As I surfed around some of my favorite movie websites yesterday I quickly found myself up to my cyber-neck in publicity regarding the new Harry Potter movie. That is understandable, of course. The film will undoubtedly be the biggest thing to hit screen this year. In fact, I’ll make a quick and not particularly risky prediction that it will be the biggest opening weekend for a movie in history. I know I’ll be sure to catch it, but that’s not what caught my eye.
Amidst all this, I saw a review of a movie made about a muggle. It was about one in particular, who about this time last year was one of the biggest names in American pop culture. Just one year since then, this person is still a celebrity, but has faded into the background and now borders on irrelevant. The movie created virtually no stir and considerably less than a stir at the box office. The film is “Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop,” and chronicles the live tour on which he embarked after being dropped from The Tonight Show,” which he called “The Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tour.”
The name of the tour is telling, because O’Brien has been playing the victim in this whole thing ever since the first rumblings of his falling ratings were heard. The press, enamored with O’Brien since the second or third year of his hosting “Late Night,” has been happy to egg him on. They, along with others who had been consistently losing to Leno in the ratings such as David Letterman and Jimmy Kimmel, have painted Jay Leno as a conniving villain, twisting his mustache while plotting O’Brien’s demise.
The problem is, it’s not true. Most of the analysis of this whole situation has been completely off-base, and the anger misdirected. It’s one of the most misunderstood series of events in pop culture. Personally, I think Letterman is the funniest when he wants to be, but he’s grown lazy and has been phoning it in for five or six years now. But I respect Leno, who is named by nearly all professional stand-ups as one of the best of all time. Casting him as the bad guy here is both inaccurate and unfair.
The real villain in this story is the NBC network itself and Jeff Zucker, the President of NBC Universal in particular. They made a series of contractual and programming errors that led to it all. Yet people think Leno was the bad guy here, and his reputation has suffered as a result, which is a shame because Leno was much more a victim at the start of this than Conan ever was.
Let’s forget for a moment who you think is the best host, or the funniest guy, or whatever. Let’s try to look at this objectively. Let’s go back five years before Leno left the “Tonight Show” for the first time, and let’s put ourselves in his shoes.
Leno guest-hosted the “Tonight Show” when the king was still on his throne. The last few years before Johnny Carson’s retirement, he got the opportunity to host the show Monday nights while Carson lowered his workload. He realized it really was his dream job, and when the king abdicated the throne after 30 years of unparalleled success and excellence, Leno was an obvious top contender for the full-time job.
The other is David Letterman, of course. Letterman assumed the job would be his when Carson stepped down. Exactly why Letterman assumed he was heir apparent is a mystery. No one told him he was next. NBC had two wildly successful and profitable shows, “The Tonight Show” and “Late Night.” While there are plenty of examples in TV history of a network spinning off a successful show into two successful shows (it’s done fairly frequently), I can’t think of a single time a network went the other way and made two successful shows into one. There’s a reason for that, and that is of course taking two ratings winners and making them one ratings winner is freaking stupid. Still, Letterman thought for reasons known only to him that he was playing AAA baseball waiting for the call-up to the big leagues. It was naïve and foolish, but there it was.
So NBC decided that it would rather have two successful shows rather than one (duh) they gave “The Tonight Show” to Leno. As we all know, this hurt Letterman severely, and when his contract was up he declared free agency and ended up getting “The Late Show” on CBS. At first, it even looked like Letterman had won. In the first couple of years of the shows going head-to-head, Letterman’s new show was outstanding and it won the ratings battle. Writer Bill Carter even wrote a book called “The Late Shift” about the saga that declared Letterman the winner.
The only problem about that was the fight hadn’t gone all 12 rounds yet. Leno slowly and steadily found his audience again, and began to catch up. Finally, he passed Letterman in the ratings and stayed there for years. Only certain episodes would bump Letterman over Leno. Overall, it was Jay winning night after night, week after week, year after year. Combined with Conan O’Brien’s following on “Late Night,” NBC was raking in huge money and solid ratings, validating its decision.
