Right away, I liked doing the show. People ask me why I do it and the answer is that it’s storytelling in its own right. I want to tell their stories: Peter Frampton, Herb Alpert, Rosie O’Donnell, George Stephanopoulos . . . If, during our talk, my own experiences overlapped theirs, so be it. I also wanted to interview people in the way that I wanted to be interviewed. I wanted a longer format, not like morning talk shows where the guest is on and off in six minutes after a series of prerehearsed exchanges. I wanted spontaneity. I wanted the guests to share what they wanted to share, without feeling pursued or judged. I had sat in interviews with venues like the New York Times where the assumption is always that the Times is doing you a favor. You’re taught to believe that everyone needs the approval of the Times, so you try to win over some smug writer who sits, coiled and unimpressed. Until you don’t. (I thought an effective way the Times could conquer their recent financial troubles would be to charge people a fee to have their name not mentioned in the paper.)
We recorded nearly all of our guests for an hour. Sometimes longer. No one is interested in my guests more than I am. I am, openly, a fan. I could have listened to Thom Yorke all day. We podcasted an interview with Billy Joel that was, I believe, unedited. Just the two of us, bullshitting, for over an hour. I began to think that bullshitting with the likes of Billy Joel was something I could do full-time. The deal with WNYC wasn’t bad. It wasn’t great either. I thought about the straightforwardness of the old Tomorrow show, with Tom Snyder. Perhaps I’d have a “ninja” set, like Charlie Rose, with the perimeter blacked out. No audience. Quiet. Real. Not screaming crowds as if we were on a roller coaster. I pitched the idea to Lorne.
*
While I was shooting Rock of Ages in Fort Lauderdale, I was invited to a conference of NBC executives at the Universal theme park in Orlando, Florida. TV executives who are paid a lot of money to run large divisions of broadcast and cable networks have a self-regard normally confined to former presidents. Indeed, their jobs put them in a rarified group. In Orlando, however, it was interesting to watch a gathering of relaxed, confident men talk about the business of television almost entirely devoid of the topic of content. In my brief evening among them, there wasn’t a single question about what I wanted to do or why. The concept that nobody knows anything took on a new meaning. How can you fire an exec over content when the subject never comes up? Executives at this level simply hire people to brief them on the creative worthiness of a project. Many of them didn’t watch or even like TV. Television programming was just a product sold by companies like Comcast, and as with any other network, they couldn’t have cared less what was on TV, to a degree. A time slot was like a piece of real estate. And like retail landlords, they just wanted to collect the highest rent possible.
The proposal was to give me a weekly slot on Friday nights at 12:30. It was explained that every show in the Friday 12:30 slot, on each network, was underperforming in terms of ratings. Once Fallon arrived to replace Leno, and Seth Meyers replaced Jimmy at 12:30, the network would consider giving me a crack at Seth’s Friday slot. Or, if Carson Daly returned for another season of his show Last Call, I might be given Friday nights at 1:30. None of this transpired, of course, because while NBC Entertainment was, understandably, focused on launching Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show, I was offered a one-year contract with MSNBC, as a sort of extended pilot series.
Once at MSNBC, I heard some strange and unsettling things about how the place was run. One thing that I think is worth repeating was when a veteran producer, a woman, sat me down to explain how MSNBC actually functioned. I’d been having a tough time communicating to Phil Griffin, the head of MSNBC, and to Jonathan Larsen, the producer Griffin had assigned to my show, about the style of program I had in mind. I didn’t want the usual MSNBC look, with their harsh lighting and dreary design. I thought their sets looked like a Soviet interrogation room and told them so. Larsen had recently been fired from Steve Kornacki’s show, and he told me that Griffin sent him to “babysit” me. The news division had different standards than the entertainment division, Larsen highlighted, suggesting I might invite Kathy Griffin to be my cohost. His lack of enthusiasm for me and the show was front and center. He had a contract with MSNBC and he was simply showing up for work.
In the midst of this less-than-wonderful environment, the female producer said, “Look. The people who work here are career, professional newspeople. There are not a lot of good jobs with network salaries out there anymore. Some of us have kids in private schools. We have retirement and insurance to think about. This is a good job compared to what’s out there. And, remember, no one is watching.” I squinted my “Come again.” She paused for effect. “No one is watching. The ratings are awful. But because of cable carriage fees, we’re still around. We’ve got a good thing here. So . . .” She put her finger over her mouth and shushed me. “Stop complaining.”
One day, Phil Griffin introduced me to Ronan Farrow. It wouldn’t be long before I was wondering how I could get some of what Ronan had, as he managed to remain on the air even as his ratings plummeted to 11,000 viewers among the desired demographic. My show, entitled Up Late with Alec Baldwin, pulled in low ratings in the demo as well, but our numbers were more than ten times Farrow’s, who was given a year to develop on the air. My show was dropped after five episodes. If the ratings were all of it, I’d understand. But they weren’t.