You see, Jay Leno is trying to get out of this whole debacle as an innocent and equally aggrieved party too, but frankly his previous actions don't seem to back that up. I will reproduce Jay Leno's statements from last night's monologue and bold the passages which are of particular note.
I thought maybe I should address this. At least give you my view of what has been going on here at NBC. Oh, let’s start in 2004. 2004 I’m sitting in my office, an NBC executive comes in and says to me, listen, Conan O’Brien has gotten offers from other networks. We don’t want him to go, so we’re going to give him ‘The Tonight Show.’ I said, ‘well, I’ve been number one for 12 years.’ They said, ‘we know that, but we don’t think you can sustain that.’ I said, ‘okay. How about until I fall to number two, then you fire me?’ ‘No, we made this decision.’ I said, ‘that’s fine.’ Don’t blame Conan O’Brien. Nice guy, good family guy, great guy. He and I have talked and not a problem since then. That’s what managers and people do, they try to get something for their clients. I said, ‘I’ll retire just to avoid what happened the last time.’ Okay.
Like Jay's former manager Helen Kushnick did when she helped put pressure on Johnny Carson to facilitate his exit from The Tonight Show through a series of backstage maneuvers and some well placed press coverage (things that were done with Leno deniability in mind). And Leno didn't just retire now did he?
So time goes by and we stay number one up until the day we leave. We hand - (applause)-No, no. Okay, but I’m leaving before my contract is out. About six to eight months early. So before I could go anywhere else, I would be at least a year or 18 months before I could go and do a show somewhere else. I said to NBC, ‘would you release me from my contract.’ They said, ‘we want to keep you here.’ Okay. What are your ideas? They said, ‘how about primetime?’ I said, ‘that will never work.’ No, no, we want to put you on at 10:00. We have done focus groups. People will love you at 10:00. Look at these studies showing Jay’s chin at 10:00. People will go crazy. Didn’t seem like a good idea at the time. I said, ‘alright, can I keep my staff?’ There are 175 people that work here. I said, ‘can I keep my staff?’ Yes, you can. Let’s try it. We guarantee you two years on the air, guaranteed.
Maybe I am not clear on Hollywood math, but I don't see how 8 months becomes 18 months in that above scenario. Can someone explain that to me. I also remember reading that Jay's contract was finished at the end of his run on The Tonight Show. But I have to give Jay credit. Mentioning his staff in that statement was genius, because it makes him look like a caring human being in this instance. But remember, he just said that the original contract binding him to NBC was up in 6-8 months from his final Tonight Show. And by the moves he discusses later in this monologue end up putting 200+ people, most of whom moved across country for that opportunity, out of work. There is also another little Johnny Carson story that never gets mentioned. Johnny Carson had to wait for his contract to expire at ABC before he could take the helm of The Tonight Show, and ABC held him to the last day of that contract. You are telling me that Leno couldn't have waited for his contract to end? NBC was going to continue to pay him, and he had stated publicly that he was retiring. You think the public wouldn't have waited 8 months for some other Leno project? Or that there wasn't a loophole that Leno could have used to start negotiating with networks (the same kind of loophole Letterman used to have networks pitch themselves to him while he was still under contract with NBC in 1991-2).
Now for the first four or five months against original shows like “CSI” you’ll get killed, but in the spring and summer when the reruns come, that’s when you’ll pick up. Okay, great. I agree to that.
Jay is a savvy guy. He would have been well aware of NBC's track record at 10PM, so he would have known exactly what was about to happen. It has also been widely reported that Jay wasn't forced to do this show, but rather, that at the end of his Tonight Show run, he didn't want to leave and this show was in fact a way of keeping Jay off of Fox.
Four months go by, we don’t make it. Meanwhile, Conan’s show during the summer, we’re not on, was not doing well. The great hope was that we would help him. Well, we didn’t help him any, okay. They come and go, ‘this show isn’t working. We want to let you go.’ Can you let me out of my contract? No, you’re still a valuable asset to this company. How valuable can I be? You fired me twice. How valuable can I be? Okay. So then, the affiliates are not happy. The affiliates are the ones that own the TV stations. They’re the ones that sort of makes the decisions, they’re not happy with your performance and Conan is not doing well at 11:30. I said, ‘what’s your idea?’ They said, ‘well, look, how about you do a half hour show at 11:30?’ Now, where I come from, when your boss gives you a job and you don’t do it well, I think we did a good job here, but we didn’t’ get the ratings, so you get humbled. I said, ‘okay, I’m not crazy about doing a half hour, but okay. What do you want to do with Conan?’ We’ll put him on at midnight, or 12:05, keeps “The Tonight Show” does all that, he gets the whole hour. I said, okay. You think Conan will go for that? Yes, yes. (laughter) Almost guarantee you. I said okay. Shake hands, that’s it. I don’t have a manager, I don’t have an agent, that’s my handshake deal.
