FWIW, here is my own blow by blow (I had to do something to avoid sticking a fork in my brain while I watched it).
I am surprised that there is no live audience cheering on both Oprah and Leno - that alone makes this about 33% more tolerable than it otherwise would be. If Oprah did her show without an audience I might actually watch it once in a while. Leno do is better without it. They both pander like cheap whores when the audience is in the room (I want to write "jump from bed to bed with the frequency of a cheap ham radio" but can not figure out how to work it in), but alone they are actual people - even when often still unlikable, as Leno very much is in this interview. Indeed, I have always liked Leno when he is away from his own studio audience, but here with Oprah he seems to be his real self - and that self is not a very nice man. He tells Oprah that he always thought that he would keep doing the Tonight Show as long as he was keeping it #1. Of course this is the opposite of what he said publicly at the time (he said he thought it was best to leave while he was still #1, and that he could not do the show at the age of 60), but okay, maybe he is telling the truth now, and was lying then as a good company man - Oprah chooses not to push him on this point. Parenthetically I note that his current position is actually not credible, since Dave has not been #1 for a long time, but has never been in danger of not keeping his job. If one were to insist on framing the issue as Leno does, the proper form would be "are your ratings as good or better than some other available candidate's would be?" or (the form Leno should be most comfortable with) "are you making money for the network?". I don't think we can ever know what Leno's original reaction was to the 5-year transition plan to Conan, nor do I think it is really relevant here. Leno is telling his current version in part to lay the foundation for his claim that he is the injured, heart broken party here - not Conan. In his narrative, Conan took his job at the Tonight Show, and broke his (Leno's) heart. But he is also telling it to lay the foundation for his more important claim - which is that in the TV game, it is ratings uber alles. He was screwed by NBC when they took the Tonight Show away from him and gave it to Conan, because he (Leno) was still #1. Conan is not being screwed by NBC (much less by Leno) because Conan was not #1. And this is where Leno holds hands with Ebersol and continues to exercise the NBC PR strategy (which still might work, since PR and history are both written by the winners) that the real problem here is Conan's failure. If Conan had the goods, and had delivered man-sized ratings, he would still be the host of the Tonight Show. Never mind, of course, that Leno himself could not have met that bar 7 months after he first took over the Tonight Show, or that Leno himself was one major cause of Conan's ratings problems. This is the kind of think that so richly earns Leno the title asshole. Any doubt about his assholitry is removed as he explains his view on Conan's reaction to accepting the demotion to 12:05. Oprah asks him if he thought of calling Conan and asking himself how he felt about it, Leno says it was not his place to do that - he just does what the NBC people tell him. She asks what he thinks of Conan's refusal to take the demotion because it would destroy the Tonight Show franchise - and the hidden but omnipresent asshole in Leno for once is clearly manifest all over his face - he says "if you look at where the ratings were" pauses for a long beat, tilts his head and says that Conan had himself already destroyed the Tonight Show franchise. Yuck. And I see he continues to push NBC's highly suspect claim that if he had not taken Conan's job it would have been the first time the Tonight Show had ever lost money (reports are the only way this could be true is if they are counting all of the start up costs, including the cost of the new studio, against the revenues for this first year). Here is the real Leno narrative - he is riding back to his rightful home at the Tonight Show to save it from the destruction being done to it by Conan. Of course, this is no surprise, this is pretty much what he said or implied in that print interview he gave last October. Even if all of this is true (which I don't believe it is), this narrative does not put Leno in a positive light. If he was not okay with the Conan transfer he should have said so at the time. NBC would then have been forced to choose between Leno and Conan, and the other could have left to do a show somewhere else. The end result would not have been that different than what we have now (except A. NBC would have chosen Conan and not Leno and B. NBC has been able to squeeze out an extra 15 months or so of not having to compete with a third high profile late night host). But whatever the result, it would have had more integrity and honor than what we have seen. What drives Dave (and many others) crazy about Leno's passive aggressive shit is that in its cowardly attempt to avoid conflict and be perceived as "nice" it winds up creating 10 times more conflict, and fucking over everyone else not named Leno. But one other thing about this, he tells Oprah that being the