Late Night Madness

Where to begin?

Whatever you think about Conan or Jay, you have to wonder about what was going through the heads of NBC's PR team during the planning process for a revised late night schedule.

Let's recap. As everyone knows by now, NBC's affiliates put pressure on the network to "fix" the late night problem. Leno was not delivering the lead-in audience the affiliates needed to support their late news shows (which are typically big money-makers at local stations), and because of NBC's bold 10 p.m. experiment, the affiliates were stuck with Jay's lead-in five nights a week. NBC management, seeing weak numbers from Jay's show and weak numbers from the Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien, decided to reverse course and restore Jay to his old perch at 11:35 and push Conan to 12:05. Conan balked, the blogosphere lit up in protest, and NBC is now wearing a 12-egg omelet on its face.

Jeff Zucker has been pilloried for his decision to move Leno to 10 p.m., but I think that's a bum rap (personal disclosure: I know Zucker from my NBC News days; I like him and I respect him). Zucker's decision didn't turn out well, but it's worth remembering that nothing seemed to be working for NBC at 10 p.m., and betting on a proven ratings winner like Leno probably seemed like a gamble worth taking. (I was less supportive of the decision to turn the Tonight Show over to Conan O'Brien -- I always thought his appeal was way too narrow for Tonight's big-tent audience).

The people whose feet should be held to the fire are the PR department folks who let this story get away from them. Consider: this was a story that should have been carefully planned, yet it unfolded as if it were unexpected, like a natural disaster. NBC could have made the decisions they made, planned a thoughtful, professional roll-out of the news, and emerged -- whether the decisions were good or bad -- with the network's image intact. None of that happened.

What NBC needed was a headline strategy. The network needed to figure out the headline they wanted to read on the New York Times website in the hours following their announcement, then devise a strategy to achieve that goal. They needed to reverse-engineer the desired outcome and plan, step by step, to make it a reality. NBC's PR team would probably say that they would have been happy to do exactly that if the story hadn't leaked and taken on a life of its own. Sorry, but if Apple Computers can keep a lid on a multi-year development project and surprise the world with the iPhone, NBC should be able to keep the lid on its plans for late night comedy, at least for a week or two.

Make no mistake, this is not just an "image" problem for NBC. O'Brien's contract provides him with a very lucrative payoff if he and the network can't come to terms, and the viewer backlash over NBC's decision to push him off his perch at the Tonight Show will certainly work to his advantage in the negotiations ahead. NBC's PR team must be kicking themselves. What might once have been achieved amicably, behind closed doors, is now playing out publicly and to the network's disadvantage. It's ugly, and it's going to be costly.