Rudy Panucci operates PopCult, a fine popular culture blog that focuses on but is not exclusively devoted to West Virginia. He writes…
I enjoy your balanced take on the Leno/Conan mess, but something hit me — if Leno had agreed to "retire" at the end of his run on The Tonight Show, instead of trying the move to 10 PM, his reputation would be amazing now.
Just think, he'd be the the guy who left Late-night, and as a result the entire broadcast time-slot and talk show genre collapsed. He could look back and say, "The whole thing fell apart when I left."
By sticking around, and then returning to The Tonight Show, he proved that it wasn't just him leaving that lead to the collapse. Of course, it could still be that his seven months away from the time slot "broke the habit" for millions of people, and hastened late night's decline, much the way that the O.J. trial mortally wounded Soap Operas.
I realize that it's an unlikely scenario, since Leno was more interested in continuing to work, rather than burnishing his reputation, but if things had played out that way, it's fun to speculate on how the landscape would look today.
If he had just retired to Vegas, people might even miss him. Then what would've happened. Would Carter have gotten a new book out of the deal?
Would Conan ever over-take Letterman? Would Letterman announce his retirement? Would it have been a bigger deal when The Daily Show beat both Tonight and Late Night, like they did last month?
It'd be fun to see what Leno would think of this idea. I get the feeling that he's way past the point of caring about his reputation, but it might at least get a comical forehead-slap as a response.
I'd wager big that all the players in the little Late Night dramas have long lists of things they wish they'd done differently. In Jay's case, I don't think he was that concerned about not having anything to do after Tonight. The guy loves standup and I'm sure he could have worked every night for the rest of his life doing that…and maybe even for better money than he was making on NBC. (Knowing he always had that to fall back on is probably one of the reasons he got through some of the more tempestuous times in late night. A lot of people marvelled at his cool or even faulted him for a seeming lack of emotion. But it can have a very calming effect on you to know you always have another great job waiting…one that no one can take away from you.)
I suspect Jay had two factors driving him to the 10 PM slot — three if you count the fact that they paid him an awful lot of money. One was the simple desire to not be kicked off TV against his wishes. The other, which would be especially significant if he really imagined Conan would fail and he'd be asked to go back to 11:35, would have been to keep his staff together. It takes time to put together a team like that and if he'd gone out of production, he never would have been able to quite reassemble that operation again. Some folks would have gotten other jobs. Some would have moved away or retired. He couldn't have stopped doing TV altogether for seven months, then gone back to The Tonight Show as he knew it. Then again, he couldn't have anticipated that his rep would take the hit it did…so he might well wish he'd done what you say.
Meanwhile, Rog Blaine asks…
So my big question is this: What if you'd been Conan or Jay? What would you have done different?
At times, I feel like that that's fun in this: Reading these accounts and thinking, at various points, "If I'd been in that guy's position, what would I have done?" In hindsight, I think O'Brien should have gone to Fox, from which he apparently then had a serious offer, instead of bumping Leno and taking The Tonight Show. Yeah, I understand the allure of hosting the show that the very sacred John W. Carson hosted but that's over. It was over the moment Johnny left and it stopped being that Tonight Show. And then I think Leno made a mistake by being too good a sport when he was ousted from that job, acting too much like he agreed with the transition. He should have said something like, "Hey, I don't like that they did this to me but if they had to, they couldn't have picked a better guy than Conan." That would have been (apparently) closer to his true feelings and it would have made it easier for him later to go back to the 11:35 slot without looking like he was reneging on a promise.
Leno on at 10 PM was obviously a mistake for him and for NBC…but I might take issue with those who say a show like that could never have worked at that time, no matter what. I think the big problem was that neither NBC nor Jay really had a concept for a 10 PM Jay Leno Show. It was basically: "Well, we'll do The Tonight Show but it can't exactly be The Tonight Show because Conan's doing that so we'll chop down the interviews (which comprise most of The Tonight Show) and we'll get rid of the musical numbers (which supply another large chunk) and then we'll expand the comedy bits but we'll move the ones that work to the end where they'll seem out of place…and then we'll fill most of the show with comedy bits by other people even though we don't really have a crew of good people to do that." It all reminds me of that quote from a theater critic who wrote of one of Neil Simon's weakest entries, "Mr. Simon didn't have an idea for a play this year but he wrote it anyway."
I'm guessing that since Jay had this "firm" pay-and-play two year guarantee, he thought he had enough time to invent the new program while doing it. That's kind of what he did on The Tonight Show when he took over from Johnny. He couldn't have thought they'd leave him on for two years of bad ratings but I'll bet he didn't think they'd bail after four months. There was so much talk of NBC being in it for the long haul; about how they knew he'd fare poorly against first-runs of CSI-type shows opposite him but would start to show strength once the opposing shows were in steady reruns. Based on that standard, his show didn't do badly. The trouble for him was that nothing about it — not the numbers and not the content — gave the network or the affiliates any reason to think things might get better.
Then again, it's hard to disagree with those who note that if Leno hadn't gone on at 10 PM, the five shows NBC would have put there instead would probably not have done much better…and would have cost five times as much. Apart from Law & Order SVU, what has NBC had lately that could have gone on at that hour and gotten significantly better numbers? What they have there now is doing worse…and at a much higher expenditure. NBC just plain has an unfixable 10 PM problem at the moment. They could have put the World Series on in that time slot and even people in San Francisco and Texas wouldn't have watched. Even before Jay got there, it was scorched earth and nothing's going to grow there for quite a while.
But I'm pretty much pointing up weaknesses without suggested remedies…kind of like they do in Washington, these days. A friend of mine read the Carter book and called to swap observations. He kept saying, "What a train wreck" and I asked him, "Once the decision to replace Jay with Conan was firm, what could anyone here have done to prevent a train wreck?" And apart from doing much better and more popular shows, we couldn't think of much, not even with the benefit of glorious hindsight.