Then they forgot what brought them to the dance. As chronicled in Carter’s second book on this genre, “The War for Late Night”, in an effort to keep O’Brien from leaving the network, NBC made a promise it would come to regret. During negotiations for a new contract with Conan, they told him if he signed he would then be made the new host of “The Tonight Show” down the road. Conan eagerly signed, and NBC broke the news to Leno that they wanted to renew his contract for five years, but that it would be his last. After it was up, the show would go to Conan.
So let’s examine what happened here. Conan, whom Leno introduced on his show and always supported, always mentioning that “The Tonight Show” viewers should stay tuned for Conan, had just put together a deal that shoved Leno out of the chair where he’d been number one for years. And Leno is the bad guy here?
Leno, despite this, went on the air like a good and loyal soldier and announced he was leaving in a five years and he was happy to be handing the baton off to Conan. He then proceeded to spend the last few years of his time on “The Tonight Show” beating Letterman night after night (I’m leaving out Kimmel because he was, is, and remains, a mere blip on the radar). Again, Leno is the bad guy?
He would have had every right to pitch a fit. He’d done his job. He was number one. He always did whatever NBC asked, he loved doing the show to the point that he actually negotiated for less time off (true story), and they thanked him by giving him the shove-off just to keep Conan happy.
When the time came, Leno graciously had Conan on his show, and then reluctantly walked away from the job he loved and had done successfully for 17 years, all because NBC had gone through a TV programming version of a midlife crisis. They had dumped him for a younger, prettier girlfriend, in this case the young and “hipper” Conan.
It wasn’t long before NBC realized their new girlfriend had some serious issues. The Conan version of “The Tonight Show” started showing worrisome signs almost from the beginning. I watched the first week of shows and while the debut had moments, I remember being disappointed. The rest of the week, for which Conan and his crew had months to prepare, came off flat and bland. I was a fan of him on “Late Night” but the differences between the looser, more relaxed Conan that came on at 12:35 a.m. and the stiff, watered-down Conan on “The Tonight Show” were obvious. Everything seemed forced.
The ratings of course were monstrous at first, but they trailed off as the week went on and then kept on going down. As the summer of 2009 went by, Conan slipped up and failed in the one task he was hired to do, which was keep NBC on top in that timeslot. Letterman began to win again.
Conan began making excuses, and it is important to note that he began losing to Letterman before Leno’s 10 p.m. show debuted. The first excuse was that NBC was a third or fourth-place network so he was starting at a disadvantage. This holds no water because for years Letterman’s CBS was the highest-rated network on TV, with NBC languishing further back. Despite this, Leno beat Letterman in the ratings for years. Jay wasn’t winning just because more people were watching NBC in the first place. They weren’t. He was winning because people were changing the channel to see him.
Things were bad in NBC prime-time as well, so looking they executives decided to try a new concept, a 10 p.m. talk show on weeknights that would be cheap to produce. Leno, who had done well for them in late night for years, would host it. If it worked it would free NBC from having to pay for expensive 10 p.m. dramas that didn’t get good ratings anyway. It was a bold – and very flawed – idea.
So NBC put the “Jay Leno Show” on the air in the fall of 2009. Again, this is after Conan had lost first place. Affiliates were happy to have Leno back at first, being that he provided solid ratings and thus advertising money for them for years. Trouble is, late night and prime time are two totally different things. Keep in mind even the highest-rated late night show has ratings that are dwarfed by just about any prime time show, just because far more people are watching TV from 8-11 than late at night. But they decided to try it anyway.
The format for a late night show is fairly basic. You load the good stuff toward the front so people watch it before they go to sleep. So the monologue goes first, the comedy bit second, the biggest guest on that night’s show right after that. Basic.
Prime time is trickier. You have to put something up first to grab attention, but then you have to maintain it all the way through. The traditional late night format of putting the good stuff on first and then trailing off wouldn’t work in prime time. That would leave the local news (which are cash cows for local stations) with a weak lead-in. Affiliates wanted popular bits like Leno’s “Headlines” and “Jaywalking” segments put on just before the local news. They though it would give them the right bump going into the local news.
That doesn’t work either. People were not going to switch off a narrative show and then decide to skip the ending to see the last segment of Leno. What they found was that a 10 p.m. talk show wasn’t going to fly, and Leno’s ratings were tiny.
