Monthly Archives: July 2013

• Lesson for Today: If you go on trial for shooting an unarmed man, make sure your attorney starts your defense with a knock-knock joke.

A very smart friend of mine in the teevee biz sent me the following with the request that I leave his name out of it…

I agree with you that Jay Leno did nothing wrong in taking back the Tonight Show, but I think the animus against him was that he did something wrong as a showman. He had the misjudgment, maybe even hubris, to think that he could slide into primetime without any heavy lifting or even re-thinking what he was presenting to the public. He wasn't even expected to be number one in the ratings. He was expected to be second best. He would still be there if he had hit second place half the time.

He became part of a corporate numbers game in a network's cynical move to curtail production costs, and in doing so The Jay Leno Show was viewed as the cable-ization of a broadcast network. The Hollywood community hated it because it meant the loss of five hours of precious primetime production, and the public grew quickly disenchanted because it was nothing special. (I'm being kind here.)

Leno returned to Tonight with a tarnished image and a tarnished show, only to be sent out the door again. He may have done nothing wrong, but you have to wonder, What did he do right?

Well, he has a pretty good track record for winning the 11:35 ratings period. That's something right. At least, it's something that a lot of guys can't do.

As I started to mention, I think the core problem with the 10 PM show was that they went ahead and scheduled five prime-time hours a week of The Jay Leno Show, then everyone kind of looked at each other and asked, "Uh, exactly what is The Jay Leno Show?" Jay seems to have believed it would just be The Tonight Show with a different name at an earlier hour…but NBC wasn't about to let him infringe on what Conan was going to do. So Jay couldn't have a desk because, you know, America will only watch so many shows per day about people behind desks. And he couldn't have more than one interview guest (at first, they didn't want him to have any) and he couldn't do his Second Act comedy pieces (Headlines, Jaywalking, etc.) in the second act. And no one seemed to have a good idea of how to fill the time, which is why we had Drew Barrymore driving in the Green Car Challenge.

They wound up relying on remote pieces, mostly planned by and/or starring unknowns without much TV experience, and they clearly didn't have the proper personnel to generate spots worthy of such exposure. Maybe if the segments had aired at 2 AM on Comedy Central, they might have found an audience…but prime-time on NBC? I could certainly buy an argument that Leno was to blame for agreeing to all this and also for flying off to do stand-up gigs every weekend while his prime-time series was starved for material. But I don't hear anyone making that argument at all.

You may be right, Anonymous Friend of Mine, about an animus in Hollywood. I have heard people in the industry complaining that they would have sold their series if Jay hadn't sucked up so many hours on NBC. Given NBC's desire to have X number of hours in their schedule that cost as little as Deal or No Deal or Identity, I'm not sure how valid it is but it's there. I'm also not sure it relates to the main thing I wanted to discuss here, which is this accusation no one seems able to explain to me in fact-based specifics that Jay did something unethical to Conan O'Brien.

Anyway, thanks, Anonymous Friend of Mine. One of us owes the other a lunch.

This is real good. It's a speech and Q-and-A George Carlin did at the National Press Club in May of '99. It runs close to an hour and it's worth it. Mr. Carlin speaks mainly of the corruption of the English language and while some of it may be familiar to you from his albums and specials, much of it is not…

Roberto Martinez has an interesting way of looking at the George Zimmerman case. At least, it makes me think that maybe everyone is overthinking this case…

You all know Todd Klein as an award-winning letterer but he's also quite the comic historian. He's recently compiled a great historical record of the early days of DC Comics which covers not only what happened but where it happened. I could summarize it but it'll be better for you if you just go read it. Here's a link to Part One. Here's a link to Part Two. Here's a link to Part Three. Here's a link to Part Four. And here's a link to Part Five.

I learned a number of things in it, not the least of which was the role a man named Sheldon Stark played in the early days of DC Comics. I knew Sheldon Stark. He was a writer at the Ruby-Spears animation studio when I worked there and we collaborated on an ABC Weekend Special. Nice, clever man. I lunched with him a few times and for some reason, it never occurred to me to ask him if he by any chance had been the Cartoon Editor of the first comic book published in America featuring new material. Wish I had.

…some incredible photos.

I'm slightly revising my weather forecast for Comic-Con International. Our whole time there, we'll be looking at highs around 72° and lows around 66° but the remnants of a storm will be drifting through Arizona and backing up into the lower portions of California. So there'll be some humidity and a fair amount of clouds and a minor chance of some rain sprinkles by the weekend of the con. Not as perfect as our usual Comic-Con weather.

