Television : Are You Really Ready for the Late-Night Talk-Show Wars?

In Times Square, “Tonight Show” host Jay Leno’s massive mug, pasted on a 25-by-75-foot billboard, is grinning down over New York like a Cheshire cat beneath the slogan “America Is Standing Up for Jay.” Similar outdoor billboards are posted in a dozen major markets throughout the country, substituting the name of the local city for America .

Every night on 2,300 United Artists movie screens nationwide, Chevy Chase gently reminds theater patrons to visit the concession stand, not smoke and, oh yeah, not forget his new late-night talk show. A life-size cardboard standee of Chase in 40,000 supermarkets across the country gives a less subtle pitch for “The Chevy Chase Show,” which premieres Sept. 7 on Fox.

CBS viewers can’t miss David Letterman’s barrage of on-air promotional spots--80 of them in all--featuring Letterman standing in front of the network’s time-honored eye logo. “Don’t you think that CBS eye thing is a little creepy?” he says in one spot. In another he says, “If you remove the glass from your TV set, you can feed me peanuts.”

Welcome to the dawning of a new age in late-night television. For four decades now the nighttime landscape has been dominated by one huge pillar in “The Tonight Show.” That all changes Monday night at 11:35, when Letterman goes up against his former network, NBC. For the first time, the broad appeal Leno brings to “Tonight” will be seriously challenged by an established talk-show host with a fiercely loyal following.

And there’s more to come. The next week, Chase will premiere his new 11 p.m. show on Fox. To discourage viewers from switching over to the other hosts’ opening monologues--or to the start of Ted Koppel’s “Nightline” on ABC, the highest-rated series in late night--Chase plans to do a version of his signature “Nightly News Update” from his “Saturday Night Live” days each night at precisely 11:35.

Then, beginning Sept. 13, newcomer Conan O’Brien will keep NBC’s “Late Night” series alive when he takes over Letterman’s old 12:35 a.m. time slot. In six months, CBS plans to introduce a similar 12:35 a.m. talk show to follow Letterman and compete with O’Brien. They both join two other hosts who already air heavily in that later time slot: the syndicated Arsenio Hall and Rush Limbaugh.

All these tireless talk-show hosts have one thing in common: They are trying to stake out a claim in the lucrative late-night market, into which advertisers pump more than $400 million in annual revenues. Since Johnny Carson’s retirement last year, the field has turned into a chessboard on which challengers are making calculated moves to capture the king’s throne--or in Leno’s case, retain it:

* Last month, Chase became Frito-Lay’s newest pitchman--a position that once belonged to Leno--and he now stars in a TV commercial running on CBS, ABC and NBC. “That way we could advertise Chevy on the other networks,” a senior Fox executive said. On Friday night, Fox will beat the drums for Chase by airing his hit 1985 theatrical comedy “Fletch.”

* To freshen up “The Tonight Show,” Leno unveiled a new animated opening on Monday along with a new set, replacing the Pacific Coast Highway background mural with a downtown Los Angeles skyline.

“If you want to say there’s these other shows coming so we’re putting in a new set, you can say that,” Leno said. Bandleader Branford Marsalis is also preparing a revised theme song.

* On Friday night, CBS-owned stations, including KCBS-TV Channel 2 in Los Angeles, trumpeted the arrival of Letterman with a half-hour behind-the-scenes infomercial on the making of “Late Show With David Letterman.”

“When we lost Dave to CBS, we said, ‘Oh, we’ll get back at them. We’ll put posters up at construction sites all over New York and hand out flyers for Jay as people are waiting in line for Dave’s show,’ ” said a good-natured John Miller, NBC’s executive vice president of advertising, promotion and event programming.

“We had elaborate plans--trucks with loudspeakers driving around the Ed Sullivan Theatre,” Miller said, referring to the location of Letterman’s new show. “It was fun to think about for a while, but then sanity hit. We decided that was not the best thing to do.”

On Monday night, after months of planning, positioning and promoting, the games will finally begin. A bevy of A-list talent has been lined up for the next two weeks, including Bill Murray and Billy Joel on Letterman, Garth Brooks on Leno and Goldie Hawn on Chase. Despite all the hype, the shows’ hosts and producers all claim to be concentrating solely on the creative aspects of what they are doing.

“I’m trying to write jokes. Everybody else is playing Stratego,” Leno said with a laugh.

If It Ain’t Broke . . .

Letterman briefly considered making changes in his late-night format when he moved to CBS but decided against it.