Once again NBC’s poor decision-making came into pay. The network had given itself another complication. In an effort to keep Leno from going to another network, NBC gave him a pay and play contract (ridiculously rare), meaning it not only had to pay Leno, the network had to keep putting his show on the air. NBC couldn’t take him off. The execs looked over their situation, and it was bleak. They had Leno failing at 10 p.m. and Conan failing at 11:35. They had to find a way out.
They found their way out in what wasn’t in Conan’s contract. As it turned out, Conan’s management team had stupidly not received a timeslot guarantee in their contract (this is actually standard for a late-night show), so NBC realized they were allowed to move Conan’s show if they wanted to. In fact they were allowed to push it to 12:05 a.m. if they wanted to (and sometimes did for Olympics coverage, etc). The idea was to put Leno in a half hour show at 11:35 (mostly monologue, comedy bit and a quick guest) then put Conan on. Conan objected to that for obvious reasons, although he should have been more angry at his management for not getting something so basic written into his deal.
He ended up accepting a monster buy-out of $45 million and left rather than see “The Tonight Show” pushed back to 12:05 a.m. That allowed NBC to put Leno back in his old seat.
Then a torrent of criticism flew at Leno. People that didn’t enjoy his show took turns blasting him. Letterman took time out from banging his employees to take shots. Kimmel was particularly shameless, going on “The Jay Leno Show” and insulting Leno, thus generating about as much attention in one day as his mostly-forgotten show has had in years put together (his ratings show his studio audience and a couple of their friends looking to see their buddies on TV during crowd shots may be about the only people watching him).
Again, what was Leno supposed to do? Just quit? Jay Leno is one of the hardest working comedians in history. When he was a stand-up he worked virtually every day. Even as the host of “The Tonight Show” he really did negotiate for less time off. He frequently would tape his Friday show and then hop in a jet to do two stand-up shows on Friday and two more on Saturday, then jet back to Los Angeles and put in an appearance at the “Catch a Rising Star” comedy club on Sunday night. He did that regularly. This was not a man who was going to just sit back and read the paper every day.
Leno defines himself as a talk show host and a comedian. That’s what he does. He never wanted to leave “The Tonight Show.” He never wanted to go to prime time. He would have been perfectly content to stay at 11:35 p.m., but it was taken from him while he was still in first place. Now he was given a chance to go back to the job he never wanted to leave in the first place. Of course he said yes. And he has been crushed for it ever since, mostly by people who don’t like his humor (and seem to be taking it personally, calling him an evil person because they don’t like him) or by people who have footprints from getting their asses kicked by him for years. Part of the smear campaign has been effective though, as Leno has not been able to get his ratings back up to pre-controversy levels.
Conan, who had gone to Harvard, edited the Harvard Lampoon, written for “The Simpsons” and “Saturday Night Live,” then gone on to host “Late Night,” was tasting failure for the first time. He did not take it gracefully. He whined on “60 Minutes” and to anyone else who would listen. He blamed Leno, he blamed NBC, he blamed everyone but himself of course.
The bottom line is, had Conan O’Brien simply done a good job as the host of “The Tonight Show,” he’d still be there. But he didn’t. He watered down his show and it tanked. He acted like he was entitled to years and years to get the show right. He wasn’t. No one is entitled to anything when it comes to being on TV, and anyone in the industry should know that. If you put on a show and people don’t watch, you get canceled, fired, or bought out. It’s that simple. That’s how it works. Carson and Leno didn’t keep their jobs for years because they were entitled. They kept their jobs for years because they were good, and they drew ratings. Conan did neither, yet he whined constantly about being a victim.
His new show was going to be his triumphant return, where he and all his devoted fans would show the world he was the next king in waiting, and a late night revolution was at hand once he was freed of the evil shackles of NBC and Leno.
Where did all that hype lead? He’s on TBS, sandwiched between reruns of old sitcoms and a guy whose act consists of 3rd grade level Mexican jokes, doing a show that draws not much more than half the ratings of Letterman, Leno or Jon Stewart. After all that, it looks like Conan was never really capable of playing in the big leagues after all.
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