Jay Leno Denies Sabotaging Conan O’Brien’s “Tonight Show”

Jay Leno is That Girl. The type who paints themselves as nice, but is actually the common denominator in all the (late night talk show) drama. First there was the feud with David Letterman, who was pissed Jay got The Tonight Show after Johnny Carson retired in 1992. Then it was Jay vs. Conan O’Brien. Jay left The Tonight Show in 2009, Conan replaced him, and Jay began hosting The Jay Leno Show at 10:00 PM. After several months of this arrangement, NBC decided they weren’t happy with the ratings. They gave Jay his 11:35 time slot back, and offered Conan two choices; his Tonight Show could either move to 12:05, or he could leave NBC. Obviously, Conan exited, and Jay made his official return to The Tonight Show. Then, four years later, he left for good. And that, my friends, is why we are stuck with Jimmy Fallon.

People reports that, on a recent episode of Bill Maher’s Club Random podcast, Jay addressed the decade-old drama, denying rumors that he “sabotaged” 59-year-old Conan’s Tonight Show by deliberately tanking his new 10:00 PM show. But 72-year-old Jay says “it doesn’t work that way.” Nope, Jay’s new show sucked without him even trying, thank you very much!

Jay tells Bill that NBC thought The Jay Leno Show idea would work because 10:00 PM dramas were expensive to make, and Jay’s show would only be a fraction of the cost. But “that didn’t work”:

And then, you know, “Leno deliberately sabotaged his [own] show to try and get The Tonight Show.” No. That doesn’t work! It doesn’t work that way. You try and do the best you can, and it didn’t work.

And then they said, “How ’bout coming on at 11:30?” I said, “Look, I don’t wanna go through this again.” They go, “If Conan goes back to 12, will you do a half-hour at 11:30?” I said, “Talk to Conan! If he’ll go to 12, I’ll do a half-hour, just with a monologue and one guest.” And, of course, Conan didn’t wanna do that, and that’s when he wrote the letter. And then they put me back in, and we became #1 again.

Bill asked Jay why he wouldn’t have just moved networks. He replied, via People:

“Sometimes the czar you have is better than the one you’re going to,” he told Maher, 66. “Then you have your old team shooting at you as well. I just figured let’s just play this out and see what happens. This all happened fairly quickly.”

He adds that he thought about joining ABC, and even called Jimmy Kimmel to discuss the possibility, but never followed up with him after deciding to stay at NBC:

“I suppose I should have called Jimmy and explained to him again, but I didn’t,” he said. “I don’t know why I didn’t. I just didn’t. I thought he probably would figure it out. But I think maybe he was hurt by that, and I apologized to him for that.”

Here’s Bill Maher’s podcast. The Conan stuff is around the 50:00 mark:

When this all went down in 2010, Conan did an interview with 60 Minutes and said that he was pissed at Jay:

“He went and took that show back and I think in a similar situation, if roles had been reversed, I know — I know me, I wouldn’t have done that,” O’Brien said at the time.

In the interview, the comedian noted he would not have “surrendered The Tonight Show and handed it over to somebody publicly and wished them well — and then … six months later [reclaimed it]. But that’s me, you know.”

O’Brien added that, if he had been in Leno’s shoes, he would’ve “done something else, go someplace else.”

So, it seems like Jay is painting his past actions as very passive, while Conan believes they were selfish. Interesting. But, again, none of this changes the fact that Jimmy Fucking Fallon has been hosting The Tonight Show for over nine years. Somewhere, Johnny Carson and his eighty wives are rolling in their graves.

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