“We had two discussions about what to change and what not to change, and they didn’t last very long,” said executive producer Peter Lassally. “Dave’s monologue at NBC was three or four minutes long, while Jay does seven or eight minutes. But four minutes is comfortable for Dave. In the end, we realized everything we do kind of works. So why change it?”

Lassally and fellow executive producer Robert Morton say Letterman’s “Late Show” will be no different from what he did on NBC, even though the network has threatened to sue for copyright infringement over such bits as Stupid Pet Tricks and the Top 10 lists. Those things will be part of Letterman’s new show “in some form,” Lassally said.

The only real difference, the producers say, is the shift in location from Rockefeller Center to the Ed Sullivan Theatre, built in 1927, in the Broadway district. CBS lowered the stage and built a chic late-night set, dropping it into the gothic-opera setting. Paul Shaffer added two members--playing synthesizer and guitar--to his band to help fill the bigger house.

Letterman will continue taping comedy remotes, only now he will react to the new environment--such as the Broadway Theatre across the street, where “Miss Saigon” is playing. In one segment already taped, he follows a repairman who is sniffing around to find which vent is leaking the deep-fried aromas of a chicken takeout restaurant downstairs.

*

Chase also is trying to distance himself from all the talk of competition to concentrate on his work.

“I don’t want to be conversant in the business side of this show,” he said. “I’d drive myself nuts if I worried about that.”

Chase plans on incorporating many of the elements he developed for “Saturday Night Live” into his show, including “cold” openings every night. They might take place from the street, the parking lot or the rooftop of the show’s Hollywood home, the old Aquarius Theatre on Sunset Boulevard. Fox took out a five-year lease on the Aquarius, then gutted, renovated and renamed it the Chevy Chase Theatre.

Chase also plans to work skits into his show. Remember the Land Shark from “Saturday Night Live”? That character will reappear on Fox as a Tyrannosaurus rex. “I just have to do my comedy, and my form of art, because that’s what I do,” he said. “That’s the only approach any of us (hosts) can take.”

But a closer examination reveals a much more concerted, aggressive approach by network executives, who have invested hard cash into researching their respective creative geniuses and devising master plans to steal the night. That’s why the CBS brass eagerly lured Letterman from NBC with a three-year, $42-million salary, and Fox executives hooked Chase with a reported two-year, $9-million deal.

“The goal is to develop a late-night franchise,” said Rod Perth, CBS’ vice president of late-night and non-network programming.

Smart Versus Nice

It’s doubtful that any single talk-show host in today’s crowded marketplace could duplicate the huge profits Carson made for NBC during his 30-year career, but Perth believes that it is time somebody tries. CBS is the top-rated network in prime time, but last season it commanded just 15.4% of the late-night advertising revenue among the Big Three networks, compared to 18.8% for ABC and a massive 65.8% for NBC.

Perth explained that a late-night franchise gives a network an identifiable personality in the host. Koppel, he said, has done a great deal to counter the youthful image of ABC with his newsy “Nightline.” A late-night franchise can also pull viewers into prime time with good promotion, and when people turn their TV sets back on the next morning they tend to stay with that network’s morning news program.

Now, with all the networks getting their feet wet in late-night talk, there’s only one question left: Who are people going to watch?

Most of the debate on that issue has centered on the competition between Leno, the nice guy, and Letterman, the smart guy.

“Dave is very different from Jay,” said Garry Shandling, who turned down an offer this month from CBS to host a late-night talk show following Letterman. Shandling chose instead to do two more years of his HBO series “The Larry Sanders Show,” which parodies the absurdities of late-night TV.

“Dave is less predictable and probably a little hipper,” Shandling said. “Jay is comfortable for the audience to watch because he has a less distinct point of view, which usually means a broader audience base. I believe that the two shows will divide up the market in a way that allows both of them to continue.”

Betsy Frank, executive vice president of the Saatchi & Saatchi advertising agency, is not so sure. After all, she said, Leno has already bucked the critics to maintain Carson’s ratings quite nicely during the past 15 months. “I think Letterman will do very well, but I think Leno will win overall. Leno is not considered hip, but he represents the rest of the country, while it is possible that Letterman, Chevy and Arsenio could split up the young urban crowd.”

*

Meanwhile, Miller said NBC is in no rush for “Late Night With Conan O’Brien,” starring the former “Saturday Night Live” writer, to establish itself. Letterman, after all, was largely unknown when he debuted on “Late Night” a decade ago.

