone of the conversations between us and the network.” Slowly, things improved. Kinnear didn’t want the job (he left hosting to become an actor), and there were no easy replacements for O’Brien. That bought him time. Stars like Tom Hanks agreed to appear on “Late Night,” which boosted audience awareness. Even Letterman, who admired O’Brien’s comic sensibility, came on to register his support. Mostly, though, O’Brien’s performance improved. “Conan always knew he had the product,” Leno told me. “He said it kind of dopey, but what he was saying was clever and smart. And then he learned how to say it well.”
He never quit. One key to O’Brien’s character is his quiet confidence that if he applies himself, he will eventually succeed. He’s not arrogant, but he’s willing to live and breathe the show. “The thing that saved my life was that I didn’t really know what I was in for,” O’Brien said, an hour before taping his last show. “If they had explained to me exactly what was involved, I might have run. But I did not want to fail. And now I’m addicted to the feeling of what it’s like to do a good show. There are 35 variables every night — what comedy do we have? What’s the audience like? Who are the guests? What time of year is it? What’s my mood? You need 15 cherries to line up to pay out the jackpot. And, every now and then, the stars align. And you keep chasing after that feeling.”
O’Brien ran off — he needed to check on Will Ferrell, who was appearing on the show as George W. Bush that night and was also rehearsing a kind of striptease. His parents and his older brother Luke had arrived from Boston, and they were waiting with Conan’s wife, Liza, in his dressing room. O’Brien met his wife through “Late Night.” In 2000, he was doing a remote at the ad agency where she worked. After the segment was taped, O’Brien asked Sweeney to make certain that he compiled everyone’s name and address. “It’s the blonde, isn’t it?” Sweeney replied.
“I immediately knew Liza was the one,” O’Brien told me earlier. “I couldn’t say, Oh no, I’m not ready — I need to be with a few drug-addicted super_models with rage issues. It’s my nature to be the opposite of a self-destructive person: something inside of me usually makes me do the right thing.” This applies to the show as well. Unlike Letterman and Carson, O’Brien doesn’t seem to have a dark side. His humor is not mean — he’d rather laugh with the audience than at them. And unlike Stewart, he’s not on TV to educate through mockery. It’s impossible, for instance, to imagine O’Brien sparring with someone like Jim Cramer, the CNBC money guru, as Stewart recently did. O’Brien is too respectful to be angry; like Leno, he works hard to be polite.
Which is why, despite many meetings and dozens of pitched ideas, the last “Late Night” did not finish with a comedy bit. Instead, O’Brien spent 11 minutes thanking his staff, his family and, particularly, Lorne Michaels for believing in him. He singled out David Letterman’s comic genius and enormous influence while politely, dutifully, thanking Leno for his “support.” O’Brien was choking back tears and he only briefly attended the crowded after-party in Studio 8H. Jeff Zucker was there with O’Brien’s agent, Rick Rosen. “I’m going to have to lay off 10 people to pay for this party,” Zucker said, as he popped a caviar-and-blini hors d’oeuvre into his mouth. He was half-joking. “Conan better be a success at 11:30.”
In the kitchen of O’Brien’s new house in Los Angeles, there is a map of America that he clipped from USA Today. Crisscrossing lines connect cities coast to coast. “That’s what I’ve been doing for the past two months,” O’Brien said. “I moved to Los Angeles on March 9, and I’ve only slept here two nights in three weeks.” It was an evening in early April, and Conan, Liza, their two children, Beckett and Neve, and the golden retriever, Bosco, were having dinner (Liza prepared lasagna with a green salad and fruit for dessert) at home. Knowing that they would be moving in 2009, they bought a brand-new house in West Los Angeles more than a year ago. The many huge rooms, most of which have double-height ceilings, are sparsely furnished with overstuffed sofas and chairs. The walk-in closets are so spacious that Conan has an elliptical trainer in his and Liza has a desk in hers. Naturally, there’s a pool in the backyard, and I lost count at four guest rooms and three dens. “I have moments of ‘Whose life is this?’ ” O’Brien said as he gave me a tour. “I get up in this house, I get in my car and I drive to work, and it’s like I’ve adopted a new personality. A lot of the early stage of the show will probably play off my feeling of being on the moon.” O’Brien sat down at the kitchen table, where he had placed the USA Today map. “That’s why, as nice as this is, it was so important that I went to see the affiliates. It’s good to remember that ‘The Tonight Show’ is not just shown in New York and L.A.” Network television comprises a web of stations that have pledged their allegiance to a particular company and its programming slate. “There really is no NBC,” Leno told me. “There are the affiliates that own NBC. So, you go see them and say, ‘Hey, here’s what I plan to do.’ And they say, ‘We like you.’ America’s a football — whoever controls the ball, controls the game.” Leno speaks from experience. In 1992, NBC gave him “The Tonight Show” over David Letterman partly because he had the staunch backing of the affiliates. (He visited them; Letterman didn’t.) Wooing the affiliates is not unlike garnering support during a presidential campaign, with particular attention paid to the cities and states that don’t understand or favor the candidate on offer. “They never really liked Conan in the Southeast,” Rick Ludwin said. “And we strongly suggested that he visit those stations.”
