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Has tough late-night battle permanently wounded Leno?
NBC is hoping that it all goes away, too. The network will not know until March 1 whether he has been damaged permanently by the disastrous decision to try him in nightly prime time and the clumsy way he recovered his old job. March 1 is when Leno returns to late night, opposite David Letterman on CBS.
“He’s going to be competitive, and I think his audience is going to come back over time,” says Jeff Gaspin, NBC Universal Entertainment chairman.
During his Winfrey appearance, Leno said he was devastated when NBC executives asked him to leave the “Tonight” show because they wanted to give the show to O’Brien. He said he told “a white lie on the air” when he said he was going to retire because he assumed he would find another job in show business.
He said he felt “really bad” for O’Brien, whom he hasn’t talked with. “I think it’s unfair, but TV is not fair,” Leno said. “Anything [NBC] did would have been better than this,” Leno said. “Anything. Anything they did. If they had come in and shot everybody, I mean, it would have been ‘Oh, people were murdered,’ but at least it would have been a two-day story. NBC could not have handled it worse. From 2004 onward this whole thing was a huge, huge mess.”
Except for the Winfrey interview, Leno will do little talking after his 10 p.m. EST show ends Feb. 9, making way for coverage of the Winter Olympics. NBC will promote his return to late night but in a low-key fashion since it has been only a few months that it hyped his prime time show, Gaspin said.
“We’re going to do it with a little humor and we’re going to do it with a little wink to the audience,” he said. “We know they know what’s going on.” The 10 p.m. show, canceled because affiliates complained about its low ratings, instantly transformed Leno’s public image into that of a failure after a 15-year run as the king of late-night television.
Meanwhile, his “Tonight” show successor, Conan O’Brien, despite being a ratings failure himself, became a folk hero when he wouldn’t accept NBC’s plan to move his “Tonight” show to 12:05 a.m. New York time to accommodate Leno’s shortened comedy program. Leno has been vilified for taking back a job he plainly did not want to leave in the first place, despite promising more than five years ago that he would.
Jimmy Kimmel, in a brutal appearance on Leno’s own show, was asked about the best prank he had ever pulled and said: “I told a guy that five years from now, I’m going to give you my show. And then when the five years came, I gave it to him. And then I took it back almost instantly. I think he works at Fox or something now.”
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