Five Night-Years From Johnny

Five years can do a lot to a man, for better or worse. Jay Leno knows this well, perhaps better than any other human being to have walked into the late-night TV arena and survived.

On the surface, he seems exactly the same as the day he took over “The Tonight Show” on May 25, 1992. There are no noticeable scars, no limps. The famously nasal voice still registers somewhere between adolescent whine and adult baritone. The chin is still The Chin.

But on closer inspection, there is something very different about the fellow. It is the hair. Directly above his forehead is, Elsa Lanchester-like, a lock of black hair adrift in a sea of gray. Now that he’s well into middle age, this could be a vestige of lost youth, maybe even a reminder of a time when the late-night game was mostly fun and not mostly war.

Yet in a fanciful sort of way, it could also be considered a badge of honor: the mark of a survivor who is not only five years older but five years wiser. Once bloodied but always unbowed, Leno is still standing.

Standing, in fact, taller than anyone else in late night at this moment. Night in, night out, his industrial-strength talk-variety show attracts 6.3 million viewers, 2 million more than you-know-who.

Circa 1997, five years could be the next best thing to eternity in late-night TV, where hosts come and go as ratings rise and plummet. But that is not the reason Leno’s fifth anniversary as the successor to Johnny Carson is such a remarkable one. His very first year on the air was just about as bad as NBC executives could ever have feared--with his intense manager and executive producer, Helen Kushnick, alienating network management, talent agents and the staff, followed by a very public internal squabble over whether Leno ought to be ousted in favor of David Letterman. Leno won that battle, only to see things get worse in 1993 when Letterman left for CBS and promptly trounced him in the ratings. Critics quickly proclaimed Letterman the new “king of late night.”

In spite of this hellish start, “Tonight” pulled into first place in 1995 and has remained there. Sweet vindication for someone about whom there had been doubts--even among top NBC executives--that he’d be celebrating a first anniversary, much less a fifth.

It is not a prediction to which Leno, 47, ever subscribed.

“Without sounding cocky, yeah, I thought [a fifth] would happen,” he says, not sounding at all cocky. “It never occurred to me it would not work out.” He adds: “When I was a little kid, my mother said [success in school] would take me a little longer than the other kids, ‘but you’ll get there, you’ll do just fine.’ That’s been my philosophy through this whole thing.”

So why is Jay not jumping for joy? Why no grand prime-time hoopla, like Letterman’s special in February on his 15th anniversary as a late-night host? (A muted affair is planned, in “The Tonight Show’s” regular time slot Thursday, the day after the May ratings sweeps end.) Why no well-deserved chest thumping?

Why, in fact, does Jay Leno sound so bloody pensive and somber?

Two reasons. The first has to do with Leno, the pragmatist.

“I don’t use that term ‘king of late night,’ ” he says. “To say that or even say ‘We’re No. 1’ is a bit like being in the airline business, where you say you’re the safest airline and then the next day. . . .”

Indeed, just as he is consolidating his hold on late night, the landscape is beginning to shift under his feet--again. Four months ago, ABC launched “Politically Incorrect,” which has begun to makes tracks in a place that has long been a trackless wilderness: the post-”Nightline” berth. And this summer, two new late-night talk shows will launch: Keenen Ivory Wayans’ show for Buena Vista and Columbia TriStar’s “Vibe.” A third show, hosted by Magic Johnson, bows next January.

The second reason has to do with Leno, the human being.

For if Leno himself declines to claim the “king of late night” crown, no one else is bestowing it on him either. He has won the kingdom but not the glory. While the show is an undeniable success with viewers, for most of the nation’s critics it remains a pariah: a fluke, headed by a host who is workmanlike but uninspired. “Is he man or machine?” an Esquire profile wondered.

Entertainment Weekly, self-appointed arbiter of hip, declined to name him one of the nation’s 50 funniest people in a recent issue. That snub, colleagues say, was especially painful to Leno, who considers himself more of a comedian than a broadcaster. And Entertainment Weekly is not alone: His ascendance has been accompanied by a collective yawn rather than a wave of adulation.

On Leno, the toll is obvious. When asked basic, standard-issue questions--Are you completely happy with the show? Is this what you want to do with the rest of your life?--he steps around them as he would a banana peel on the sidewalk. “Anybody can have a life,” he says bluntly. “Careers are hard to come by. I’m doing exactly what I want.”

The press is now the enemy, and that is yet another big change in the man. Leno, colleagues say, is weary of the sniping--weary of the “charge” that he is not hip, or that he has stolen shtick from Letterman’s “Late Show,” or that he is too nice to his guests, or. . . .