Tom Shales about Conan O'Brien's start on The Tonight Show in August 2009: "He's in much better shape than Leno was at the beginning, and Carson didn't really become the master of his domain -- in terms of asserting his own identity -- until a few years into his heroic three-decade run. There've already been enough wild, socko segments on the new "Tonight Show" to fill a 90-minute "Best of Conan" special. But there's still the nagging sensation that we aren't really seeing his best -- at least not yet." I also love the fact that Jay neglects to mention that on at least two occasions he publicly undermined Conan O'Brien by basically saying either that he wanted to come back to do The Tonight Show or that if he was asked, he would definitely do it. If you don't think that Jay Leno showing up at a press conference in disguise that is discussing the Tonight Show transition to Conan O'Brien and asking "Brett Favre retired and then wanted to come back, and the Packers said no. What do you make of that?" isn't, I don't know, being a little dickish, I don't know what is. And there was that whole interview with Broadcasting & Cable where Leno is asked numerous times about taking the 11:35 slot again, and at no time does he say no he wouldn't do that. He'd do whatever the company told him to do. Now if he was talking about these things publicly, then what was he saying privately, because I have a sneaking suspicion that he was a Chatty Cathy with people at NBC about this whole situation, making it clear that he was #1 when he left late night and so on. He also admitted that he talked to the affiliates a lot, and he knew they were pleased with his performance on The Tonight Show, and he may have made a few suggestions. I'm not saying he did, but it is well within the realm of possibility.
Conan told a joke the other day where he stated "And I just want to say to the kids out there watching - you can do anything you want in life, unless Jay Leno wants to do it too." They both work in the same town, so if that lobbying was going on, Conan was probably well aware of it, and now that he is headed out the door, well, now seems like as good a time as any to say it.
And does anyone believe for a second that if they offered Jay Carson Daly's slot that he would have taken it? I have serious doubts about that. Or that he believed that Conan O'Brien would say yes to the deal as described above, because Jay wouldn't have stood for that, and in a 1992 piece in the New York Times, he was rather clear on that.
Next thing I see Conan has a story in the paper saying he doesn’t want to do that. They come back to me and they say if he decides to walk and doesn’t want to do it, do you want the show back? I go, ‘yeah, I’ll take the show back. If that’s what he wants to do. This way, we keep our people working, fine.’ So that’s pretty much where we are. It looks like we might be back at 11:30, I’m not sure. I don’t know. (applause) I don’t know. But through all of this - through all of this, Conan O’Brien has been a gentleman. He’s a good guy. I have no animosity towards him. This is all business. If you don’t get the ratings, they take you off the air. I think you know this town, you can do almost anything. You get ratings they keep you. I wasn't getting the ratings. He wasn't getting the ratings. That was NBC’s solution. It didn’t work. So we might have an answer for you tomorrow. So, we’ll see. That’s basically where it is."
And how can Jay act surprised about this. He knows exactly what that situation feels like, and he was ready to walk over it back in 1992 when they were going to take the show away from him then so he knows exactly how shitty that is to do to someone else (and if he doesn't find it ironic that it happened around 7 months in, then he is really dense). But he makes it sound like he is taking The Tonight Show back with a heavy heart. If you've been publicly angling for the job back, you can't really play that card. It doesn't work that way. To quote Leno in that earlier story: "I am disappointed. I feel like a guy who has bought a car from somebody, painted it, fixed it up and made it look nice and then the guy comes back and says he promised to sell the car to his brother-in-law." I mean, that is exactly what Conan O'Brien could be saying today.
The way things happened, Jay accepted the offer before they ran this plan by Conan, and he admitted that in his monologue. To me, that shows either a remarkable lack of respect on Leno's part, or an incredible amount of eagerness for him to have the 11:30 slot back. So yes, he is an active participant in destroying Conan at NBC, and not just by providing a lousy lead in to his show. He had to do some of the legwork to get Conan out the door by placing him in an unwinnable situation, because even if Conan accepted 12:05, Jay was still in a position to continue to kill The Tonight Show or usurp it. Conan merely saved him a step in the process (but ironically, left it in a better state than if he would have let Jay continue to erode his power and ratings on the show for months or maybe years).
Now personally, I am a political realist, so I appreciate Machiavellian schemes for power, and I think that is exactly what has happened here. The fact that Jay Leno is trying to play the victim here instead of just owning up to his complicity in this whole affair makes him not just unlikable, but someone I can't respect. If he said he wanted the show, events moved in such a way that he could get it back, so he took the network up on their offer, I'd still be pissed at him, but I could nod my head and say that at least he was honest in the pursuit. He was applauded as being clever for sneaking into a storage area to listen to a network meeting regarding his job at The Tonight Show back when it was still on shaky ground.
I mean, put it this way, I am siding with Rosie O'Donnell on this thing, you know someone who is on my Enemies List. If you haven't heard the story, well, Rosie was offered a gig as a Tonight Show Guest Host in the mid-1990's by someone at NBC which she accepted, and Jay put the kibosh on that, and then tried to still act like he was a nice guy in that mess.
The fact that so many comedians have come out against Jay Leno in all this is also telling. Jay still works a lot of comedy gigs, so if his peers who he likely rubs elbows with on a weekly basis in clubs around the country aren't directing all their anger towards NBC suggest that there is perhaps other stories that aren't being told in all this, other slights and tales of Leno being dickish. The one notable comedian who has come out in favor of Jay in this is Jerry Seinfeld, but you have to remember that he also got an NBC time slot because of this shuffle, so he isn't the most objective person in this whole thing.
But the concise way of saying this is, Jay Leno, even if it was a network decision, still pushed another person under a bus to get The Tonight Show back. If that other information wasn't out there, the fact that he agreed to take the 11:30 time slot before Conan had made been made aware of the proposal was bad enough. But the fact that Leno publicly stated he either wanted the show back or was willing to take it back if the opportunity arose makes Leno complicit in this affair, and there were likely other conversations which we may never know about which really put Leno's actions in clear perspective. He sat at that desk for 17 years, and he denied another person the joy of helming The Tonight Show (make that at least 3 people now). But somehow he's a victim in all this.
I'm sorry, but I don't think I can ever believe that.
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