Leno Takes It on the Chin

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).