I think he just likes working, period. He has the reputation of being one of the hardest working guys in show business, the type of person who rarely takes a day off. In addition to the NBC show, he also does regular Vegas gigs and stand-up tours.
Leno is the worst of the group. He has a good opening but his interviews are terrible. He avoids uncomfortable questions.
Letterman is a much better interviewer . But he acts like he is pretty bored with it all now.
Conan was better when he was wilder. He does have Triumph and that is a huge plus. He is a horrible interviewer.
Kimmel gets a lower level of guests. But he does ask the question that occur to you during an interview, even if it makes the guest a little uncomfortable. Sometimes the line of questioning veers into something interesting. Then he has a couple good bits like the Moments of Unintended Censorship.
Ferguson did a great interview last night with Steven Wright. He went right along with his bit and it was amusing and caught Wright off guard.
What’s (choose one) funny/sad/ironic/overlooked is that the bean counters at NBC had a pretty good idea of Leno’s appeal. He’s been delivering the (modest) audience the network promised advertisers, and his show is cheap to produce.
What the NBC programmers failed to anticipate was that 1) that 5 years after the deal was made, Conan wouldn’t yet be up to the challenge of the replacing Leno, and (worse) Leno would be stronger than he was 5 years ago, 2) the audience in general wouldn’t be clamoring for an hour of Leno comedy-talk in prime time every night and 3) that Leno would cost the affiliates their audience flow into the late news.
I always thought that Leno’s show would be perfect for Friday and/or Saturday evenings when the only people watching TV were too old to matter to advertisers. Leno would capture those of us who used to watch Carol Burnett and have an incredibly loyal audience.
Now, of course, NBC is screwed. If it puts Leno back on at 11:30 he’s going to have an enormous chip on his shoulder, NBC will lose the investment they made in Conan, and a whole bunch of affiliates will probably show Wheel of Fortune after the news instead of either show.
If I were NBC, I’d probably do something like put Leno back on Tonight and give Conan an hour of prime time every night on one of their cable networks. “Here’s your budget, do whatever you want with it.”
Heard tonight that Conan’s ratings are about 50% lower than what Leno had at 11:30. So the problem is not just Leno’s ratings at 10.
All in all, I still like the idea of moving Leno to Meet the Press. It is a soft spot in the schedule and Leno does a good interview and will attract a younger crowd. (But Jay has expressed no interest in this. As stated, he seems to like the Tonight Show.)
In fact, he’s quoted in this article as saying that he lives solely off his standup revenues and has always put his Tonight Show earnings into savings, so clearly, it is out of a love for his work and not solely about the money.
Good interviewer? Younger crowd? Is there some other Jay Leno I’m unfamiliar with?
Kimmel starts at midnight mostly in deference to Nightline but it has the exact side benefits you describe.
Conan would almost certainly have better ratings than Kimmel so Kimmel could be axed. Nightline could get the ax as well.
NBC was very close to axing Leno after his first 6 months on the Tonight show, they were going to hire Letterman. The talks broke down and Letterman went to CBS. At first Letterman had better ratings so it looked like NBC picked the wrong guy but eventually Leno came out on top.
Conan didn’t try too hard to hide his anger toward NBC last night; at one he implied that being impaled would be preferable to staying at NBC. Unlike most people in this thread (and America, apparently), I think Conan’s Tonight Show is the best late night show at the moment, and should have been allowed to flourish without Leno breathing down Conan’s neck (at 10pm or 11:30). In fact, if Leno accepts this deal, then I’ll have lost all (solely automobile-related) respect for him, because it shows that he puts his career over the legacy of the Tonight Show, and has no regard for the livelihood of Conan and his transplanted staff.
You could argue that NBC screwed up the legacy of the Tonight show by forcing out a guy with high ratings. Leno didn’t leave on his own.
TV news guy here…yes, the lead-in numbers from Leno at 10 are a disaster and the afffiliates are furious. NBC is also losing money at it’s owned and operated stations because of the lower news ratings. The Leno experiment was a huge gamble. If it works, NBC gets five hours of primetime programming at a fraction of the production costs of a scripted drama.
It didn’t work. The ratings for Leno are good enough for NBC to break even on production costs, but not nearly good enough to please the affiliates. Leno’s demographic appeal turned out to be too narrow.
Conan replaced a #1 rated show and destroyed the ratings for that time slot. He’s gone regardless of what Leno does. His edgy, weird humor has too narrow an audience.