Hard to believe it all starts next Wednesday night. Everyone I know who's going is rushing to get things done and when I tell them, as I do, "Don't worry…I've arranged for the con to be postponed two weeks," they don't believe me of course but there's that faint glimmer of "Oh, if only you could…"

For those who've asked: My knee is healing but not as fast as I'd hoped. Right now, it's kind of unpredictable. Feels fine for an hour, then hurts for half an hour, then feels fine for three hours, then aches for one, etc. There doesn't seem to be any pattern, any particular thing I'm doing that brings on pain or makes it go away. I'm working with a Physical Therapist and I think that's doing me some good but I couldn't tell you how. Anyway, I will be at the con though I may be scootering around now and then, and I haven't ruled out piggyback-rides from Tony Isabella. Tony may have ruled that out but I haven't.

And speaking of transportation, a lot of folks who attend the con get around via San Diego's peachy trolley system. Scott Marinoff suggests I tell you that some changes have been made since last year so you might want to consult this page. You might also want to consult this one that details some of the ongoing construction work.

I am off to the Physical Therapist. If I can't get rid of this limp, maybe he can show me how to look more graceful in my hobbling…

Nine minutes with my favorite folk-singing group of the sixties, The Limeliters…

I'm going to postpone the Leno/Conan stuff a day because I feel like writing about the Trayvon Martin case here. Like more of you than will admit it, I don't know exactly what happened that night. George Zimmerman does seem to have gone after Martin based on some sort of personal assumption that a black guy walking in a high-crime neighborhood was suspicous just because he was a black guy. For all the attempts by some to portray Martin as a bad person, he seems to have been utterly innocent of anything but being the kind of person who'd arouse Zimmerman's suspicions…and then there was a confrontation in which Zimmerman claims he was forced to shoot in self-defense. His story sounds fishy to me but we don't convict people in this country because their stories sound fishy.

Guilty people do get off because there just plain isn't enough hard evidence. Reporters and pundits who've been following the trial closer than I have mostly seem to think that's what's going to happen here. Maybe so…though I can't help but note that the results of other recent trials have surprised the commentators. The judge is now allowing the jury to consider Manslaughter as a possible verdict and that may be of value if the six jurors are on the fence. Perhaps one of those civil "wrongful death" suits will follow, regardless.

Here's kind of what's on my mind here…

Back when this incident happened, an acquaintance of mine — notice the absence of the noun, "friend" — told me he prayed Zimmerman would be acquitted. The acquaintance, who is white, didn't really know the details of the case but he lived with a constant fear of violence from minorities — an excessive one, I thought. He admitted to me that he identified with Zimmerman. He was naturally suspicious of non-Caucasians. When I pointed out that even Zimmerman admitted that when he started following Martin, Martin had not done one thing to warrant suspicion, the acquaintance said, "He didn't have to. He was black." And out of his mouth then tumbled all sorts of dubious stats about how a random black guy is X% more likely than a random white guy to be guilty of something. That, to this guy, was good and sufficient cause to treat Martin as a suspect.

The acquaintance then noted, "If a suspect is stopped by the police and he doesn't cooperate, he could be hurt or killed." I pointed out George Zimmerman was not a policeman. Just because a guy acts like a cop doesn't mean we have to treat him like one. The acquaintance said, "If he has a gun, you'd damn well better treat him like one." You can imagine where the discussion went from there.

We (of course) didn't resolve anything but it bothered me that the reason this fellow wanted to see Zimmerman walk is because, you know, if he treated a black guy as a criminal, his heart and mind were in the right place. That he was confronting an innocent black guy was irrelevant. The acquaintance's attitude was that we need to reward people who do that kind of thing, not scare them into not stopping other black guys. He thinks we need more George Zimmermans out there.

If Zimmerman walks and he walks because there isn't enough evidence to prove he broke the law, okay. That's how the system sometimes works and I would hope people would see that as the reason he went free. What I would really hope is that most folks wouldn't interpret it the way that acquaintance of mine will. Frankly, I see more to be scared of from the George Zimmermans than from the Trayvon Martins.

