A psychic predicts the future of The Tonight Show

Earlier today, NBC announced that Jimmy Fallon will officially take over The Tonight Show from Jay Leno next April. Shortly after the announcement, I received an email from Ms. Rosa Conjunctivitis, who claims to be a psychic. She sent me a timeline for the future of NBC's late night schedule, and gave me permission to share it with you.

April 2014:

• Jimmy Fallon takes over The Tonight Show.
• Seth Meyers takes over Late Night.
• Jay Leno goes back to doing stand-up full-time.

October 2014:

• In an emergency move to shore up poor ratings before the November sweeps, NBC brings back Jay Leno to replace Jimmy Fallon.
• Jimmy Fallon gets a $20 million bonus to leave the show. His bonus is paid for by a $1 charge added to the bill of every Comcast subscriber.

January 2015:

• Jimmy Fallon begins hosting a new six-hour-long late night show for Fox titled "Jimmy FallON All Night."

January 2019:

• Although Jay Leno's Tonight Show remains the #1 late night talk show, the average age of its viewers has increased to 69, so NBC replaces Jay Leno with Seth Meyers. Comcast adds another $2 to all of its subscribers' bills to pay for NBC's settlement with Jay Leno.
• NBC names Funnybot 3000, an android, to be the new host of Late Night.
• Jay Leno goes back to doing stand-up full-time.

August 2019:

• Faced with a mass revolt by its remaining 46 affiliates, all of which are owned by one 69-year-old man, Jay Leno returns to host The Tonight Show. Comcast adds another $4 to the bills of all of its subscribers in order to pay Meyers and Leno.
• Leno purchases the former Mall of America and turns it into a garage for his car collection.

January 2020:

• Seth Meyers becomes the host of a nightly combination talk show and clearance sale on QVC titled Wholesale After Dark with Seth Meyers.

June 2024:

• NBC announces plans to replace Jay Leno on The Tonight Show with Funnybot 3000. However, NBC's four remaining affiliates threaten to switch to QVC, so NBC keeps Leno as the host.

March 2046:

• Jay Leno passes away at age 95 while doing weekend stand-up at the "Komedy Kabana" in Elkhart, Indiana.

April 2046:

• The Tonight Show's new format consists of an hour-long broadcast of Jay Leno's embalmed body from a glass-walled sarcophagus built where the ice skating rink used to stand in Rockefeller Center. A drummer plays a rimshot every three minutes.

Profiles in Cowardice

It looks as though the negotiations between NBC and Conan O'Brien will be completed as early as tomorrow, and I couldn't be happier. With the disaster in Haiti, this entire situation doesn't even deserve ranking as a sideshow. However, a couple of things have happened that tick me off and point to the high level of cowardice within NBC's current management. First, Dick Ebersol, the president of NBC Sports, criticized O'Brien and David Letterman for their jokes about Jay Leno, saying that it was "chicken-hearted and gutless to blame a guy you couldn’t beat in the ratings." He went on to say that "what this is really all about is an astounding failure by Conan." Later, he claimed that if O'Brien had only taken his (Ebersol's) advice to water down his comedy to fit the 11:35 p.m. audience, everything would have been fine.

Let's take those arguments, in reverse order. O'Brien DID make his comedy blander and less pointed in order to avoid offending the "Tonight Show" audience. I don't think they ran the Masturbating Bear once during the last seven months, for example. I'd argue that it was removing exactly that edge that made The Tonight Show less entertaining and less interesting. In the last week, O'Brien has taken the gloves off, and his ratings have soared.

Second, the "failure" at 11:35 was hardly Conan's fault alone. NBC knew that putting Jay Leno on at 10 p.m. was going to draw away some of the older audience, and that they might not stay up later to watch O'Brien. If I recall the statistics, the average shortfall in ratings that NBC affiliates suffered by putting Leno on at 10 was 17%. That meant that a 17% lower audience was carrying over into the 11:35 time period for NBC. Of course O'Brien's ratings were lower, because he wasn't fighting on a level playing field. He had to start with the damage caused by The Jay Leno Show.

Before I skip to the first charge by Ebersol, let me bring you another quote, this time from an article last Friday in the New York Times, including a quote from Jeff Zucker, chairman of NBC Universal:

"Mr. Zucker said that it was during a phone call in the first week of January from Jeff Gaspin, NBC Universal’s head of entertainment, that he learned that the network’s affiliates were threatening to pre-empt the Leno show. 'It was becoming tough to deal with,” Mr. Zucker said. “The pressure from the affiliate body was strong.'

Mr. Gaspin’s idea was to move Mr. O’Brien’s show to 12:05 a.m., and give Mr. Leno a half-hour show at 11:35 p.m. 'That’s what he wanted to do, and I said, O.K., give it a shot,' Mr. Zucker said. The shot exploded in their faces."

Ahh, so it's Jeff Gaspin's fault, is it? If all that Zucker was doing was assenting to a plan proposed by his subordinate, why did Zucker go ballistic and threaten to not only pay O'Brien nothing but to keep him off the air for 3 1/2 years? He seems awfully invested in someone else's idea. It sounds more like Zucker is trying to make Gaspin the fall guy. Zucker was the one who came up with the plan to give The Tonight Show to O'Brien in the first place and to give Leno a show at 10 p.m. after Leno wouldn't agree to a show at 8 p.m. If he didn't originate the harebrained scheme of musical chairs starting with moving Leno back to 11:35, he most certainly approved it.

Which brings me to the "chicken-hearted and gutless" remark by Ebersol. Who's more chicken-hearted and gutless in this situation: O'Brien, standing up for himself, or Zucker, hiding behind Gaspin? For that matter, when Ebersol's Winter Olympics coverage loses $100 to $200 million for NBC, which he's said that it's going to do, I wonder who he'll blame or whether Zucker will stand up for him.

Conan O'Brien Rejects NBC--Leno Will Get Back "The Tonight Show"

It looks like NBC is going to do what I suggested in an earlier post, but not because they want to do it. Yesterday, Conan O'Brien basically told NBC to "take a hike" with its plan to move Jay Leno back to 11:35 p.m. for 30 minutes, followed by The Tonight Show at 12:05 a.m. In a heartfelt but very carefully crafted public statement, O'Brien said that by moving The Tonight Show to 12:05 a.m. from a time period where it's been for almost 60 years, it will effectively no longer be The Tonight Show, and he won't be a party to that.

According to NBC, its contract with O'Brien doesn't specify at what time The Tonight Show has to run, so the network is completely within its contractual rights to move the show without having to pay O'Brien his kill fee. However, O'Brien is making the argument (and his lawyers would make the argument if it ever got to court) that having The Tonight Show on after the local news is a multigenerational institution with U.S. television viewers, and that by moving "The Tonight Show" to 12:05 a.m. and putting another entertainment program in front of it, O'Brien's show will be "The Tonight Show" in name only.

The trade press says that all that remains is for NBC to negotiate a cash settlement with O'Brien and an agreement on how long he'll have to stay off the air before he can work for a competitor. It's fairly clear that barring some other major event, O'Brien's last show as the host of The Tonight Show will be February 11th, the same night that "The Jay Leno Show" goes off the air. Leno will take over again as the host of The Tonight Show after the end of the Winter Olympics.

I have to admit that I wasn't a fan of O'Brien's Tonight Show, but I was even less of a fan of Jay Leno, who seems to believe that you can never dumb your talk show down enough for the audience. I'm not happy about the outcome, but NBC (and its acquirer, Comcast) has to be even less happy. No one in negotiations with NBC in the future is going to trust that the network will think through or stand by its decisions.