America’s safest comedian, Jay Leno, is now Public Enemy No. 1. Just after New Year’s Day, NBC became entangled in a Mexican standoff with Leno, the former host of the Tonight Show, and Conan O’Brien, the then-host of the Tonight Show. And lots of people took sides against Leno. Protestors assembled outside the NBC studios at 30 Rockefeller Center chanting slogans such as “Leno kills puppies!” Aaron Barnhart, the TV critic for the Kansas City Star, wrote that Leno was “a two-faced, hypocritical, unfunny lying jerk.” The New York Observer likened him to Gollum. In the Wall Street Journal, Joe Queenan compared Leno to Hitler. David Letterman took shots at Leno on CBS. So did Jimmy Kimmel on ABC. Even Leno’s NBC colleagues on Saturday Night Live went after him.
Leno’s crime was agreeing to return as host of the Tonight Show. It’s odd that a case of corporate succession planning would animate such a spectacle. But in any event, the protestors, TV writers, and comics have it all wrong: The person to blame for Conan O’Brien leaving the Tonight Show is Conan O’Brien.
This slow-motion train wreck began in April 2004 when NBC renewed Leno’s contract. After Johnny Carson left the show in 1992, there had been a fight to replace him. NBC chose Leno, and the defeated David Letterman left for CBS, where he set up a competing franchise. Letterman beat Leno in the ratings at first, but by 1995, Leno had retooled Tonight and turned it into a juggernaut. By the time he re-upped his contract in 2004, he had beaten Letterman for nine consecutive years.
Five months later, it was time for O’Brien’s contract to be renegotiated. O’Brien was host of Late Night, the show that followed Tonight and, like Leno’s, owned its time-slot. But O’Brien was no longer content to host Late Night—he wanted Leno’s job. According to a Variety report at the time, O’Brien “made it clear to NBC execs that there were opportunities elsewhere” and that he would leave the network if they did not give him Leno’s show.
NBC didn’t want to lose O’Brien, but also didn’t want Leno to take his successful show elsewhere. So programming chief Jeff Zucker tried to strike a compromise: He signed a deal with O’Brien guaranteeing that he would take over as host of the Tonight Show in 2009. As part of the deal, O’Brien was guaranteed to remain as host of Tonight for at least two years or he would be entitled to a payout of $60 million.
The news was a surprise. Leno was only 54, and his show still dominated the ratings, pulling in 5.5 million viewers a night. He didn’t want to leave Tonight, but he didn’t have very many options. He asked to be released from his contract, but NBC refused. The network wanted him out of the time slot, but didn’t want him to go elsewhere and set up a competing show. The executives in charge figured that they had time to come up with a way to square the circle.
And Leno kept delivering for NBC. He was a good corporate soldier and brought O’Brien onto his show. Leno smiled and said all the right things. By 2006, his ratings were up slightly, to 5.7 million viewers, widening his lead over Letterman (who had just 4.2 million viewers) and crushing Jimmy Kimmel (whose show brought in only 1.6 million viewers). To get a sense of how important Leno was to NBC, consider this: 2006 was a down year in late-night advertising sales, yet Leno’s Tonight took in $250 million that year, clearing a net of $160 million, 15 percent of the network’s total profits.
Zucker still hadn’t figured out what to do with Leno and still refused to let him out of his contract, claiming that he wanted to keep him at NBC “for life.” But a strange idea was being floated: Perhaps the network could simply move Leno’s show to primetime.
It wasn’t the first time the network had toyed with the notion of a prime time talk show. In 1981, they had discussed the idea with Carson. Three years ago they had approached Oprah Winfrey about doing one, too. In December 2008, NBC announced that the Jay Leno Show would air 5 nights a week, 46 weeks a year, at 10 p.m. It would be substantially the same show as Tonight, only 90 minutes earlier. Leno’s new contract was, in relative terms, modest. He didn’t want full ownership of the show, for instance. But it did stipulate that, if the Jay Leno Show was taken off the air before two years had passed, Leno would be owed $80 million. To anyone paying attention, this was a declaration that while the network was willing to experiment and give in to O’Brien’s demands, if push came to shove, they would return to Leno (and save $20 million by buying out O’Brien).
Leno left Tonight in May 2009; O’Brien took over the next month. His ratings were strong initially. He held onto the lead over Letterman for several weeks. But then his numbers began to drop. By August, Letterman was beating him handily, with 3.41 million viewers to O’Brien’s 2.47 million. (Before he stepped down, Leno’s 2009 average had been 4.4 million viewers.) During the summer, it got so bad that O’Brien was even losing to Letterman repeats.
The next month, Leno’s primetime show launched. It was a debacle. Leno’s ratings in primetime started out low and trended downward. Having such a poorly performing show at 10 p.m. crippled the 11 p.m. newscasts of NBC’s local affiliates. And O’Brien’s ratings at 11:30 remained stagnant.
In November, Letterman beat O’Brien with 3.88 million viewers to 2.33 million viewers. By contrast, in November 2008, Leno had won the slot for NBC with 4.76 million viewers to Letterman’s 3.95 million. As Jeff Gaspin, NBC’s head of television programming, glumly put it, “If you look at the ratings in households, NBC is down 14 percent, while Conan is down 49 percent. In adults 18-49, NBC was down 16 percent but Tonight was down 23 percent.” O’Brien’s tenure was an unmitigated disaster for what had been an intensely profitable arm of the network.
Leno’s 10 p.m. ratings were so bad, moreover, that a third of the local affiliates were threatening to preempt his show. NBC had to make a change. They could fire Leno, pay him $80 million, and hope that O’Brien managed to find an audience. (Which, you’ll remember, he failed to do even before Leno’s primetime bomb was on the air.) Or they could fire O’Brien, pay him $60 million, and hand the Tonight Show back to the guy who dominated the time slot for 14 years. Quite sensibly, NBC chose Leno.
The network’s opening move was to cancel Leno’s primetime show. During the first week of January, they announced that the Jay Leno Show would be pared down and moved back to 11:35, meaning that O’Brien’s Tonight Show would be bumped to 12:05. This gambit wasn’t intended as a compromise—it was an attempt to prod O’Brien into quitting, so he wouldn’t be owed his $60 million.
But O’Brien wasn’t going to let NBC off cheap: His contract specified that he was entitled to the payout if he was no longer hosting a program called the Tonight Show and he was willing to litigate the disagreement. A few days later, NBC and O’Brien reached a settlement: He would leave Tonight with $32 million for himself and $12 million in payments to his cast and crew. More important, O’Brien would be free to work on a competing show in September 2010. The one stipulation NBC foisted on O’Brien was a “no disparagement” clause, which prevents him from publicly speaking ill of the network (and Leno) until September 2010. But then NBC generously chose not to invoke the clause until after O’Brien had left Tonight, meaning that for two weeks, he used their airwaves for self-pitying jokes such as, “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.”
All in all, it was a much better deal than NBC had been willing to grant Leno when they took the Tonight Show away from him in the first place.
In any rational reading of the events, Leno is not the villain. At worst, he is guilty of working to hold on to a job he did very well. It was O’Brien who demanded he be given someone else’s job. It was O’Brien who failed to perform once he was sitting in the big chair. It was O’Brien who whined publicly when NBC changed its mind. And it’s O’Brien who walks away from failure with an enormous pot of gold.
In the end, Conan O’Brien’s partisans don’t seem to care much about any of that. They’re more concerned about making sure the world knows how sophisticated they are and that NBC went the Middle America route. Yet if everyone who claimed to adore Conan O’Brien during the last few weeks had actually watched his program, he’d still be hosting the Tonight Show.
Jonathan V. Last is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