Thursday, July 18 – 1 PM to 2 PM in Room 5AB
SUPERMAN: THE JULIUS SCHWARTZ ERA
In celebration of Superman's 75th Birthday, we look back at the Man of Steel in Comics' Bronze Age. In 1970, veteran editor Julius Schwartz assumed command of the primal hero and charted a course for a new generation. To discuss it, we assemble many of the writers who worked with him in keeping Superman flying high: GERRY CONWAY, MARTIN PASKO, MARV WOLFMAN, ELLIOTT S! MAGGIN and Moderator MARK EVANIER!

Thursday, July 18 – 2:30 PM to 3:30 PM in Room 8
THE SERGIO AND MARK SHOW
Same guys, same panel, same stupid barbarian. The folks who've brought you Groo the Wanderer (and vow to do so again soon) will tell you what's up with that and what's up with all their other silly projects. Featuring the world's most honored cartoonist, SERGIO ARAGONÉS and his faithful sidekick, MARK EVANIER, plus the creator of Usagi Yojimbo, STAN SAKAI, and the world's hardest-working colorist, TOM LUTH.

Friday, July 19 – 10 AM to 11 AM in Room 9
SPOTLIGHT ON TONY ISABELLA
Comic-Con Special Guest TONY ISABELLA is the man who brought you Black Lightning, It the Living Colossus, The Shadow War of Hawkman, The Champions and so many more memorable comics, plus his long-running column in Comic Buyer's Guide. He will be ruthlessly interrogated about them and other milestones of his career by his longtime friend, MARK EVANIER.

Friday, July 19 – 5:30 PM – 6:30 PM in Room 8
A CELEBRATION OF WALT KELLY'S 100th BIRTHDAY
The creator of one of comics' great newspaper strips, Walt Kelly, would have been 100 years old on August 25th of this year. His magnum opus, Pogo, is now receiving its first ever complete reprinting in an Eisner-nominated series from Fantagraphics Books. So it's a good time to remember him with Kelly fans JEFF SMITH (Bone), Paul Dini (Batman), comic historian R.C. HARVEY, MAGGIE THOMPSON (Comic Buyer's Guide), CAROLYN KELLY (co-editor of the Complete Pogo series and Walt's daughter) and Moderator MARK EVANIER (Groo the Wanderer).

Saturday, July 20 – 10 AM – 11 AM in Room 4
REMEMBERING JOE KUBERT
We lost one of comics' most beloved and respected creators in August of '12. Joe Kubert started drawing comics when he was twelve years old and didn't stop until he'd inspired and taught a couple generations how it was done. Come hear all about this extraordinary man from folks who knew and worked with him: SERGIO ARAGONÉS, NEAL ADAMS, PAUL LEVITZ, RUSS HEATH, TOM YEATES, JON COOKE and your Moderator, MARK EVANIER.

Saturday, July 20 – 11:45 AM to 1 PM in Room 6BCF
QUICK DRAW!
It's the fastest, funniest panel in the whole convention! (Well, some folks think it is — mainly Sergio and Mark..) Once again, your Quick Draw Quizmaster MARK EVANIER pits three super-speedy cartoonists against one another as they go mano a mano to create great cartoon art right before your very eyes. Competing this year are SERGIO ARAGONÉS (MAD Magazine, Groo the Wanderer), SCOTT SHAW! (The Simpsons) and this year's Special Guest Quick Draw-er, NEAL ADAMS (Batman, X-Men). Plus a couple of surprising surprises!

Saturday, July 20 – 1:00 PM to 2:30 PM in Room 6BCF
CARTOON VOICES I
Each year, Moderator MARK EVANIER gathers together a bevy of the most talented cartoon voice actors working today and invites them to explain and demonstrate their artistry! This year's lineup includes SCOTT MENVILLE (Teen Titans Go, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), GREY DeLISLE (Scooby Doo, Pound Puppies), CHRISTOPHER COX (Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes, Family Guy), DAVID BOAT (Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, Family Guy), MICHAEL LEON-WOOLEY (The Princess and the Frog) and KARI WAHLGREN (Bolt, Tangled).

Saturday, July 20 – 4:30 PM to 6:00 PM in Room 5AB
THAT 70'S PANEL
It was a time of change in comics with a new generation intermingling with the old and taking command. Hear what it was like from MARTIN PASKO (Superman, Swamp Thing), TONY ISABELLA (Black Lightning, The Champions), VAL MAYERIK (Man-Thing, Howard the Duck), ELLIOTT S! MAGGIN (Superman, Green Arrow), GEORGE PEREZ (Teen Titans, Justice League) and Moderator MARK EVANIER (Groo the Wanderer, Blackhawk).

