Last week, with Conan O’Brien getting ready to leave the air, Team Coco dominated the Internet. This week, with Jay Leno preparing for an image-rehab visit to Oprah tomorrow, the race to be “the only one out there sticking up for Jay Leno” is starting to get crowded. Mark Evanier argues that Jay is not the bad guy and that NBC’s decision to ditch Conan had little to do with Jay. Michelle Cottle in The New Republic contends that people who blame Jay simply never liked him in the first place.
Meanwhile, Neal Gabler gets positively revisionist, arguing that the decision is a triumph of a Baby Boomer “silent majority” over hipsters and a repudiation of TV’s focus on the 18-to-49 demographic—and pretty much entirely ignoring the historic implosion of the Jay Leno Show experiment, which necessitated the shakeup in the first place.
I don’t see much point in arguing the relative funniness or unfunniness of Conan and Jay; people can vote with their remotes. I’m not interested in debating “was Jay the bad guy?”—I’ve said I believe he’s more hypocrite than villain, but ultimately I don’t think it much matters.
What does matter, even in something trivial like TV comedy shows, is getting history right. We are probably all a little sick of this story and I hate to belabor it. But for the record, this is the rough sequence of actual events of the Jaypocalypse:
* In 2004, NBC agrees with Conan O’Brien to boot Jay Leno in 2009 and replace him with Conan. Jay graciously says he wants to avoid acrimony, tells Conan the show is his, and says nobody but Johnny Carson could have kept hosting Tonight into his 60s.
* 2008: NBC announces The Jay Leno Show at 10 p.m., acknowledging ratings will be lower, but arguing that it will save so much money as to be worth it.
* 2009 comes. Conan’s Tonight ratings are bad. Leno’s primetime performance is disastrous—he successfully cuts NBC’s costs, but so damages the affiliates’ 11 p.m. newscasts that they threaten to rebel, which in turn could create trouble for NBC’s proposed purchase by Comcast. NBC has to fix it, now like yesterday.
* Problem: NBC would owe Conan a big payout (reportedly $40-50 million) if it fired him. Bigger problem: NBC would owe Leno a bigger payout (reportedly as much as $150 million) if it fires him early.
* NBC does the math, decides to keep Jay.
* NBC offers to push the Tonight Show with Conan to 12:05 p.m. Did the network expect him to accept? Did NBC ever think a half-hour Jay Leno Show at 11:35 was a realistic long-term plan? Or did it hope Conan would quit, in a way that would get the network out of a payout (or at least reduce it)? Jeff Gaspin now says he thought Conan would take the deal. I can’t decide if it’s worse if he’s lying, or was thick enough to actually believe it.
* Word leaks out. Jaypocalypse ensues.
This is what happened. NBC was forced to act by an unignorable emergency in its primetime lineup and with its affiliates—not by Conan’s ratings. (No denying it, they were bad, and worse than NBC expected; but if not for the affiliate crisis, NBC would have stuck to the long-term plan of trying to grow a future audience in the ad-friendly demographic—for how much longer, no one knows.) It based decisions, as it had through its whole history with Jay and Conan, largely on trying to avoid huge contractual payoffs. (Also in part on trying to avoid having either Jay or Conan jump ship, though that ended up happening anyway.)
And as for TV no longer caring about 18-to-49-year-old viewers: Gabler is knowledgeable enough about the entertainment business to know that’s not true. TV will stop caring when advertisers stop caring. (I agree the controversy took on generational significance—the old guys won’t move over! why should we get pushed out for young people!—but that was a result, not the cause.)
It is, of course, in NBC’s interest for the public to believe, months from now, that Jay is hosting Tonight because too-hip-for-the-room Conan bombed, because America demanded its successful, beloved Jay back, and for no other reason. And that The Jay Leno Show never, ever happened.
And because people have real lives and don’t obsess about this sort of thing, that is probably what they will remember. But for the handful of you reading this post for research—I’m guessing somewhere around the Leno-Fallon War of 2017—well, thanks for listening.
