The audience members who gave Conan O’Brien a standing ovation upon his appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon last year — whom O’Brien then playfully chided for cutting into his 10 minutes on the late-night NBC talk show — likely remember that for a moment, the Tonight Show desk was his. That stint came to an end 15 years ago now as O’Brien lost the job to Jay Leno, his predecessor, after just seven months and fewer than 150 episodes.
O’Brien became a household name as the host of Late Night With Conan O’Brien since 1993, serving as the lead-out for Leno’s Tonight Show, which debuted a year earlier. As both shows became ratings leaders in their respective time slots, NBC brass did all they could to keep O’Brien in-house, including a 2004 promise that The Tonight Show would be his five years hence.
Publicly, Leno initially endorsed the transition of power — “I felt that the timing was right to plan for my successor and there is no one more qualified than Conan,” he said in a statement at the time. Privately, however, Leno felt devastated that NBC had shown him the door.
As the changeover date approached, NBC executives got qualms about losing Leno, so they offered the comedian various possibilities for another NBC show. Leno settled on a five-night-a-week 10 p.m. talk show titled The Jay Leno Show that would lead into local newscasts before O’Brien’s Tonight Show kicked off at its usual 11:35 p.m. start time.
The news of The Jay Leno Show took O’Brien by surprise. “It took me about 45 minutes of, ‘Really?’” he told The New York Times in 2009. “I think, realistically, that Jay will be doing the same show he’s doing now. I knew that there was this thing that was starting to brew that poor Jay was being pushed out by Conan. Jay was clearly becoming unhappy, and it had the makings of a situation that would make me unhappy. I like Jay. I don’t want to be an unpleasant chapter in his life. Or he in mine.”
And so The Tonight Show With Conan O’Brien premiered on weeknights at 11:35 p.m. in June 2009, and The Jay Leno Show premiered on weeknights at 10 p.m. that September. Soon, however, ratings for both shows began to slip. O’Brien was losing older viewers, and it didn’t help that Leno’s show was dogged by dwindling ratings and bad reviews.
With its affiliates frustrated with the audience loss, NBC tried to find a solution. One idea was to give Leno a half hour at 11:35 p.m. and push O’Brien’s Tonight Show to 12:05 a.m. Leno approved of that plan; O’Brien did not, releasing a now-famous statement to the “People of Earth” in January 2010. He wrote, in part:
For 60 years, the Tonight Show has aired immediately following the late local news. I sincerely believe that delaying the Tonight Show into the next day to accommodate another comedy program will seriously damage what I consider to be the greatest franchise in the history of broadcasting. The Tonight Show at 12:05 simply isn’t the Tonight Show. … So it has come to this: I cannot express in words how much I enjoy hosting this program and what an enormous personal disappointment it is for me to consider losing it. My staff and I have worked unbelievably hard, and we are very proud of our contribution to the legacy of The Tonight Show. But I cannot participate in what I honestly believe is its destruction.
Meanwhile, public support had O’Brien’s back, with celebrities and fans alike joining “Team Conan.” Hundreds if not thousands of people, for example, turned out for “I’m With Coco” rallies across the country.
Leno, meanwhile, took a beating in the press, with pundits berating him for taking his show back after The Jay Leno Show failed. “When Jay got The Tonight Show, he didn’t have to follow Johnny [Carson] bombing for an hour,” Bill Burr pointed out on a podcast. “[Leno] struggled for eighteen months before he got going, and he got to go on after a hit show; he got to go on after ER.”
Within days of his “People of Earth” letter, O’Brien and his team reached a $45 million settlement with NBC, and the exiting host used his own money to compensate staff members who had followed him from New York City to Los Angeles. And with that, O’Brien left The Tonight Show, never to be seen in the talk show’s studio until his triumphant guest appearance last year. Leno went back to hosting The Tonight Show in March 2010 and continued until February 2014, when he ceded the show to Jimmy Fallon. O’Brien took his talent to TBS and hosted Conan from November 2010 to June 2021.
As painful as it was to see O’Brien lose The Tonight Show so soon after getting the dream job, the comedian closed his final episode with a plea to look past the behind-the-scenes ugliness. “All I ask is one thing … I’m asking this, particularly of the young people who watch: Please do not be cynical,” he told viewers. “I hate cynicism. For the record, it’s my least favorite quality. It doesn’t lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get, but if you work really hard, and you’re kind, amazing things will happen.”
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