Not A Normal Topic of Mine

In SoCal, the whole Jay Leno/Conan O’Brien/"The Tonight Show" (TTS) thing is being treated as a huge deal. Skip the next 3 paragraphs if you are familiar with the situation.

In case you are unfamiliar with the situation – almost six years ago, NBC promised Conan O'Brien, hosting the after-TSS, "Late Night", TTS in 2009. This was to keep him from bolting to another network to set up a competing show. ("Late Night" was the show David Letterman started up and hosted for many years before leaving for CBS.... after he lost out on getting TTS and regular guest host Jay Leno got it instead.) The problem was, Jay Leno is a notorious workaholic and didn't want to give up regular TV work.

So NBC gave him a 10pm show that was essentially a redressed TTS (monologue, sketch/bit, and interviews). This kept Leno from going to a competing network when his contract finally expired, which would have been a while after Conan took over TTS. It also was much cheaper for the network to do this show than buy five hours of drama shows a week.

Networks don't own all of their stations, and the other station owners were complaining about the drop in ratings for their local 11pm news broadcasts as a result of a talk show at 10pm rather than an hourlong drama. So now NBC has announced plans to move Leno back to 11:35 and move the TTS/Conan to midnight or five minutes later. Leno has agreed. Conan has said NO WAY.



It's a huge mess. Not only because of the lower ratings for the local news – the TV industry was worried by the loss of five hours of drama. Those shows keep a lot of people working.

But the thing is, even with those five hours taken up by Leno, NBC is STILL showing THE SAME EPISODES of dramas twice a week, like "Law & Order: SVU". Leno didn't kill five hours of drama. Advertisers tightening their belts did. Now I wonder what they'll fill in the time with… more repeats? New magazines?

Now that Conan has said "NO" things are going to get really interesting. There's a clause in his contract that gives him something like $40,000,000 if he is removed from TTS. I don't know if that includes the show being pushed back to midnight or later, or if he has veto power over changing the time of the show. Whatever – yeah, it sucks that he had to move his whole family from coast to coast (and it sucks for NBC that they had to build a whole new studio) – but he's going to be just fine. He'll leave for another network if he has to, where they will pay him $$$ and promote the heck out hime. If that happens, the NBC's failure will be complete, to paraphrase Darth Vader. They will have made all of those changes, blown all of that money, and messed with "The Tonight Show" only to have the very result they were hoping to avoid when they made their plans six years ago – a net loss all around.

Conan has been handling the situation with class and humor.

NBC should grovel at his feet and apologize and commit to keeping him in the same place, same time.

I like Jay Leno. They should give him half an hour earlier in the night, like at 8:30 or 9, or 9:30 and use the show to preview "The Tonight Show". Compensate for the reduction in time by giving Leno a weekend show, too, like on Sunday nights.

It is just going to be really strange if Conan leaves and Jay is given TSS again. The only way they should start that up is to open up with a skit in which Jay wakes up in bed next to a Suzanne Pleshette look-alike, or – even better - Bob Newhart.