Watching Conan O’Brien take to the Tonight Show stage for what might be the final time, I felt emotionally conflicted. On the one hand, I want to be angry that NBC has treated him so poorly, trapping him in the middle of a business dispute and unfairly judging his show far too early for the sake of making other people happy. On the other hand, I want to show support for Conan, and being angry doesn’t entirely reflect how much I appreciate his particular brand of self-deprecation. So when Conan makes jokes about his imminent departure barring some sort of hail mary from NBC, are we supposed to boo to reflect the injustice, or are we supposed to cheer because we want CoCo to know we care?
And then I realized that for all of the emotional conflict I might be experiencing, Conan himself is having to mediate his anger with professionalism, and his sadness with comedy – for all of the verbal gymnastics we’ve been working with over the past number of weeks, trying to figure out how all of this is going to work out, it is nothing compared to what Conan O’Brien has been dealing with inside his head. So it’s that much more miraculous that what emerges in an official statement is pointed but civil, an argument not so much about what is being done to him but rather what NBC is doing to its own reputation, and to the position of the Tonight Show in its late night lineup. And, it’s that much more impressive that he proceeded to go onto his stage and be something that used to be enough to get you somewhere in this business: funny.
I don’t have much further extended thoughts that that, to be honest: while this issue is plenty fascinating, as we see how NBC deals with Conan’s departure and how long it takes Conan to end up at FOX (where it is expected he will be taking over the 11 O’Clock hour), I’m to the point where I simply want to acknowledge the cruel irony that I have paid more attention to Late Night now than I have in a very long time, and to remind everyone that Conan’s money is right on the money: while it might be easy to lay blame at the feet of Jay Leno, the problem here is a network who believes it can turn back time and who is throwing away a potential Tonight Show legacy in the process.
My one goal for the future is ensuring that this doesn’t just become a footnote in the larger story of NBC’s collapse: it is a turning point, a moment where we question the degree to which this network actually wants to craft a new identity, actually wants to climb its way out of the ratings basement. We’ll be debating about this for months, whether in terms of seeing how the network manages its late night situation or discovering just what the network will do with five hours of primetime. And yet at no point in that debate do I want us to forget that this was the time when NBC’s business decisions failed to respect someone who has been with their company for nearly two decades, tarnished the reputation of the man who they rushed out of his job sooner than he wanted in order to respect that person, and managed to end up with a bigger mess than what they started with.
I’m on Team Conan, but I’m also on Team “WTF NBC.” And something tells me that both memberships may be for life.
Cultural Observations
- Conan’s show was overall quite good on the NBC bitterness front, as the briefcase gag played out as one might expect (plus, one last bit of corporate synergy), but the way it fed through the rest of the interviews was probably the real kicker.
- Zachary Levi discussing teabagging in front of Tom Brokaw was just wondrously awkward.
- Alan Sepinwall has a full rundown of all the late night responses to the conflict: I caught a bit of Kimmel’s Leno impression, which was bizarre in the best possible way.
- Anne Helen Peterson has a great deconstruction of what “Team Conan” actually represents (which doesn’t change my affiliation, necessarily, but makes me consider it more carefully), while Felix Gillette compares the situation to Springtime for Hitler (the fictional musical from The Producers) in what is an extended analysis of the point which Jaime Weinman made last week.
- James Poniewozik asks whether Jay is the “right” choice, but we also wonder whether Jay “should” take the job, and whether doing so could tarnish his reputation (which James also blogs about as Jay struggles to play the gracious winner).
Cultural Learnings 
What is, “The title of Tracy Jordan’s tell-all account of the Disaster at Knuckle Beach, from the ‘Cougars’ episode of 30 Rock?”
What O’Brien is doing isn’t different from what Jack Paar or Johnny Carson did. Paar walked off The Tonight Show for a month over NBC’s censorship of a toilet joke. Carson threatened to leave The Tonight Show in 1979 over difficulties with then-NBC president Fred Silverman.
What makes the Leno/O’Brien mess different is that NBC has effectively decided to undercut its flagship show by moving it to 12:05 AM. Moving The Jay Leno Show to 11:35 PM – albeit in a truncated half-hour timeslot – makes salvaging that failure more important than maintaining its 56-year-old legacy timeslot. This isn’t like Carson wanting the show to be reduced from 90 to 60 minutes to reduce his workload.
I’m not going to debate the merits of Leno vs. O’Brien, but an institution is only as good as how well it is treated. The Tonight Show has had a more-or-less stable timeslot for seven decades, which is being undermined to fix a short-term problem. That’s the issue here, diluting a main brand since NBC can’t establish another.