Fuck You, Leno

There is no bigger TV news this week than the Late Night shitstorm over at NBC and it would be utter negligence on my part if I didn’t take this opportunity to excoriate Jay Leno while elucidating the situation for anyone that isn’t quite up to speed on the whole issue.

As I’m sure all of you are aware, this whole debacle began when NBC affiliates started to complain that The Jay Leno Show was providing extremely disappointing lead-in ratings for newscasts. This gave the geniuses at NBC the idea that maybe, just maybe, Jay Leno wasn’t suited for primetime and instead of being euthanized, he should be moved back to a late night slot; Conan O’Brien’s late night spot, to be precise. NBC drew up preliminary plans to facilitate Jay Leno that would see The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien pushed to 12:05am, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon to 1:05am, and Who Gives a Shit with Carson Daly to, in all likelihood, never. Unsurprisingly, when they ran this idea past O’Brien he wasn’t pleased. He saw it as NBC reneging on their contract and polluting the history of The Tonight Show while NBC argued that the contract only stipulated that he host The Tonight Show and gave no guarantee of a particular time. O’Brien saw this as a step backward for his career and, ultimately, unfair.

I won’t go into specifics because there are far, far too many examples, but it is at this point that everyone in the world—except Jimmy Fallon—started attacking Leno and NBC, exacerbating the predicament to a point where a disagreement has turned into a blood feud between Leno, O’Brien, and NBC.

O’Brien is said to have settled his contractual dispute with NBC, taking a payout of 45 million dollars with 27% (12m) supposedly going to his staff of 200 and he will be prohibited from appearing on any other programs until September 1st, 2010. In order to reach an agreement, NBC made one final senseless demand: that O’Brien cannot take any of intellectual property over to another network. NBC now owns the rights such classics as The Masturbating Bear, Horny Manatee, If They Mated, and sadly, Pierre Bernard’s Recliner of Rage. This is purely a petty, vengeful move on NBC’s part because no self-respecting comedian in the world could or would touch any of O’Brien’s signature bits, which I guess still leaves Leno to perform them.

The entire situation has shown just how heavy-handed and unprofessional NBC is. Instead of ignoring O’Brien’s admittedly hilarious insults like a faceless media company should, multiple NBC executives have committed PR suicide by emerging from the dark pits of Mordor to call O’Brien a coward, et al. for not taking their shit. However, nothing could be further from the truth; this whole debacle has shown that O’Brien has a backbone that I think no one imagined he possessed. As for Jay Leno, well, besides being the herpes virus of broadcast television and an irrefutable sign of the apocalypse, he has, instead of displaying any remorse, attempted to portray himself as a child caught in the middle of a nasty divorce—albeit a divorce he instigated.

What’s so infuriating is that you can see how badly Leno wants it, but you get the feeling he doesn’t know why he wants it. He just wants it to have it and will do nothing interesting with it once he gets it. There is no doubt that his monologues will remain about as unpleasant and painful as getting finger-banged by Wolverine from the X-Men (I would imagine).

However, it isn’t all dark news for O’Brien as he is reportedly being courted by FOX, FX and, inexplicably, Dancing With the Stars.

The only hope for NBC now comes in the form of Chuck (airing Monday’s at 8pm), which you should watch before NBC finds out that it’s a great program and cancels it, replacing it with extra episodes of Heroes, in which Jay Leno is sure to become a series regular.