Host of the Tonight Show is the only job he ever wanted. But during the original conflict with Dave, wasn't Leno denying or at least down playing his ambitions to be the host of the Tonight Show? My memory is that he kept saying that eh was happy being a guest host, but NBC asked him to takeover for Johnny and so he was happy to do that too. I give him credit for admitting (finally) that the reason the JLS failed was that it was a late night talk show at 10:00. But I don't believe him when he says that he did not realize that his 10:00 show was putting hundreds of people who work on scripted shows out of work until his show actually went on the air. That simply can not be true. That issue was front and center for each of the weeks from the initial announcement of the Leno Experiment until the day the show started. It is not credible that he had never heard that charge until September of 2009. I was a little surprised that he said Kimmel had sucker-punched him; I have never been certain that he was not in on that bit, and even if he wasn't, I didn't think he would admit it, or basically enlist Kimmel fans (such as they are) in Team Coco. I did like his analogy between the comic and the boxer - when boxers get hit, it hurts, but they don't get mad at the other guy, that is what we do. I am gratified that he said he thought NBC would have cut his primetime show down to 2 or 3 nights per week, since that has been my recommendation since somewhere around Week 4 of the Leno Experiment. But that gratification is very short-lived, as he immediately follows it with the BS that the problems of the Leno show were covering up Conan's rating problems. He is as stubbornly "on message" as a hack politician. Please, please, Oprah, I will take back half of the unkind thoughts I have ever had about you if you just ask him if Conan's ratings would have been better if he had a stronger lead-in at 10:00 - or what Leno's own ratings were like the first months he took over the Tonight Show. But of course, she does not. A surprise opportunity for self-reflection for Leno - he says he always thought he was doing the right thing, he always thinks he is doing the right thing (as opposed to Dave, who you get the impression never thinks he is doing the right thing). So many people blame him for this he almost asks himself "maybe I am not doing the right thing?" - but no, the question is rhetorical, the opportunity for self-reflection is passed up. The answer is, he is one of the few decent, hard working, straight shooters in a town full of Hollywood elitists. Oprah says that Leno's Dave joke was beneath him (the way to get Letterman to ignore you is to marry him). Leno's two part excuse - it was funny, and he had a right to one cheap shot joke since everyone else was giving him cheap shots. But the joke was not that funny (we have no evidence that Dave ignores his wife, only that he screwed other women before he married, but while he was living with, her). But she lets him get away with saying that it was the only joke he made about Dave during the last couple of weeks (not true), and does not call him on the at least two references he has made in the current interview to not having had affairs or sexual scandals, which are clear side swipes at Dave. I am really surprised 96% of Oprah's audience is on Conan's side - I thought her audience was pretty close to Leno's audience (and as Melissa has pointed out here, Conan seems to attract more of the sophomoric young male audience). Ah - Oprah does finally push back appropriately on a repeated Leno BS-ism, that he could not have done anything else in the situation. "You could have walked away" she says. No, that would have been the ego move, because it would have cost all my staff their jobs, without the 12 month notice he would have given them if NBC had kept a failing primetime show on the whole run. "Well, you could have done what Conan did - negotiate a buy-out for himself and his staff. Leno's response "I could have done that - but I didn't - they offered me my old job back, which was my dream job". Of course, this is close to one of the things that people are hating Leno for - he failed in primetime, then took Conan's job because he really wanted it. I can understand it of course, but even Oprah just eviscerated your lame ass attempt to pretend it was your only choice, or the honorable, ego-less choice. Can you just acknowledge that at least? No, of course you can't. One thing becomes clear watching this - if their places had been exactly reversed Leno and Conan would have behaved quite differently from each other. Leno clearly would have taken the Tonight Show to 12:05, no doubt realizing that eventually the older guy will lose steam in the ratings, and he would be positioned to swoop back and reclaim the 11:35 slot when he did. Conan would not have agreed to do a show 30 minutes before the Tonight Show. Conan might have accepted the 10:00 offer, but of course he would have been able to put on a show significantly different than a regular talk show. Oprah, not a hard hitting journalist after all, is less obnoxious than I had expected and feared her to be. Leno was more genuinely an asshole than I expected him to be. -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en