Saturday, July 20 – 6:00 PM to 7:00 PM in Room 5AB
SPOTLIGHT ON LEONARD MALTIN
He's been called America's most knowledgeable film critic and historian, and he's the author of more than a dozen books of motion pictures, in addition to his annual (and best-selling) Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide, a book no lover of film can be without. This year, he's a Comic-Con Special Guest and for this hour, he'll be interviewed by his longtime friend, MARK EVANIER.

Sunday, July 21 – 10:00 AM – 11:15 PM in Room 5AB
THE ANNUAL JACK KIRBY TRIBUTE PANEL
Each year, we set aside time to talk about Comic-Con's first superstar guest and the man they call The King of the Comics, Jack Kirby. Jack left us in 1994 but his influence on comics, film and this convention has never been greater. Discussing the man and his work this year are NEIL GAIMAN, TONY ISABELLA and Kirby family attorney PAUL S. LEVINE. And of course, it's moderated by MARK EVANIER.

Sunday, July 21 – 11:30 AM – 12:45 PM in Room 6A
CARTOON VOICES II
Yesterday's Cartoon Voices Panel will have been such a hit that we'll have to do another one with different but equally talented actors from the world of animation voicing. Once again, Moderator MARK EVANIER has assembled an all-star dais that will include BOB BERGEN (Porky Pig), ALICYN PACKARD (The Mr. Men Show, Poppy Cat), MAURICE LaMARCHE (Futurama, Pinky and the Brain), CANDI MILO (Dexter's Laboratory, Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends), NEIL ROSS (G.I. Joe, Transformers) and maybe someone else.

Sunday, July 21 – 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM in Room 25ABC
COVER STORY: THE ART OF THE COVER
What does it take to make a great cover for a comic book? Let's ask four of the top artists…all folks who've created some of the best. Come hear the "shop talk" of JERRY ORDWAY (Superman, The Power of Shazam), GARY FRANK (Action Comics, DC Universe: Legacies), DAN JURGENS (Superman, Booster Gold) and CHRIS SAMNEE (Daredevil, Thor). Moderated by MARK EVANIER.

Sunday, July 21 – 3:00 PM – 4:30 PM in Room 25ABC
THE BUSINESS OF CARTOON VOICES
Interested in a career doing voices for animation and video games? There are plenty of people around who'll take your money and tell you how to go about it…but here's 90 minutes of absolutely free advice from folks who work in the field. Come hear cartoon voice actors GREGG BERGER and CANDI MILO, agents PAT BRADY (C.E.S.D.) and HEATHER VERGO (Atlas Talent) and your moderator, voice director MARK EVANIER (The Garfield Show).

Another example of the magic of René Lavand…

Andy Rose reminds me of this 2004 interview in which Jay Leno stressed his liberal credentials. I suppose those on the right who want to claim him as an ally would say he's changed over the years, especially because he recognizes that Obama is a gay Kenyan socialist Anti-Christ. I still think Leno's overpowering interest in politics is to construct jokes from any vantage point that audiences will laugh at.

This next message is from J. Neill…

I'll tell you what Chin Boy did wrong. He said he was going to leave the Tonight Show and he didn't. He's still friggin' doing it. He promised to leave it and it was clearly implied that was forever and then when they asked him if he wanted it back, he said yes. A man of any integrity would have said no, I said I was leaving forever and I'm a man of my word.

Ah, so much to rebut. He never said "forever." He said he was handing off the show to Conan and he did — rather graciously, I thought, especially since a good case can be made that Jay was wronged by a deal made behind his back. In any case, if Conan's show had gotten better ratings, he'd still be there now instead of Jay.

Part of the problem here is that in show business, it's pretty clearly understood that contracts are based on the assumption that the project will succeed. If an actor signs for a year's run of a play and the play closes after three days, it's understood he doesn't spend the next 362 days of that year doing the play in an empty room somewhere. Jay and Conan were both signed for their respective shows (Jay's at 10 PM, Conan's at 11:35) for at least two years. That doesn't mean NBC was obligated to leave them on the air for two years of sub-par ratings. Once your show flops, most bets are off and everyone scrambles to settle contracts and see what they can salvage from the wreckage. NBC and Jay decided that their best salvage move was Jay at 11:35.

