The battle of Team Jay versus Team Conan has been raging for weeks, and it’s doubtful that anyone will switch sides after
As Winfrey pointed out during an hourlong interview
on the set of Leno’s prime-time show, Leno is now seen as “the bad guy”
in the affair of “The Tonight Show.”
Earlier this month,
executives announced that they wanted Leno to once again follow the
local news and that they wanted to move O’Brien’s “Tonight Show” to
None of that came to pass, because Leno, as he said, “got his old job back” (he returns to “The Tonight Show”
But according to Leno, he got his job back only after
“Conan said he thought it would be destructive to the franchise,” Winfrey said.
“Well, if you look at where the (O’Brien ‘Tonight
Show’) ratings were, it was already destructive to the franchise,” Leno
replied.
He also said the media had been “unfair” to him.
“I mean, I think it’s funny that they have a picture of me and
Somehow these are quite similar,” Leno said. “You have a TV show, he
had sex with a 13-year old girl with Quaaludes. Yeah, that’s about
equal.”
Despite the flashes of bitterness, it was clear that
Leno wanted the world to know that, contrary to popular opinion, he did
have hurt feelings about the whole matter, feelings that stretched back
to 2004. That’s when
plan that would have put O’Brien behind the “Tonight Show” desk and
Leno into retirement in 2009.
“It broke my heart. It really did. I was
devastated,” Leno said. “This was the job that I had always wanted and
this was the only job that ever mattered in show business, to me. …
It was just like, why?”
Since that point,
“Anything they did would have been better than
this,” Leno said. “If they had come in and shot everybody. It would
have been ‘Oh, people were murdered,’ but at least it would have been a
two-day story.
Winfrey repeatedly asked why he didn’t just retire or at least call O’Brien to consult him about the plan
had proposed. It never seemed like the right time to call O’Brien, Leno
said. And though he was sure throughout that he was “doing the right
thing,” he also admitted to some “agonizing” doubts.
“How can you do the right thing and just have it go
so wrong? ‘Maybe I’m not doing the right thing,’ I would think,” Leno
said. “Maybe I’m doing something wrong. This many people are angry and
upset over a television show. … My show got canceled. They weren’t
happy with the other guy’s show. They said, ‘We want you to go back,’
and I said, ‘OK.’ And this seemed to make a lot of people really upset.
And I go, ‘Well, who wouldn’t take that job though? Who wouldn’t do
that?'”
But by ending up back at “The Tonight Show,” wasn’t he “taking away Conan’s dream?” Winfrey asked.
“No,” Leno replied. “Because, again, this is an
affiliate decision. Affiliates felt that the ratings were low. This was
the first time in the 60-year history of ‘The Tonight Show’ that ‘The
Tonight Show’ would have lost money. And that’s what it comes down to.
It’s really just a matter of dollars and cents.”
It’s worth pointing out that
“Unless
studio and office complex it built for ‘Tonight’ — it’s hard to see how
the show could so quickly go from profit to deficit in less than one
year,” Adalian wrote.
Leno did say he felt bad for O’Brien, but he largely
portrayed himself, as he has for weeks, as a passive player the drama.
In his mind, he’s a guy whose has been “fired twice” and went back to
the “Tonight Show” mainly to keep his staff employed.
To retire would be an “ego decision,” he said. That
would be “the selfish thing to do. You walk out and say to the 170
other people who work here, ‘Listen, I don’t want to get my reputation
ruined, I don’t want anyone talking bad about me. I’ve got enough
money, I’m going to leave. You people can all fend for yourselves.’ …
As long as I’m working, they’re working. That seems to make sense to
me. Is it a little selfish in that I still like being on TV? Oh sure.”
Winfrey, a media mogul who has weathered her own
share of controversies, said she was surprised by a joke that Leno made
about the infidelities of
been hammering Leno for weeks (“I thought that was beneath you,
actually,” Winfrey said). But she also said she was taken aback at the
anti-Leno sentiment.
“I could understand people thinking that you were
selfish if you owned the show and controlled the show,” Winfrey said.
“It’s a little surprising to me that people think you stole the show
when in fact it wasn’t your show to steal. It’s owned by
“I never expected this to happen. People think
you’re behind the scenes, pulling strings,” he added. “There’s no
strings to pull. I have a show that’s been canceled. So why would I
have any power to go, ‘Oh, I want (‘The Tonight Show’)?
The portrait Leno painted of the passive man on the
sidelines doesn’t square with his reputation of being relentlessly
ambitious and driven. This is the man who, according to the book “The
Late Shift,” hid in a closet in the ’90s to hear
To hear Leno describe it, everything that occurred
during the last month or two was the handiwork of the affiliates and
ham-fisted
“I said, ‘I’m going to retire.'” It was just maybe easier that way.”
—
(c) 2010, Chicago Tribune.
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