Technically, Carson Daly’s 1:35 AM late-night show always aired the “next day,” but for its premiere episode, that was truer than ever.
“Stay tuned for Last Call with Carson Daly,” Conan O’Brien told Late Night viewers in the last moments of his January 7, 2002 show. “It’s his first episode. Check it out!”
But what aired next was a rerun of SCTV. A disclaimer scrolled across the screen, informing the million-or-so viewers watching that the much-hyped premiere of NBC’s new 1:35 AM talk show would not be airing after all.
It was a shocking development for a show that had seen quite a leadup.
NBC had not had a 1:35 AM show since Later, hosted by Cynthia Garrett, went off the air a year earlier. (Hosted by Bob Costas when it premiered in 1988, Greg Kinnear had taken over Later in 1994. That was followed by four years of guest hosts, then Garrett’s year-long tenure.)
Shortly after the cancellation of Later, NBC had set its sights on a rising star among younger viewers: MTV’s Carson Daly. Daly had been hosting the cable channel’s after school show Total Request Live for two and a half years. TRL was a hit with teens, peaking with an average total audience of over 850,000 in 1999.
NBC began talking to Daly about coming to the 1:35 AM Monday-through-Thursday time slot—the third talk show in its late-night block following The Tonight Show Starring Jay Leno and Late Night with Conan O’Brien.
NBC Entertainment President Jeff Zucker later touted Daly’s “real ability to connect with younger viewers” to the New York Daily News. “He’s got a big following with an audience group we’d like to attract,” he said.
Daly, for his part, was also interested in late-night. According to the paper, the MTV VJ had previously “discussed a position as host of a late-night show” with CBS, where he’d been under a multi-special deal. But CBS didn’t have a time slot for him, and “when CBS couldn’t provide Daly with an outlet, NBC moved in.”
In the meantime, NBC had been rerunning episodes of the Canadian sketch show SCTV in the old Later slot, billing it as Later Presents: SCTV.
By August 2001, Daly had agreed to a three-year deal with NBC Studios to host what was then described as a revamped version of Later.
Daly’s deal included other opportunities, such as appearing on NBC specials and potentially developing a show for teens on NBC’s Saturday morning lineup. But the TRL host still had a year left in his contract with MTV and, at least for the time being, would continue those duties in addition to his new NBC gig. Even so, a launch of the Daly-hosted Later was eyed for that fall.
Daly and his co-executive producer, David Friedman, were also eyeing a title change. “Later had fallen so far by the wayside,” Friedman explained to The Chicago Tribune. A new name soon fell into their lap: the pair were mulling over new title ideas at a bar one night around 2 AM, when the bartender shouted “last call.”
In late December, NBC announced Last Call with Carson Daly would premiere on Monday, January 7. Singer Alicia Keys would be his first guest. Daly already had four test shows under his belt, including one with his soon-to-be lead-in, Conan O’Brien.
But O’Brien’s efforts to prop up Last Call went further than that. At that time, Late Night with Conan O’Brien was airing repeats on Monday nights. For Daly’s premiere night, he taped a new episode so that the Daly’s first episode wouldn’t have a rerun as its lead-in. O’Brien would also call out the premiere during his show.
“Tonight’s a special night here in the NBC family,” O’Brien told viewers after the monologue that night. He spent time at his desk promoting the new show. Ad spots for Last Call’s premiere ran during the commercial breaks, including clips of the episode featuring Daly and Alicia Keys. (Daly had taped his premiere with Alicia Keys earlier that day, as well as his planned Tuesday show with Gwyneth Paltrow.)
After Conan closed out his show with one more “stay tuned,” viewers—and reportedly even some folks at the network—were surprised to see SCTV air instead of Last Call. While an onscreen crawl told viewers Daly’s show would not be airing that night after all, it wasn’t clear why.
“We were unable to close the deal with Carson Daly for the new late-night show,” an NBC spokesperson said the next day. “We’re working toward a resolution and we’re hopeful we can move forward with the show.
The holdup was apparently rooted in a flag raised by MTV, according to a Los Angeles Times report. NBC wanted to air repeats of Last Call with Carson Daly to the cable channel E!—but with Daly still hosting TRL, MTV was concerned about the prospect of the host competing against himself on another cable network.
Daly’s team “continued to insist on contract changes even though they had verbally agreed to terms for the new series,” The New York Times wrote.
The decision to swap out Last Call for an SCTV rerun was reportedly made by Zucker just three minutes before the broadcast—a threat Daly’s team had wagered was a bluff. Even Daly himself expected the show to air. “I asked a lot of my friends to stay up till 1:30 last night,” he told LateNighter’s Bill Carter, then writing for the Times. “I was shocked when it didn’t come on.”
On the following night’s Late Night, O’Brien addressed the hiccup. “There’s something I have to talk about right here at the top,” he told viewers. “Apparently last night [Last Call] didn’t air… because of some kind of contractual dispute that they’re having over there.”
“I looked kinda like a jackass,” Conan joked. “Not that I care, it’s what I do for a living.” But jokes aside, O’Brien wasn’t sure whether Daly would be his lead-out that night, either.
“As of the taping of this show, it’s definitely not gonna happen tonight?,” he asked his producer Jeff Ross.
“It’s not definitely not happening,” Ross told him. “But as of now, we don’t know.”
“I didn’t know they ran a network like this anymore,” O’Brien joked. “I don’t know if they run basic cable like this.”
O’Brien then introduced a desk piece based on the debacle, showing clips of purported “backup shows” that NBC had ready in case Last Call failed to air again, including Total History Live (a teen-infused TRL-style history show) and Get Up and Go (in which a camera crew goes into a sleeping man’s bedroom and forces him to wake up and host a late-night show). Later in the show, O’Brien returned to the bit with another: Stackenblochen, a German game show where contestants try to arrange objects at perfect right angles.
“America waits,” Conan told viewers of the ongoing standoff. He checked in with Ross again mid-show, still left without an answer.
As unusual as it is for negotiations with talent to come down to the wire like this, it’s not without precedent—even on NBC. As Bill Carter pointed out in his Times report at the time, Lorne Michaels found himself in a similar situation with John Belushi, who didn’t sign a contract for Saturday Night Live until ten minutes before its first episode premiered in 1975. (That moment is dramatized in Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night movie.)
Unlike Belushi, Daly had to learn the hard way that NBC was serious—and the day after the thwarted premiere, the network doubled down. Zucker had threatened to cancel the show outright. While Daly didn’t believe him, the two sides managed to sign a deal at 6:30 PM—just seven hours before Last Call was set to make its second attempt at a premiere broadcast.
The Alicia Keys episode intended for the night prior aired that night, pushing the rest of the show’s planned week by a day. But viewers were left in the dark until 1:35 AM rolled around. Even Conan O’Brien wasn’t reassuring when he attempted a second promo on Late Night.
“Ladies and gentlemen, unfortunately, Stackenblochen will not be seen tonight. But the good news is that Last Call with Carson Daly [is] coming up right now, so check it out,” he said as he closed out that night’s show. “I’m pretty sure I’m right this time. If not, we’ll talk about it tomorrow.”
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