How many people had flashbacks on Monday night to how close a Ronald Reagan convention speech running way past primetime came to rewriting the history of late-night television?
I certainly did. There, before my eyes, was the coverage of a convention already bogging down time-wise because of the pile-up of speakers eager for their chance to pump up a live crowd, running well past its intended closing time. The reason? A former president (soon-to-be former president in this contemporary case) was speaking at length well past 11 p.m. Which meant the network late-night shows set to play after the local news had no shot of getting on the air before midnight—or anywhere close to midnight.
In this case, this year—not 1992—The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, expensively invested in going on location in Chicago this week to produce live shows that could poke some instant fun at the night’s events at the Democratic National Convention, did not get on the air until the truly wee hour of 1 a.m.
That enabled Colbert to make some timely cracks about the delay, like: “It was an extraordinary night—and extraordinarily long. Technically… we’ve just rolled over into the first night of the 2028 campaign.”
But keeping a studio audience—and a gigantic one at that, with 4,000 spectators—cooling its heels for 90 minutes and launching a show an hour into a new day was hardly what Colbert or his producers were hoping for. (OK, it was just barely into the day in Chicago, but they go to bed earlier out there.)
At least they still put on a show. Nobody pulled the plug, sent the audience home, and/or forced the network to scramble to slot in a rerun at the last minute.
That would have been a pretty drastic way for a late-night show to protest having its start time delayed.
And yet that is exactly what happened in 1992, when a still-new Jay Leno, trying to capitalize on his own political commentary in a live monologue following the first night of that year’s Republican National Convention, did not perform at all. He wound up with an unexpected night off. There was no original “Tonight” show that night.
Because the studio audience had been sent home.
It was a night of infamy in late-night lore. Leno’s manager/executive producer—a formidable woman named Helen Kushnick—really did erupt in a display of volcanic anger at what she saw as an unconscionable disruption in her plan to showcase her client’s talent for political humor with a live show. So she up and killed a scheduled network show.
There had been a bit of build-up. The DNC, held the previous month, had also messed up Kushnick’s plan for a live show with Jay by running long on its second night, principally because of a lengthy closing speech from the former Congresswoman Barbara Jordan. Kushnick, apoplectic, called the president of NBC News and insisted he take Jordan off the air mid-speech so The Tonight Show could start on time.
He refused, and a gauntlet had been thrown. When the same thing happened with Reagan speaking, Kushnick took matters into her own hands—and told the waiting audience to get up and leave.
How did this almost change the course of late-night history?
NBC executives were pushed to the limit of their tolerance over how Kushnick was running The Tonight Show. The tolerance officially ended a few weeks later when NBC decided to fire her, even though the network’s entertainment executives worried that Leno, who felt deep loyalty to Kushnick for building his career, might oppose the move in some unpredictable way. And he more or less did.
Over several days of machinations, including what NBC executives came to call an “intervention” with Jay, the decision to remove Kushnick was thrashed out with Leno who, under pressure from Helen, resisted to (almost) the bitter end.
What finally turned the tide was a promise/threat made by the then-NBC Entertainment president Warren Littlefield. He informed Leno that Kushnick was fired, gone.
“If you can’t separate, then I think it’s a mistake,” Littlefield, who had been among Leno’s staunchest backers at NBC, told his star. “I regret it, but we at NBC do have choices. And the choice we have is to tell David Letterman that it’s time to take over The Tonight Show.”
Littlefield said he expected Letterman—who was still under contract to NBC at the time, though alienated by NBC’s decision to pass him over for Jay as Johnny Carson’s successor—would “be in Burbank on 24 hours’ notice.”
He likely would have.
After a few more days of sturm and drang and flying pieces of office furniture, Kushnick was in fact removed and banned from the studio lot. Leno stayed on. No private jet was sent to pick up Letterman.
The longest, most closely observed rivalry in late-night history thus unfolded as we have come to know it, complete with memorable Super Bowl ads.
And much cooler heads now prevail at all the shows.
Certainly Colbert’s head was cool Monday night. His joy at performing in his old college town, the town where he got his comedy start at The Second City, working in the spectacular Auditorium Theatre, with one of the coolest temporary sets imaginable—the Chicago River framed by the city’s towering skyline—did not seem diminished in any way by the late hour.
If Colbert realized that the franchise he is now hosting, CBS’s Late Show, might never have existed if Jay Leno hadn’t consented to his manager’s dismissal, he didn’t show it.
What a great story, thanks!