Jay Leno on his show Monday night addressed the issue between NBC, Mr. Leno and Conan O?Brien and said ?we should have an answer tomorrow? about whether he is going to return to 11:35 p.m. time slot.
Mr. Leno described the series of events that led to his situation; they began in 2004 when, he said, an NBC executive came to his office and said the network wanted him to step down from ?The Tonight Show? in five years even though he was still first in the ratings at that time.
Mr. Leno said he agreed to the plan based on his unwillingness to ?go through what we went through the last time,? when NBC chose him over David Letterman as host of ?Tonight.?
At the end of the five-year period, he said, he was still No. 1 and NBC suggested he move to prime time after showing him charts and graphs indicating the audience would follow him to the 10 p.m. time period. He said that NBC had given him a two-year contract for the 10 p.m. slot. Now, he said, four months later, because of problems with NBC?s affiliated stations and low ratings, network executives informed him they were canceling his show but ?told me you?re still valuable.?
?I said, I?m still valuable? You fired me twice.? The network asked him to move back to 11:35 for a half-hour show, with Mr. O?Brien to follow at 12:05 with ?The Tonight Show.?
Mr. Leno said he asked whether Mr. O?Brien would go along with this plan and was told that NBC was sure that he would.
Mr. Leno said he agreed to the change ? as he had to the move to prime time ? because he wanted to protect the jobs of his staff members.
According to Mr. Leno, the network learned that Mr. O?Brien would not accept the shift but he said he does not blame Mr. O?Brien at all, calling him ?a gentleman and a good family guy.? He said he has never had any animosity toward Mr. O?Brien.
He added that the network?s decisions were driven by the fact that neither host had succeeded in the ratings and that NBC expected ?us to help him and we didn?t.?
At its height, NBC was the very model of what a television network should be. With iconic programming, enviable ratings and spectacular business success, the peacock network delivered plenty of laughs along the way with ?The Cosby Show,? ?Seinfeld? and ?Friends.?
Nobody is laughing anymore.
Today the network is in shambles, brought down not just by the challenges facing broadcast television ? fragmenting audiences, an advertising downturn ? but also by a series of executive missteps that have made its prime-time lineup a perennial loser and, most recently, turned its late night programming schedule into a media circus that threatens the lucrative ?Tonight Show? franchise.
?We live in a society today that loves a soap opera,? Jeff Zucker, the chief executive of NBC Universal, said in an interview in his office at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York on Friday. ?Three months ago it was David Letterman. Six weeks ago it was Tiger Woods?s problems. Today it?s NBC?s problems.?
And this is all happening as the company itself is in transition, waiting for regulators in Washington to approve a sale of NBC Universal from General Electric to Comcast, the nation?s largest cable operator. By the time G.E. finally decided to wash its hands of NBC late last year, the network ranked low on the list of those parts of the company most valuable to Comcast, which will swallow the network mainly so it can acquire the company?s money-making cable channels, like USA, Bravo, Syfy.
Indeed, even though NBC?s news division remains highly profitable, the network?s overall finances are crumbling ? less than a decade ago, according to Bob Wright, the former chief executive of NBC Universal, the network generated over $1 billion in profit for its parent, G.E.
This year, mainly because of high costs associated with broadcasting next month?s Winter Olympics, the network is expected to lose more than $100 million, according to a person briefed on the network?s finances who insisted on anonymity. The company does not break out financial figures for the network. (In 2009, the network made a few hundred million dollars, and represented about 10 percent of NBC Universal?s operating profit.)
All of the networks are dealing with economic pressures, but NBC?s competitors have proved more deft at managing the challenges and creating hits, even as their profits have declined.
But what about Conan? He clearly emerges with a big reservoir of sympathy as the poor guy (yes, the extremely highly paid poor guy) who got the shaft, losing his show after barely a couple of months on the job. But as some of my TV-steeped colleagues have shrewdly pointed out, where can he possibly go to replicate the kind of late-night talk show he's been doing for years? ABC has already said it's not interested in hiring him. HBO isn't prepared to get into the late-night talk show racket. And Fox, the network that normally would be most aggressive in taking advantage of a competitor's misfortune, has a lot of issues to overcome, starting with a huge lack of enthusiasm from its affiliates--who see a Conan show as a losing game--as well as the financial complications of footing the hefty bill for hiring O'Brien along with settling out the costly contracts for reruns on Fox's TV stations.
This creates quite a bind for Conan's team of WME talent agent advisers. They've sprung him from NBC, getting a big payoff, but where does he go from here? With the late-night landscape already crammed with talk shows, O'Brien (to use an analogy from his favorite sport) is like the slugging first baseman who becomes a free agent in a year where there are already loads of great first basemen on the market.
Whatever he does, he's going to have to take a serious pay cut. Since that's a given, I'd like to see him go to where his audience already is instead of asking them to find him on an unfamiliar outlet. It's no secret that Conan's audience is at least a decade younger than Leno or Letterman's audience. We also know that the younger the TV viewer, the more likely they are to be watching cable TV, not the cobwebby programming available on network TV.
So if I were Conan, since I have to take a pay cut anyway, I'd be focusing on cable. And I'd also want to go somewhere where I had a decent lead-in for my show, not to mention a lead-in that might help me hang on to the younger audience that has been deserting TV in droves. Get my drift? If there were ever a perfect setup for O'Brien, it would be Comedy Central, which already has a powerhouse double bill of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Conan would be a great fit following their shows, inheriting a small (by network standards) but intensely loyal audience of viewers primed for his droll, irony-filled comedy routines.
The money wouldn't be the same, but I think it would be a liberating, low-pressure experience for O'Brien, who looks like he could use a break from the high-stakes ratings death match of network late-night TV. Instead of being told to tone down his act and pretend to be an old fogy, as NBC was asking him to do on "The Tonight Show," he could cut loose and get back to his roots, when he was was the most inventive, loose-limbed funnyman on TV. It's time to let Conan be Conan again.