Neither did Carson. I don’t think anyone disagrees that the original decision to replace Leno was a boneheaded move, but demoting or possibly canning Conan after 6 months, and a lot of effort to launch the show, seems turbo-short-sighted. If early ratings were a predictor for future success, then Leno would have been out on his ass sometime in 1993.
As far as I understand it, Conan’s TS is a financial success, and the real problem is that Leno’s show is sucking the wind out of local news ratings. So, to me, the solution is simple: Say sayonara to Leno. Try to cultivate Conan’s show (say, run a commercial once in a while), and you may end up with a brand-new Leno 2.0 who stays with you for the next 20 years and battles in the ratings with Letterman’s inevitable replacement. But all they know is “Letterman’s winning and we gotta keep Leno” and they go in to full-on panic-and-kill-Conan’s-dreams mode.
It’s just absurd that the key players in this debacle are STILL Letterman and Leno.
Do you actually watch him? He’s pretty accessible these days. Not “Jaywalking” accessible, but “Carnac the Magnificent” accessible. People forget that Carson used to do stuff that was 10x edgier and weirder than Leno.
And, like I say, 6 months and he’s gone? The world moves too quickly for me now. 
Conan is a guy who wanted to host the Tonight Show his whole life, and actually appreciates the contributions of people like Steve Allen, Jack Paar, and Johnny Carson.
I never got that sense with Leno.
Since posting earlier and reading all the reports on the Internet and hearing the newscasts speculate, one thing has struck me - a very subtle distinction in how they describe Conan and Leno.
Most reports talk about Leno’s popularity but mention Conan only in terms of contractual agreement and money. I have yet to see a report that mentions any fan base of Conan, but most will talk about Leno’s audience and how they stopped watching the Tonight Show and are not tuning in regularly at the 10:00 timeslot. Not a mention of Conan’s fans not tuning in “earlier” at 11:35.
It seems, at least in press reports, nobody considers Conan’s audience worth diddle, whereas most are wondering where Leno’s legions of fans went. I am not a big Conan fan, but sort of feel sorry for him - reading between the lines, it is obvious that most think Conan has woefully underperformed and that canceling his show would upset about 3 dozen people nationwide.
This all started in 2004. Conan’s contract was set to expire in 2006. Leno agreed to a five-year contract renewal, and that he would step aside in 2009 when he would be 59 years old. NBC was afraid that Conan would go elsewhere in 2006, and this was a way to ensure that they both stayed in place through 2009.
But as Leno’s retirement date approached, NBC found that his show was the top one in late night. So in December 2008, they announced that they would give Leno a 10pm show, screwing over Conan.
Leno’s *Tonight Show *ratings were about 5 to 6 million people, a night which are the same as his 10pm show gets. The people who watched him at 11:30 did follow him to 10pm, it’s just that 5-6 million in primetime usually means a show gets cancelled. *30 Rock *gets around 6 million viewers a week and it would probably have been cancelled if it didn’t win Emmys.
Conan is getting fewer viewers for the *Tonight Show *than Leno did, about 3 million which is the same as he did at *Late Night *but less than Letterman.
Leno is doing as well as expected at 10pm. It’s just that NBC was stupid to not predict that those numbers would hurt their affilates 11pm newscasts. I think NBC would have given Leno and O’Brien more time in their current timeslots to grow if the affiliates weren’t taking such a big hit and being so vocal about their losses.
I can’t find those number right now because every article about the drama fails to provide the actual ratings numbers, which would put things into much better context than saying Leno is failing. It’s new year, it’s not that hard to mention how well they both averaged in 2009.
I think this has something to do with Leno sucking, though. I know personally, I usually forget Leno’s on at 10 when I’m flipping through channels. A few times, I’ve stopped at Leno, watched for a few minutes, got bored, and changed the channel. Once I’ve settled on something else, I usually forget when it’s time for Conan. And I freaking LOVE Conan.
Leno needs to walk away. Maybe if the Conan TS had been given a fair chance, it wouldn’t have these problems.
Things changed a lot since 93 so it’s not that unusual that Conan would be axed after just 6 months. And as I said above, Leno was nearly axed early on but NBC could not reach a deal with Letterman. If Letterman had agreed with NBC then Leno would have been out.
Many shows are axed after only 1 or 2 episodes now, Conan has done over 100 shows. He’s a funny guy but it looks like he just can’t bring in enough viewers at 11:30.
In sports they say don’t follow a legendary coach, Leno did that by following Carson and he survived after a rough year or 2. It’s possible Conan could do OK eventually but he probably won’t get that long.