“I’m not going to be on the cover of Newsweek the first week I come on: ‘Conan Slays America,’ ” said O’Brien, 31. “And NBC seems to understand that. There’s some heat on me to do a good show. Certainly, I wouldn’t say it’s a pressure-free zone, but I don’t think I’m in a war with anybody.”

Examining Leno’s competition, Miller said: “What’s tough in the case of Chevy (is that) people don’t know what that show is yet, so research can’t tell us too much until we see the show. With Dave you know what his show is, but Dave is pretty polarizing. Dave has some real fans, and there are people who don’t like him. There’s not that strong negative with Jay.”

Playing the Numbers

But both CBS and Fox are convinced that they have found the hosts who can eventually supplant Leno--and each is armed with reams of carefully conducted research to prove its point.

CBS began the process in November to persuade Letterman to choose CBS over a number of potential suitors. David Poltrack, senior vice president of planning and research for CBS Broadcast Group, devised a complex “ratings-projection model,” factoring in competitive scenarios and concluding that Letterman would do better on CBS than on any other outlet.

“CBS did research on the type of coffee cup to have on the desk,” joked Letterman’s executive producer Morton.

Once CBS did sign Letterman in January, Poltrack set out to challenge the perception that Letterman’s caustic humor appeals only to the white, college-age males who rallied around NBC’s “Late Night With David Letterman,” because CBS has built its success on adult viewers. “There was a lot of discussion whether David Letterman was compatible with CBS’ audience profile,” Poltrack said.

He was surprised to learn that Letterman’s share of young women and middle-aged men and women was almost equal to his share of young men. It’s just that more young men watch TV after midnight, Poltrack said, lending the appearance that only they like Letterman.

“We found the popularity of David Letterman is much broader than the myth has it, or than the press accounts have it,” said Poltrack, whose latest research shows a much higher interest among viewers of all ages to tune in to Letterman than Leno. “So when he moves earlier, he has great potential to expand his audience.”

Such information came as no surprise to the Letterman camp. “People forget that David Letterman has changed as he’s gotten older,” Morton said. “The David Letterman who used to throw watermelons and other objects off the roof--he hasn’t done that in five or six years. So the notion that he used to do things at 12:35 a.m. that he can’t do at 11:35 p.m. doesn’t apply.”

*

Madison Avenue has backed the unproven Letterman and time-tested Leno equally, paying an average of $30,000 for each 30-second commercial spot--double what CBS was charging for its revolving crime dramas “Crimetime After Primetime,” which will move to 12:35 a.m. to make room for Letterman.

CBS has already sold out most of its commercial inventory for Letterman and expects to net $100 million this season in ad revenue. That’s roughly one-fourth of the entire late-night market, easily justifying Letterman’s $14-million annual salary. (The half-hour “Nightline” still commands the highest ad rates at $45,000 for a 30-second spot.)

Because of contractual obligations, however, only 68% of CBS affiliates will carry Letterman at the time specified by CBS. The rest will delay the show half an hour or more. As a result, most advertisers expect Leno to win the ratings race the first year, with the second year up for grabs as CBS stations start airing Letterman at the same time.

“The consensus within the advertising industry is that Letterman will attract more 18- to 49-year-olds than Leno,” said Bill Croasdale, president of broadcast television for Western International Media, a media-buying service. “Leno’s key audience is older, 25- to 54-year-olds, partly as a result of inheriting the Carson audience and partly as a result of Leno’s own comedy style.

“Leno has the No. 1 talk show, and I think he’ll win by anywhere from half a ratings point to a full ratings point ahead of Letterman in the first season. But, in the second season, I think Letterman could become the king of late-night comedy in overall ratings as well as demographics.”

Minding Their Qs

Don’t tell that to the people at Fox. Because if Chase can pull off a comedy show that people like, he stands to be the dark horse in this race. The independent research firm Marketing Evaluations, which measures the popularity of celebrities with something called a “Q score,” says Chase rates higher with adults ages 18 to 49 than Leno, Letterman and Arsenio Hall combined.

“Clearly the biggest advantage we have is a blockbuster talent, by every evaluation we can make,” said Andy Fessel, senior vice president of research and marketing for Fox.

The Q score is derived by taking the number of people who are aware of a particular talent, and dividing that into the number of them who say that talent is a favorite. Chase rates a 44 with adults 18 to 49, followed by Letterman at 19, Hall at 17 and Leno at 8.

