Jay Leno and NBC: Twenty Years of Duplicity and Incompetence

Television executives are human garbage. The only people worse than them are music executives, with violent pedophiles actually being slightly better than both. They are merciless guardians of the bottom line and not only is loyalty a foreign concept to them, they see it as a sign of weakness. They can and will destroy both you and everything you love the second your value to them diminishes even slightly.

That's what makes NBC's relationship with Jay Leno so perplexing. It's almost as if they go out into the wilderness together once a year, spit on their hands and grunt that they don't know how to quit one another as they unleash their conflicted sexual identities on another and Anne Hathaway grows ever more confused.

Leno has now twice almost single-handedly brought down the NBC brand, yet the brass there keeps running back to him. Few people in the history of television have displayed such mechanical skill in manipulating soulless monsters like he has.

If you haven't read Bill Carter's books The Late Shift and The War For Late Night you really should. Few other tomes are as insightful into the depravity and incompetence that infests the human condition. You can easily apply the lessons of those books into any industry or social interaction that you find yourself life. All you really need to know is that the vast majority of the population is stupid, cowardly, or all three. Few writers have laid that out as clearly as Carter.

Some background is necessary before I touch on recent developments.

First, Johnny Carson didn't leave the Tonight Show of his own accord. Jay Leno (more exactly, his late manager, Helen Kushnick) pushed him out. Carson was handily winning his time slot, just as he had for almost thirty years. The problem was the demographics. Carson was having his ass handed to him by Arsenio Hall (remember him?) with men aged 18-54, which happens to be the only demo advertisers care about.

Leno, Carson's permanent guest host, started quietly talking to other networks (primarily ABC) about starting his own show at 11:30. The brass at NBC, not wanting to see both Arsenio and Leno competing with Carson for a demographic he was already losing, panicked. Over the next 20 years NBC would be panicking regularly, which is why they're hardly a network anymore.

The network then told Carson that he could leave on his own terms, but there was to be no mistake about his leaving. To be fair, Johnny Carson was a world-class prick his entire life, especially with NBC. He got away with that as long as he dominated the demo. Once Arsenio came along, that leverage ended, and the network was stuck with a aging, domineering host who was down to only working three days a week.

They promised Leno the Tonight Show, which is where things got interesting.

Carson had explicitly promised David Letterman the Tonight Show, and NBC had promised it to him implicitly. Letterman's contract was ending just as Leno's maneuvering had become known and Dave, himself not an easy guy to get along with, properly went insane.

Contrary to all available evidence, NBC thought Letterman would stay at Late Night while Leno took over the Tonight Show and everybody would be happy. The network had either forgotten or never cared that, without Letterman, nobody would have ever heard of Leno. Someone with as little self-esteem as Dave would never tolerate such an affront to his pride.

After months of pointless and circular negotiations, the worst case scenario happened: Letterman signed with CBS for a 12:30 show, which despite losing in the overall ratings, regularly beats Leno with men aged 18-54.

I will give NBC credit for one thing in this mess. The signed and stood by Conan O'Brien as Letterman's replacement. O'Brien was the brilliant head writer for the Simpsons and Saturday Night Live, but he had exactly no performing experience. As he himself will readily admit, O'Brien's first six months as the host of Late Night were physically painful to watch, but the network stood by their guy until he got his footing. It would be the last time NBC showed any courage whatsoever.

Fast forward about 12 years.

Conan started worrying about beginning and ending his career at 12:30. Like everybody else in comedy at the time, he dreamt of hosting the Tonight Show. If Leno was going to try to beat Carson's reign, O'Brien would start putting out feelers elsewhere and he started talking seriously to Fox, which would have been a perfect fit for Conan's style.

Once again, NBC panicked. They concocted a deal where Leno would relinquish the Tonight Show to Conan in five years and everybody would live happily ever after.

Or not. Toward the end of his contract, Leno started talking to ABC (which was apparently willing to throw the much funnier Kimmy Kimmel and Nightline - which beats all of the comedy shows in the ratings - over the side.)

NBC panicked yet again. Just as was true in 1992-'93, they didn't want their two late night hosts on competing networks when they could keep them both. They came up with an idea the looked great on paper, but proved to be a disaster in practice: They signed Leno to do a show at 10 pm.

Prime time dramas cost about a million dollars an episode to make, whereas talk shows barely cost a tenth of that. Even if Leno caused a dip in prime time ratings, the network would still make more money with him there.

NBC couldn't stop congratulating themselves for their own brilliance, at least until the ratings came in. What they hadn't counted on was that absolutely no one was interested in watching Jay Leno at 10. If another network started broadcasting kiddie porn, it would have beaten the Jay Leno Show. NBC affiliates were dropping Leno at an alarming rate, and there was almost nothing the network could do about it.

At the same time, Conan was finding his feet in an earlier time slot and the Tonight Show's ratings had dipped. Unsurprisingly, NBC panicked.

This was complicated by the contract they gave Leno for the prime time show. They stupidly gave him a "play or pay" deal. They committed to air the show for two years. If for whatever reason the show was cancelled before that, the network had to pay Leno $50 million and let him immediately go to another network.

Faced with that, NBC chose to fuck with Conan. They wanted to move Leno to 11:35 for a half hour, and move the Tonight Show to 12:05. O'Brien rightly refused and tense negotiations about ending his contract ensued. In the end, Conan walked away with about $37 million and was only kept of the air for a few months before going to cable.

You would think that NBC would have had its fill of late night drama by now, right?

Guess again.

There’s word that NBC brass are ruminating over Jay Leno’s future — which would involve finally giving their current late-late guy comic, Jimmy Fallon, the coveted job as the host of "The Tonight Show."

The latest rumblings about Leno come from various talent agents who admit they have quietly been contacted by NBC officials hoping to find a new late-late host who will eventually take over Fallon’s 12:35 a.m. time slot.

Leno’s current $15 million a year deal expires in 2014, and came about after he “volunteered” to take a 50% pay cut earlier this year, a move that helped NBC slash "The Tonight Show’s" $100 million budget by about 20%.

What's going to happen next year is perhaps the easiest prediction to make in human history. Not only Jay Leno seem to have no life outside of television, he has the survival instincts of a fucking cockroach. More importantly, we have two decades of experience demonstrating just how nutless NBC is when it comes to Leno.

Not only will he not go quietly, he won't go anywhere at all. My guess is that by spring we'll start hearing about Leno talking to Fox (since ABC seems committed to Jimmy Kimmel, that avenue is closed off.) Astronomical numbers will be bandied about, and word will go out about Fox strong-arming affiliates in giving a potential Jay Leno show 100% network clearance (meaning that individual stations have to carry it, much like NBC does with the Tonight Show.)

And, as they did in 1992 and 2009, NBC will panic. And this time, it'll be Jimmy Fallon would gets it, sans lube. Don't worry about him, though. If there's one person that Fox probably wants more than Leno, it's Fallon.

But NBC will have screwed three of its 12:35 hosts - Letterman, O'Brien and Fallon - in favor of Leno in a row. Who would be crazy and desperate enough to take over Late Night under those circumstances? No one with any career prospects or human dignity would subject themselves to that, and any one that would is almost guaranteed to be a loser in the ratings.

There's gotta be a point where Jay Leno and NBC know how to quit either other or there won't be an NBC at all.


I couldn't address this topic without sharing this, the most brilliant takedown of Jay Leno ever. Better still, it was done to Leno's face.

And here's Letterman venting some hate.



And Howard Stern ...



I'd love to share some moments from Conan's last week or so at the Tonight Show but the cowards at NBC appear to have stripped them all from YouTube, the bastards.