Tagged: Jay Leno

Conan offers NBC ultimatum

Conan O’Brien offered NBC an ultimatum this week: move the Tonight Show later than it has aired for 60 years, and I’m walking away. While he hopes NBC will choose to keep The Tonight Show in its traditional spot with him as host, O’Brien’s ultimatum is viewed by some network execs as his resignation papers. This means NBC will effectively have given Conan only seven months on the Tonight Show after a 16-year partnership.

If NBC boots Conan, Jay Leno would be free to return to the Tonight Show, but as damaged goods; he’s already the butt of national jokes that paint him as the reason NBC is now viewed as a “minor-league” network on par with The CW and MyNetworkTV. NBC trashed five hours of scripted programming last spring to launch The Jay Leno Show, simply to hang on to a relationship with the aging comic; now, they could be trashing the future of The Tonight Show by losing out on its natural successor in O’Brien.

Sure, O’Brien is joking about selling the best weightloss products in a matter of weeks, but the truth is that he will immediately become the focus of a bidding war for his services, with Fox being the most natural suitor.

NBC muffed the Carson-to-Letterman transition, opting for Leno about 16 years ago; now they’ve muffed the Leno-to-O’Brien transition. Nitwits.

Other late night talkers returning, sans writers

Hollywood writers no esta aqui!

Even a simple sentence like that may be difficult to manage when late night hosts from Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien to Jimmy Kimmel all return to the airwaves early next year, some perhaps as soon as later this week. Unlike David Letterman and Craig Ferguson, however, they won’t be returning to the air with the benefit of writers.

Which means Leno fans won’t really notice a difference, though fans of Kimmel and O’Brien may.

Kimmel and O’Brien have shows that feature actual, scripted sketches; the type of humor that requires writers. Leno, even with benefit of writers, usually puts on skits that involved him standing on a street corner handing out promotional pens.

And since Leno’s monologues all sound like unfinished Jerry Seinfeld jokes, writers probably won’t matter much on The Tonight Show one way or another.

LENO:
So! Did you hear about that thing at the White House today? That had to be pretty weird, huh?

(Yes, that joke is finished now. Thanks, Jay, for all the years of those imponderable, unfinished thoughts.)

On second thought, maybe Leno’s show never should have left the air; it clearly hasn’t been using writers during his reign.

All I can say is, the switch to The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien can’t arrive soon enough! Hopefully he can bring Triumph with him if the show uproots him from Manhatten and plops him down in LA.

Leno offers bonuses as 120 are laid off

When striking Tonight Show writers open their mailboxes this week, they’ll find a paycheck; not from the network, but from host Jay Leno himself.

Over 120 Tonight Show staff recently received Christmas bonus checks, but were laid off early for the holiday season, with no guarantee they’d have jobs when the program resumes following the writers’ strike, which could come within the next couple weeks if the WGA accepts a contract proposal they are reviewing from producers, but may stretch into the unforeseen future if they do not.

The 120 layoffs match a similar layoff two weeks ago of staff who depend on the NBC comedy The Office for their weekly pay. The longer the the strike stretches out, the more common such layoffs will become.

The personal bonus from Leno was $100 for each year a staffer has been on staff with the show since he took over; not much money by Hollywood standards, but all of it apparently out of Leno’s personal account, not the network’s.