People who are responsible for the creative aspects of a show “walk a fine line between how much to believe research or fight research, but over the years I’ve learned you can’t ignore it,” said “Chevy Chase” executive producer Steve Binder, who used to produce Steve Allen on “Tonight.”

“One of the highest pluses we’ve found is how much the audience is looking forward to him doing news updates again.”

Much of this research is academic for Fox executives, they say, because Chase has virtually no talk-show competition at 11 p.m.

“What you face in late night is an inclination for the viewer to turn off the TV and go to bed,” Fessel said. “Our show going on 35 minutes before any of the other shows is a tremendous opportunity. We’re up mostly against late local news, and viewers claim late local news is a repeat of what they’ve seen earlier in the day.”

Fox is even selling advertising on “Chevy Chase” in two different blocks. A 30-second commercial during the first half-hour reportedly costs $30,000, but the price is reduced to $20,000 during the second half-hour when the competition heats up. Word is that Fox even plans to run its commercials out of sync with the competition, in hopes that Leno and Letterman viewers will flip over to Chase during commercial breaks.

Poltrack at CBS is not impressed with Fox’s findings. He points out that Chase’s awareness level is so high because people know him as a movie star as well as a “Saturday Night Live” alumnus. In his own research for CBS, Poltrack found that viewers expect “The Chevy Chase Show” to be more like “SNL” than a talk show, and he believes they’re going to be disappointed when they find a more conventional talk format.

By his own admission, Chase is not exactly sure how his show will take shape yet.

“We’re starting to put ideas up on the board and look at them, and we don’t know what the hell we’re doing,” he said last week. “That’s the real truth. I think what I’m facing here is something I’ve always liked--my back against the wall.”

The C List

Another challenge Chase may face as a new entry in the late-night arena is booking guests--a problem many believe was the downfall of Dennis Miller’s syndicated show last year. “I’m not going to commit any of my clients to Chevy Chase’s show until I see what it is,” said the head of one top public-relations firm in town.

Poltrack’s research at CBS has shown that with so many choices, the deciding factor may be the guests. Although the competition has been intense, there do not appear to be the kind of booking wars for guests that plagued “The Tonight Show” and “Arsenio Hall” last year. Each show has vowed not to set policies that might encourage such conflict.

Letterman’s producers have found it easier to book higher-profile guests now that their show is in an earlier time slot. Still, they plan to continue having bizarre guests, such as the Crazy Pie Lady from Oklahoma and Kamar the Discount Magician, who botches every trick he does. They say being in New York is a great advantage in avoiding the clamor for guests.

“This is one of the reasons we decided to stay in New York, so we wouldn’t get into the sameness of going after the same 20 guests each week,” Lassally said, referring to the show’s earlier decision not to relocate to Los Angeles. “We had this image of all these limos filled with stars heading in all different directions.”

To start out, at least, all the talk shows will be trying to catch “Nightline”--even though competitors are quick to point out that “Nightline” has an easier time in the ratings race because it is only half an hour long.

“We don’t consider ourselves in competition with the entertainment talk shows, but there may be an advantage in being the one fixed point in a changing landscape,” said Tom Bettag, executive producer of “Nightline.”

“Nightline’s” ratings have been up about 20% in recent months, Bettag said, as the show has moved away from its traditional format to include more investigative reporting and on-scene reporting by Koppel. These changes, Bettag said, were made to freshen the program and not as a competitive reaction. “We don’t plan to do anything different in response to the other shows coming on.”

And the Loser Is . . .

No matter who wins in the ratings, industry observers expect all this late-night business to be good for the networks. Right now, NBC, ABC and CBS average about a 50% share of all late-night viewing, compared to 61% of prime-time viewing. There’s reason to believe that the networks can steal back enough viewers from syndication and cable to find a supportive audience for each talk show.

That could leave Arsenio Hall, without network support, out in the cold. His syndicated show was airing in quality time slots on CBS and Fox affiliates, but many of those network stations have recently dropped Hall or shuffled him to early-morning hours to make room for Letterman and Chase.

“Certainly Arsenio’s future is threatened,” said Dick Kurlander, a programming vice president for Petry Television, which consults independent TV stations on which programs to buy. “Irrespective of Chevy Chase and David Letterman, his ratings have eroded rather significantly over the past two years.”

There has been speculation that Hall, who has just produced his first feature film and is in the last year of his contract with Paramount Television, may bail out after this season. Hall and Paramount executives declined to comment for this story, but they have stated before that they are in this for the long haul.