Taking It On The Chin #4

This one is from someone who signs his name "Corey R." Here goes…

It's real simple. Leno and his manager knifed Johnny in the back and forced him to retire, thereby getting Jay a job that by all accounts rightly belonged to Letterman. Then NBC dumps Leno (finally!) and gives it to Conan. Does Jay have the decency to go away like a good loser? No, he gets NBC to give him that crappy 10 PM show knowing full well his lead-in will sabotage Conan's Tonight Show and NBC will cancel it and bring Leno back.

Yeah…and Barack Obama's from Kenya and Hillary Clinton murdered Vince Foster. Boy, there's a lot to unpack there…

Personally, I've never bought that Leno and his manager Helen Kushnick forced Johnny Carson out. They didn't have the power to do such a thing. And really, all she did was to plant one insulting (but mainly true) story in a tabloid paper that said a lot of people at NBC felt it was time for Johnny to go and Jay to take over. Johnny Carson — maybe the most powerful man ever in television — was forced to quit because of that? I think a more logical scenario is that Johnny looked at the numbers and realized that if he didn't go soon, he might not have gone out in (arguably) first place. Or that if he wanted to stay much longer, he was going to have to do some wholesale reinvention of his program…which might or might not have worked. The Kushnick-planted story was rude but Johnny had endured "this is Carson's last year" stories in the tabloids for a couple of decades.

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One of the things I find intriguing about Leno is that while he's been in some ways as big a money-earner for NBC as Carson was during his last decade or so, Jay had never had very much clout there. Three times now, NBC decided to oust him from the post — the time his job was offered to Letterman which didn't go through, then later with O'Brien and now Fallon — and all three times, Jay was in first place in the ratings when they made that decision. Name me anyone else in television who gets fired when they're in first place in a highly-competitive time slot. There's probably one performer (I can't think of who) who had that happen to them once but Jay's the only one who's had it happen to him again and again…

That's how little power he's ever had at that network. And yet someone believes Leno had the power to force his way into five hours of NBC's prime-time schedule with the intention of sabotaging it and all that followed…and that he didn't worry it would hurt him professionally to crash and burn in that time slot.

People also forget that O'Brien went on the air with his Tonight Show on June 1, 2009. He got great ratings his first night but by the end of that first week, both Letterman and Nightline were beating him. His demographics in the 18-49 age bracket were pretty good but NBC sure didn't expect the program to go from first place to last in the over-all numbers in about three days.

This was not the fault of a weak lead-in from Leno's 10 PM show. Leno's 10 PM show didn't go on the air until September 14th. If Conan's ratings had been okay and then plunged when Jay came on, sure. You could blame that on the weak lead-in. Even then though, you might have noted that when Jay was on at 11:35, he had some pretty awful lead-ins and he usually managed to win his time slot. In fact, since low-rated shows at 10 PM have pretty much been the norm at NBC for a long time — and were destined to be even after Leno's show at that hour was axed — you could say that the job description of hosting The Tonight Show includes recovering from weak lead-ins at 10 PM. Jay's consistently been #1 in his hour following an NBC prime-time schedule that's in last place.

We will continue this tomorrow and for a few more days after. I'll address a few more of Corey's points before we're done.