Last night on The Jay Leno Show, the host set the jokes aside for a few minutes and provided an earnest account of the late night NBC network programming drama from his perspective, beginning in 2004 when NBC executives first approached him about handing The Tonight Show over to Conan O’Brien up until the present likelihood of taking back over following O’Brien’s departure from NBC.
Leno explained the reasoning provided to him by NBC executives when they informed him in 2004 that the network had decided to give O’Brien The Tonight Show, which Leno had, at that point, been hosting for 12 years. “I said, ‘That’s fine.’ And don’t blame Conan O’Brien. Nice guy, good family guy, great guy. He and I have talked and had not a problem since then.”
Leno then described the contract negotiations and programming maneuvers NBC went through in order to keep both him and O’Brien at the network, and the poor ratings for both late night hosts that ensued. After O’Brien refused a proposed shakeup that would have pushed his Tonight Show back to a midnight start, NBC offered Leno the show back at its traditional 11:35 time slot.
“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, I don’t know,” Leno said to cheers from the studio audience. “Through all of this, Conan O’Brien has been a gentleman. He’s a good guy, I have no animosity toward him. This is all business. You know folks? If you don’t get the ratings they take you off the air. … I wasn’t getting the ratings, he wasn’t getting them, that was NBC’s solution, it didn’t work, so, we might have an answer for you tomorrow. So we’ll see.”