Both men felt they had an understanding that their shows would have been given longer runs to prove themselves…and they're probably right. But it's far from unprecedented. In television, the folks behind a cancelled show sometimes feel they weren't given enough promotion and time. It's one of those things that only happens about, oh, 98% of the time.

I think this message homes in on the main reason some people feel Leno did something unethical by taking back the 11:35 show…this feeling that if he hadn't, Conan would have gotten more time to make his show work. Well, maybe. Or maybe NBC would have offered The Tonight Show to Jerry Seinfeld or Chris Rock.

The thing is: Jay Leno didn't cancel Conan's show or even go to NBC and say, "Hey, put me back on at 11:35 and bump Conan to a later slot." And once NBC (not Jay) had decided they couldn't leave Conan at 11:35, I don't understand why Jay — who'd been kicked out of a job he was succeeding in by Conan — had any sort of obligation to turn down a good offer on the chance it would get Conan more time to prove he could do the job in which he wasn't (yet) succeeding. Someone…help me out here.

I'm not saying Conan was not wronged. I think both hosts were wronged in different ways but since Jay had the track record at 11:35 (and reportedly, the support of the affiliates), he was the one who wound up at 11:35. But that was only after NBC — not Leno — decided they couldn't leave Conan there any longer. And yes, I think Conan shouldn't have lost The Tonight Show when he did…but I also feel Jay shouldn't have lost it when he did, either…twice.

Tomorrow, another message not unlike the above. Then I'm hoping to wrap this up on Friday. Either way, Saturday, there'll be another Tale of My Father here.

Turner Classic Movies will be telecasting a Ray Harryhausen film festival beginning tomorrow (Thursday) night, and our pal James H. Burns has a nice piece over at CBS in New York about other aspects of Ray's television (!) history…as well as such surprising revelations that Harryhausen, even when contemplating retirement, wanted to make a comedy with the likes of Mel Brooks and Woody Allen! Personally, I would have liked to have seen Mr. Harryhausen try to animate Abe Vigoda. I don't mean he should have built a likeness of Mr. Vigoda and made it move. I wanted him to attempt to animate the real Abe Vigoda.

Here's a clip from Soupy Sales' short-lived syndicated show in the seventies. But he's doing a bit that he did on his old shows once or twice a month. Somehow, it always made me laugh…

Michael Doran has another question…

Over at the Breitbart websites, they're pushing the notion that the main, if not the only, reason that Leno outrates Letterman is that Jay tells jokes about President Obama, and Dave does not. The Breitbarties always try to skew everything to the Right, of course, but this has turned into an obsession over there, particularly with one regular poster named Christian Toto. To me, for one side to claim Leno as One Of Their Own, while Letterman is Going Down In Flames With The Kenyan…silly beyond belief. But the Breities are convinced of this, as they are with all their tropes, and there are quite a few of them (the Breities and the tropes, I mean). Maybe this is too dumb to comment on, but I am curious, if not yellow…

Well, the obvious response here is that Leno has been outrating Letterman for a long time…since before anyone was talking about Obama at all, and during a period when Obama was a topic but not one that either late night host criticized. If Jay had been losing in the ratings and then only pulled into first place after he started doing jokes about Obama, someone might have a point.

I actually once briefly discussed politics with Jay. I don't know the guy well but we've had a few conversations. My sense, based on those talks and things folks on his staff have told me is that Jay is not particularly on anyone's political team. At least, he doesn't care enough about any particular point-of-view enough to reject a good joke that slammed anyone or anything. For a long time, he didn't do Obama jokes because…well, there weren't many good ones around; not unless you bought into a lot of the accusations that most Americans don't buy like Obama was born in Kenya or Obama is gay.

Imagine you were hired to write a roast of some person. How would you start? You'd look for what I used to describe to my comedy writer students as Access Points. What's the joke about? Is it about the person being fat or dumb or slow or old…or what? I couldn't write jokes about Obama being fat or dumb or slow or old…but I could about him spying on your phone calls. That's an access point. The jokes would be pretty much the same as the ones about Rupert Murdoch listening to your phone calls but it's a fertile premise…and one that Jay and his gag writers didn't have a year ago. There wasn't much about Obama that you could hang jokes on. Even Dennis Miller couldn't come up with much…but now there are a few more access points.

Really, I think it's silly to try and extrapolate something about America from something like that. You could just as easily say more people are watching Jay because he's for gay rights and women's rights. Or because Letterman cut back on his Sarah Palin jokes. There's no way of proving any such cause-and-effect.