Mostly, though, he is just weary of trying to change people’s minds.

“Occasionally [critics] will say that the show should have gone to Dave,” Leno says. “So why didn’t it? What was the problem? OK, so five years later, what now? Am I supposed to go, ‘Gee, I feel terrible’? It seems a little silly to me. . . . You earn the right to be where you are. For the first year and a half, we weren’t getting any rating and in my mind [viewers] were correct. [The show] wasn’t any good. But I’ve been here five years. We’ve done what we had to do. So now I feel I can answer [the critics] with something behind me.”

“I have never considered Jay bitter about any of this,” says Gary Considine, executive producer of NBC Studios (formerly NBC Productions), who along with executive producer Debbie Vickers and Leno redesigned the show from top to bottom after the purging of Kushnick. “ ‘Bitter’ is not the right word. Hurt, maybe.”

And that, of course, is unfortunate. The fall and resurrection of this show and its host is one of the most amazing comeback stories in recent TV history. It is a testament to the man as much as to the circumstances in which he found himself embroiled.

“When I looked at the [ratings] each and every week and read the critical massacre, yes, I certainly doubted my instincts [for having backed Leno over Letterman],” says Warren Littlefield, president of NBC Entertainment. “At the same time, I kept looking at Jay and I would see all the flashes, all the integrity and the absolute devotion that reminded me why I backed him in the first place.”

The story of Leno’s decline and rise is not a simple one. Leno now concedes that Kushnick almost killed the show, and his career along with it. There were screaming tantrums, the banishment of NBC executives (and any mention of Carson) from the show, furious booking wars. She was fired four months after Leno had taken over (and died of cancer last year). Motivated by either a sense of posterity or professional pride, Leno has hidden tapes of the shows he did during that period in hopes that they will never be seen again.

Leno now says L’Affaire Kushnick “was my fault.”

“I swept it under the rug,” he says. “This isn’t meant as an excuse, but I did not come from a house where women screamed or did duplicitous things. I equate women with a certain honesty . . . I’m comfortable with them. A woman will say, if she wants the air conditioner turned off, ‘Is it chilly in here?’ A man will say, ‘Turn off the damn air conditioner.’ Helen was always pulling the air conditioner off the wall and throwing it into the parking lot.”

With Kushnick gone, the show’s fortunes started to turn. His new team began to remake the show to cater to Leno’s strengths, and he began to look more comfortable. As Littlefield put it, the show “went from an off-the-rack suit to a custom-made suit.”

But not so well-fitting as to ensure complete viewer loyalty. Because when Letterman’s “Late Show” premiered on CBS in August 1993, it took the late-night arena by storm, chalking up one ratings victory after another and leaving the venerable “Tonight Show” as an also-ran. Shell-shocked NBC executives took to observing that the late-night race was a marathon, not a sprint.

It turns out they were right. Leno lengthened his monologue, introduced a new set, replaced bandleader Branford Marsalis with Kevin Eubanks, endlessly mined the O.J. Simpson trial for laughs. By late 1994, he was closing the gap, and in mid-July 1995, when Hugh Grant came on to explain his close encounter with a prostitute, Leno took the lead.

Actually, “Late Show’s” audience had started to erode earlier that year. One reason was CBS’ abysmal prime-time performance, but there were other factors too, most notably the loss of eight key affiliates to Fox. But critics began to complain that the show had become repetitive and tiresome, and Letterman’s disappointing performance as host of the Academy Awards that spring only made matters worse.

Since 1995, “Late Show” has lost more than 2 million viewers. Meanwhile, “Tonight” has gained just over 600,000. Clearly, not everyone made the switch to “Tonight.” The other viewers probably just drifted off to cable, to “Nightline” or to bed.

Right now, the late-night landscape is about as stable as it has been in five years. ABC’s “Politically Incorrect,” the talk show hosted by comedian Bill Maher that airs in many markets opposite the second half of both “Late Show” and “Tonight,” was supposed to have shaken things up, but CBS and NBC producers say there has been virtually no effect on their shows since its Jan. 6 debut, although ABC reports that “Politically Incorrect” is beating Letterman in 17 big cities, thanks to the lead-in it gets from “Nightline.” “Politically Incorrect” has averaged a respectable 3.2 million viewers a night; “Nightline” is averaging 5.7 million, up 4% from a year ago.

Meanwhile, “Tonight” is averaging 6.3 million viewers a night this season, about 200,000 more than for the same period a year ago. And Letterman? The news remains bleak: 4.4 million viewers, down 10%. The bleeding, however, appears to have stopped.

