I find it sad they'd shaft Conan after nearly 17 years of good late-night TV. I don't think Leno is that relevant nowadays.

Rumor has it that Leno and his goons pulled NBC's strings to move Johnny Carson out of the chair.

If Fox were to snatch Conan, they'd have a gold mine in prime-time. This would be an opportunity to reunite him with his former Simpsons colleagues. At least both Tim Long and Mike Reiss (Simpsons producers) have background as talk-show writers/showrunners. Long ran Letterman's staff in the 90's, while Reiss wrote for Johnny Carson.

Yes.

Basically the people at NBC didn't want to lose Leno to another network, but the contract they had with Conan wouldn't let them keep Leno on the Tonight Show without being forced to pay Conan a very tidy sum.

So NBC came up with the Jay Leno Show to kill two birds with one stone. The first bird was that it would keep Leno on their network. The second bird, in theory, was that it would save them money because a talk show is cheaper to produce than a scripted series.

Well flash forward just a few months and that second bird turned out to be a real beast. Leno's show wasn't getting very strong ratings. It was still profitable for NBC (I believe), but NBC affiliates weren't so happy. Since Leno came on right before local news programs his poor performance was actually HURTING those news programs. Turns out these affiliates make a lot of money off news and weren't very happy about Leno costing them a chunk of it.

So they complained to NBC, basically threatening to pre-empt Leno. This is how NBC ended up where they're at now. Despite Leno's poor ratings they still don't want to lose him.

Conan actually hasn't been doing THAT badly, and as his statement points out NBC should really give him the time to build his show (the same way they gave Leno time when he first started off on rocky footing). But I think NBC still sees Leno as they more valuable person (otherwise they probably wouldn't be so willing to let Conan go). In the long term this is probably another mistake, but only time will tell.

At any rate, because I don't keep up with these things, I was under the impression that Leno was leaving THE TONIGHT SHOW, because he was retiring. I did come across his new show a few weeks ago and was surprised to see that basically it was exactly what he had been doing before except now the show was named after him. My question "Why did he step down from THE TONIGHT SHOW then?" He's doing the exact same thing except 90 minutes earlier. And the shows are taped, not broadcast live so I would imagine he's still working the same hours.

My question: What was the whole point of this then? If NBC wanted to see Conan be the new TS host then Leno should have been let out of his contract and move on to HBO or some other network if he still wanted to do his thing.

I haven't watched Conan in ages, so I haven't seen any of the TS under his "command." But again, he wasn't really doing anything all that different in terms of format so I'm surprised he's been having such a difficult transition as I've been reading. I'm not saying it's easy to host. I'm sure I'd be terrible at it myself. But NBC seemed to have a perfectly running machine. In my opinion Jay Leno needs to make up his mind: does he want to continue to host THE TONIGHT SHOW or not? If not, then he needs to find another network to do this thing.

Lousy and Half-Baked works later on in the night at like 3am, but even Craig Furguson is funny, Jimmy Kimmel is funny. I laugh at most things and can't laugh hardly at Conan. In fact the audience doesn't laugh that hard at Conan. So if Fox want's him they can take him and NBC can put Leno back on the tonight show where his ratings would never be the same. R.I.P NBC.

On the good side of this I have learned what not to do as a network boss...

Anyways thanks Jammer for keeping the blog going, you always have some insight into these things and it's appreciated.

ever since Johnny Carson retired they have mishandled everything with The Tonight Show, starting with the David Letterman/ Jay Leno drama.

bunch of loons at that network.