Even before “Late Night” ended, O’Brien was doing two shows on Thursday and flying on Friday to meet the affiliates. He’d visit two cities a day, often with Jeff Ross, who will be the executive producer of “The Tonight Show.” “I felt like Lyndon Johnson in the hill country, running a grass-roots campaign,” O’Brien said, as his daughter came to say goodnight. “In places like Oklahoma City, everyone was wearing Conan wigs and they brought a Clydesdale out of a truck. I grabbed a cowboy hat and rode in circles in front of the station. There were cheerleaders doing cheers for me and banners with my name on them. I kept thinking, I came into show business through the back door of ‘S.N.L.’ and ‘The Simpsons,’ and now I’m in the carnival. Which I love. If you want to host ‘The Tonight Show,’ you need to go to Kansas City and Cleveland and Milwaukee and San Jose and Oklahoma City. There’s something about the show that does belong to those people.”
In most cities, he made a regular stump speech about watching Johnny Carson with his father and how much the show mattered to him. In early April, the NBC affiliate in Boston dropped a bombshell: they did not want to carry Leno’s new 10 p.m. show. Instead, they would put on the local news. NBC reacted immediately, threatening to strip the station of its network affiliation. “They had to be aggressive,” said Jeff Ross. “They couldn’t risk a trend.” After a heated two-week battle, the network prevailed: Leno’s 10 p.m. show will now be shown in Boston. Interestingly, Leno made an appearance in Boston during the two-week dispute. “Don’t ***** and moan,” he told me. “Do something if you want the ball back.”
On his affiliate tour, O’Brien never visited Boston; it was considered a reliable city for him. “I’m sure I’ll end up going,” he said. “But there’s work to do here.” It was less than two months before “The Tonight Show” would have its June 1 première, and O’Brien knew he had to establish his show with a new 11:30 audience before Leno began broadcasting in September. “The anticipation of doing the show is getting hard,” he continued. “I have to talk about things endlessly rather than doing them. It’s all buildup. I need to get back to a room full of writers and come up with ideas. I need to actually do the show.”
Around the same time that Conan O’Brien was named the next host of “The Tonight Show,” General Electric, NBC’s parent company, purchased Vivendi Universal Entertainment and fused the two divisions. A newly hatched NBC Universal moved most of its West Coast operations from Burbank to Universal City. This means that the new “The Tonight Show” will not hail, as it did for decades, from Burbank. “I was worried that we would be the least-exciting attraction at the Universal theme park,” O’Brien said in late April, as he stood outside his new offices. The nondescript five-story building was constructed for “The Tonight Show” on what was once a parking lot. The offices are connected to an existing soundstage, which will house the studio.
“In 1961, Jack Benny filmed his show here,” O’Brien said, pointing to his new home. “And then, in the ’80s, ‘Knight Rider’ was shot here. But I prefer to associate with Benny.” O’Brien walked toward the soundstage. “They wanted to put my name on the building, but Rule No. 1 in Hollywood is don’t put your name on anything,” O’Brien said. “All I imagine is them putting my name in cement and then having to jackhammer it out.”
The Universal lot could not be more different from Rockefeller Center. Located in the San Fernando Valley, Universal is an old-fashioned working back lot, where Spielberg (and others) still shoot parts of their movies. Where Rockefeller Center, in all its deco splendor and history, is urban, charmingly chaotic and rather cavelike, Universal is vast and sunny and seems to have been designed by dozens of architects with no interest in comparing notes. There are low bungalows that look as if they belong to silent-film stars next to office buildings that resemble swinging-singles apartment complexes from the ’70s.
The show’s offices, which are just inside the studio’s gates, are completely generic. “I wanted it that way,” O’Brien said, as he took the elevator to the fourth floor and walked down the hall to his new home. “I said, I don’t want a desk made of onyx and baboon skulls.” He shipped his old metal desk from his New York office; the same cork bulletin board that hung there was mounted on the wall here. The color coding has changed: yellow index cards now connote comedy ideas; blue, possibilities for remotes; white, material for O’Brien to perform at the desk; and each pink card, the name of a scheduled guest. The lineup for the first show, on June 1, was set: Will Ferrell and Pearl Jam. (Interestingly, O’Brien will be Leno’s guest on his last show.)
Ideas were starting to take shape, too, many of them inspired by the back lot itself. “Jaws” was a huge hit for Universal, and one writer suggested that Bruce, the mechanical shark, could occasionally drop by the show. “In our mind, he sounds like Paul Lynde,” O’Brien explained. “He dishes dirt about his co-stars.” The show had an exact replica of O’Brien’s desk built onto the front of a golf cart and, later that day, O’Brien was scheduled to take a short road trip through the studio. “We’re going to drive up to the ‘Psycho’ house and try and interview Norman Bates at the desk,” O’Brien said. “And maybe we’ll take a break during 1869 in Western Town. And then we’ll swing by the ‘Desperate Housewives’ set and try to see Eva Longoria in her trailer for an interview.