Scott Marinoff writes to ask…

What (if anything) do you make of TCM's choice of Conan O'Brien (rather than Leno or even Letterman) to do the intros and closes for the vintage Carson guest interview segments that have been airing Mondays in July?

Well, we don't know for sure that Jay or Dave weren't asked and turned it down. Assuming they weren't, I can think of two reasons. One is that Carson's nephew Jeff Sotzing, who runs the company that licenses footage of Johnny, is reportedly a big Conan fan. And the other reason is that Conan is a star on TBS, the Turner Broadcasting System, which is owned by Time-Warner. So it's not that odd to promote him on TCM, Turner Classic Movies, which is owned by Time-Warner. Perhaps both those reasons are applicable.

Lastly for now, here's Donald Byrne again with another question…

Thank you for answering my question about Conan O'Brien and the whole Tonight Show debacle. As long as I have your attention, let me ask you about something else — and this might require pure speculation on your part. Namely, what is the endgame for The Late Show with David Letterman? Letterman is 66 years old and I have read that he is looking to make an exit in the not too distant future. I also read that he wanted to outlast his onetime pal, Jay Leno, and now that Leno will be gone early next year, Dave can start planning his own exit. Does CBS have someone lined up to take Dave's place? Will it be Craig Ferguson? Or will it be someone like Jon Stewart (the name I hear most often) or Stephen Colbert or if they're really desperate, Pat Sajak again? Does CBS even have succession plans in place? Or are they planning on airing NCIS: Duluth in that spot after Dave departs? I can imagine CBS executives laughing at the straits that NBC is in being a lot less jolly when Dave retires and they have to deal with similar issues.

If I had to guess, I'd guess that Dave's current plans have very little to do with outlasting Leno but they might have a lot to do with how he fares in the ratings against the two Jimmies. If they split the younger audience and Dave is suddenly back in First Place because he inherits a lot of viewers from Jay, there will be a powerful argument that this would be a good time for Letterman to announce his retirement so he could go out on top.

The trouble with that premise is that what I'm hearing is that Dave does not want to retire; that he still loves doing the show and loves going into the office almost every day. He has been known to go in during weeks the show is dark just because he likes working on the program and being with the staff. I think it's also becoming pretty obvious that Dave has nothing else he wants to do of a professional nature. He doesn't want to do movies. He doesn't want to play Vegas. He doesn't want to do prime-time specials, a la Bob Hope. Yeah, he could retire to his ranch and raise his son but there's nothing else he wants to do for audiences. Retirement on that basis might not be healthy.

I was discussing this the other day with someone and I tried to think what Dave might do. Now, keep in mind that I, like other Dave-watchers, have a near-perfect track record for being wrong with predictions about what Dave will do. So do most folks around him. But if I were Dave Letterman, I'd go to CBS and propose a deal: "Look, I know you'd like to get a younger guy into this time slot and have me retire soon with dignity and grace. Okay, let's pick someone and have that person guest host Monday nights. I don't even want to do five shows a week. If our first pick doesn't work out, we'll find someone else. If and when someone does, we'll expand that person to Monday and Tuesday and eventually give him (maybe her) some whole weeks.

"My conditions are they do that show indefinitely out of the same building. We can bring in new people for the new host to work with but we keep my staff intact and when I go, they can stay on if they choose. And I will go but at my own pace, cutting back over the next few years. I will never be fired. I will never look squeezed-out. I will anoint my successor and there'll be no nastiness about 'Who will replace Dave?' And I'll have a place to go and a show to do until the ratings on my nights fall below an agreed-upon level or I just feel like it's time to bow out."

Assuming Dave didn't demand unreasonable money or that his company own the show after he stopped appearing on it, I think CBS would go for such a deal. It would solve a problem they've undoubtedly had to consider, which is what to do if it becomes time for Dave to go and he doesn't wanna. It would make sense for Dave too…which is probably why he won't do it. Truth to tell, I don't know what he'll do or when he'll do it and he may not either because, among other things, he doesn't know if post-Leno, he'll be in First Place, Second Place or trailing badly behind two guys who are much worse at hosting a talk show. The only prediction I feel fairly confident of is that the next host to star in that time slot is probably not someone mentioned anywhere in this posting.

Tomorrow, more about why people thought Jay did something unethical in taking back his old job.