What a lovely dramatic weekend NBC had with the whole Leno vs. Conan bullshit. Time for me to vent.
NBC promised The Tonight Show to Conan back in 2004 because they were afraid to lose him to Fox. The problem was that Leno wasn’t ready to step down from The Tonight Show then, or in the middle of 2009, and this caused a similar problem for NBC in not wanting Leno to go to another network and kill them in the ratings. Their screwed up solution was to give Conan The Tonight Show but to create The Jay Leno Show and put it on at 10pm. Effectively undermining the position of The Tonight Show as the preeminent late night talk show and screwing over Conan. This led to a whole bunch of complaining by NBC’s affiliates because Leno’s ratings suck and that’s having a torpedo effect on their own news shows. All this led to the reshuffle that was announced on Sunday with the plan being to put Leno on at 11:30pm for a half hour, Conan at 12:05am and Fallon at 1:05am.
Congratulations Jay, you’ve got what you wanted since 2004, to keep The Tonight Show. That’s what this basically amounts to. The actual name of the product doesn’t matter. It’s the timeslot and the host, and Leno at 11:30pm doing the same old tired and boring comedy is The Tonight Show. Creating a show for Leno and putting him on ahead of Conan was a slap in the face, but bumping Conan to accommodate Leno is even worse. If Conan can get out of his contract and head over to Fox he should do it in a heartbeat. Not only would they throw money at him to entice him to leave NBC but he’d probably be able to shift back to the zanier presentation he had on Late Night. Everyone is well aware that he’s toned down his personality to fit with the 11:30pm timeslot and the supposed hallowed history of The Tonight Show (which is a bullshit approach to take in 2009), but a move over to Fox would allow Conan to go back to his real self.
All this conjecture is pointless though because it seems pretty obvious that Conan isn’t gonna leave NBC. He seems like too loyal a guy to bail on the network which gave him his start in late night. So he’ll probably sit there whilst NBC reshuffles again, and accommodates Leno again, and doubts him again, all because he’s a good guy and because he reveres The Tonight Show so much.