For O’Brien, the open landscape of California may be both inspiring and isolating. In his “Late Night” show in New York, O’Brien was able to define himself as a smart outsider, but “The Tonight Show” is, by its nature, a different game for a different crowd. Traditionally, it has mirrored the mood of the country. “Johnny’s the one I look back to,” O’Brien continued. “The constant is Johnny. He was very sophisticated, but he was also a clown. As a kid, I was fascinated by the fact that while he was clearly the coolest guy in America, he could dress up like an old woman or have a raccoon crawl on his head. He surrendered his dignity, and it only made him cooler. There aren’t a lot of hosts who will put on a skimpy bathing suit and jump into a hot tub with Don Rickles.” O’Brien picked up a guitar. “When I first got ‘Late Night,’ ” he said, “I was whisked to John Cheever Connecticut to a 50th birthday party for Bob Wright, who was then the head of NBC. They said, ‘We want you to get up and be funny.’ And then I realized that Johnny Carson was there, too. I was petrified. Johnny was wearing dark glasses and he was ramrod straight and perfectly coiffed. He was very shy. I wanted to kill myself. And I had to go first. I had prepared a thing — the idea was I didn’t know who Bob Wright was — and it worked. People really laughed. And Johnny nodded. Then he got up, made his toast and blew the roof off the place. Afterward, he came over to me and said, ‘Good luck to you.’ He said, ‘Just be yourself — that’s the only way it can work.’ ” O’Brien paused, “There’s an opportunity to put my stamp on this show. I’ve got an ego, and I want to do my ‘Tonight Show.’ ” O’Brien was interrupted by Jeff Ross, who wanted him to go downstairs to the stage. When the set was being designed, O’Brien’s main concern was that the space not feel too big. “We want to have a parade of elephants if we need it,” Ross explained as we went through the stage doors, “but we still want the audience to feel like they’re close to Conan.” These decisions matter: for the first two years of Leno’s tenure, Letterman was regularly beating him. Then Leno changed studios, switching from Carson’s old arrangement, which put him at a distance from the audience, to a closer configuration. As a stand-up comedian, Leno played more to the crowd and needed to see faces. It may have been a coincidence or a national change in taste, but when he altered his set, Leno started to win in the ratings. And then, in 1995, Hugh Grant was arrested for soliciting a prostitute and didn’t cancel his “Tonight Show” booking. When an abashed Grant sat down, Leno asked, “What the hell were you thinking?” There was a huge laugh, and ratings soared. From then on, Leno was No. 1. “Do you think it was the set or Hugh?” I asked Ross.
“Well,” he said, “I couldn’t come up with five names living that will guarantee a rating. News-generated guests will be big, but everything has been diluted by the entertainment shows. Everyone is everywhere four or five times a day. So unless you have a sitting president like Barack Obama on, or a big scandal, you’re better off with a set that helps.”
The new “Tonight Show” set has the usual elements: band shell stage left, desk stage right and a mesh curtain made of metal in the center. But the curtain is curved and, like the rest of the set, is deco in style. It evokes the mood of 30 Rockefeller Plaza but is much grander than O’Brien’s former set in Studio 6A. There are nearly double the number of seats, and there are many more lights flashing. “I liked the set,” Lorne Michaels told me later, “but I wonder if it’s the movie version of a talk show.”
As he wandered around the stage, O’Brien looked comfortable, at home. “The hardest thing in L.A. is a destination,” he said. “I’m spoiled. I’ve had the destination in New York: Rockefeller Center. It’s the high temple of American TV, and we were smack-dab in the middle of it. L.A. is different. Everything can feel like the lunar landscape out here.”
He paced around the set. The set wasn’t finished: there were at least 25 workers installing lights or checking plans or hammering. “I’m happy when I’m in the studio,” O’Brien said. “I’m eating my meals here now.” O’Brien’s desk wasn’t finished yet, and there were three folding chairs where the guests would be. “I miss doing the show,” he said. “I miss the audience. The other day, I was at my daughter’s school to read to the kids, and I started acting out all the characters. I ran into Liza on my way out, and she said, ‘How did it go?’ I said, ‘I killed in there!’ She looked at me and said: ‘They’re a bunch of 4-year-olds. You’re just supposed to read the book.’ ”
O’Brien laughed. He walked over to an X that had been taped to the floor. When the show starts, that will be where he’ll stand when he emerges from the curtain to address the audience. “I come here at night, after everyone’s gone home, and I practice giving the monologue,” he said. “Every night. For hours. I just stand on the X and imagine the rest.”
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May 21st, 2009 03:05 AM