The slippage, says Leslie Moonves, president of CBS Entertainment, “concerns Dave more than it concerns us, frankly. He’s a very self-critical guy. But a lot of this was attached to our prime-time [deterioration]. It’s ironic that now we’re switching roles. As prime time improves, and it will, it’s going to help him. We do believe that. And remember, [“Late Show”] is still a huge profit center.”

“Would we like to be the No. 1 show? Absolutely,” says Rob Burnett, “Late Show’s” executive producer. “But it’s not the thing that affects our daily lives.”

And now, enter the new crop of late-night shows.

Producers of “The Keenen Ivory Wayans Show,” “Vibe” and Magic Johnson’s vehicle say they don’t expect to knock off “The Tonight Show” or “Late Show.” But they believe they can grab a significant piece of the action by courting the young and ethnic audiences that basically have been ignored since the demise of “The Arsenio Hall Show” in 1994.

Mort Marcus, president of Buena Vista TV, which is fronting Wayans’ return to TV after his Fox hit “In Living Color,” diplomatically puts it: “We think Leno and Letterman are really high-quality shows and we’d be lucky to do as well. But the fact of the matter is, [audiences for] both have gotten a little bit older. That has happened since ‘Arsenio’ went off the air: The void is still there, and the gap has gotten bigger.”

All three new ventures promise virtually the same thing: comic remotes, stand-ups and music. Johnson’s will rely more heavily on interviews than the others. “Vibe,” with Quincy Jones as one of the producers, may go a little heavier on music, although its host is Chris Spencer, a stand-up who has appeared on “Arsenio” and “Martin.”

Johnson, who declined to be interviewed, said in a statement: “Prospering in late night doesn’t mean trying to do ‘The Tonight Show’ better than Jay or ‘Late Show With David Letterman’ better than Dave. You have to bring something to the table that’s never been done before. I want to do a show that is uniquely mine, bringing together guests and entertainment that reflect my interests and who I am.”

With the Wayans project, “we are looking to incorporating the audience far more in the show,” says Michael Davies, senior vice president of programming for Buena Vista Productions. “We’re looking to make the host more the center of action than the center of the show. . . . We’re looking to surprise the audience. Spontaneity is the key.”

If all of this sounds vaguely familiar, it should: “The Tonight Show,” after its plunge into late-night hell, also evolved into a comedy show with surprise elements (like guest drop-ins), an expanded monologue, characters (Beyondo, Mr. Brain, Iron Jay) and just about enough sketch material to fill a 22-minute sitcom.

Leno also brought the stage down to audience level, and audience members are now instructed to leap to their feet when the host emerges. He drifts into the crowd, like a politician primping for votes. The overall effect: “Hey! I’m a swell guy and I LOVE YOU!”

His monologue is solid; it is by far the best part of the show. From there, matters often deteriorate. The sketch material is at best corny and at worst crude--an uncharacteristic trait for Leno. (A recent sketch had actress Alexandra Wentworth wearing breast implants that stood out a foot from her chest.) The show also has a manic quality. There is a feeling that the audience, stoked by flashing applause signs, must laugh at all times, which relegates the interviews to little more than comic props for Leno’s act. (It is a criticism that could easily be leveled against “Late Show” as well.)

Says Leno: “Yeah, we do cross the line occasionally, but the idea is to keep the show moving. I’d rather do a silly sex joke than a mean joke. . . . You’re not going to please everybody.”

Indeed, he has not. There has been carping from some corners that the new, improved “Tonight Show” filched ideas from “Late Show,” like taping comedy bits outside the studio and inserting taped material into the monologue. Not true, says Considine: “The one thing people have to remember is [that] nothing is new in late night. Are you not allowed to leave the studio because Dave did? Or can you not talk to kids because Art Linkletter did? Everything has been tried.”

Leno, middle-aged, gray and wiser than he was five years ago, insists that he has learned to live with the critics:

“TV does not give you a good real-world view of what people want or don’t want. You can fill up a comedy club but you can’t ‘fill up’ a TV program. When I first started this, I would play on TV like I was doing a nightclub act. With 300 people in a room, there’s always a guy who’s not laughing. You gesture to him or do whatever you can to get him to laugh, then you can say, ‘Good, I got the whole room.’ When I first got [“The Tonight Show”], I was trying to please everyone the whole time. I realized that TV was not a club and that there are people who legitimately don’t like you.”

“What was so remarkable about this guy,” says NBC executive Littlefield, “is that he never gave up. He just kept saying one day at a time. . . . He didn’t quit, and I think that’s a tribute to Jay and the people around him.”

No one, Jay, can argue with that. So cheer up.