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.