I get that successful people only become that way by taking risks. You can only achieve a great reward when you take a great chance and staying with the same formula will only get you the same result. That's all well and good, but if the formula is working and making everyone rich in the process, perhaps you should just stick with it anyway - variety be damned. Trying something new can only serve to complicate things and potentially ruin what you had working. I'm talking, of course, about this whole Leno/Conan/Tonight Show fiasco.
After a short 7 month try of having Leno be on at 10 o'clock, NBC realised that this wasn't working and will be moving him back to 11:35, after the local news. Conan O'Brien will have the option of staying with The Tonight Show at 12:05 (best line of the weekend was Seth Meyers, "Can it still be called The Tonight Show if it starts when it's tomorrow?"), or leaving to go to another network, which would give Leno The Tonight Show chair back. I'm not sure what the best move is here for O'Brien. NBC has made it pretty clear from the beginning that they favor Leno over O'Brien and therefore I can see no reason that the network deserves Conan's loyalty. Also, there is talk that Fox is interested in O'Brien doing a show over there at 11 o'clock, but I'm wary of how well that would work. I don't think the problem for Conan is the network, it's the time. I said when this move went down that if he dumbed-down his show for an earlier crowd he would still be too smart for Leno's audience and just end up pissing off his loyal viewers, which is just what happened. If Fox wanted to give him a show at midnight, then I think that is the formula that would work best for him.
In this situation in which no one wins, I think Leno is managing to come off the worst. The last week of monologue jokes have been all about getting cancelled and how bad NBC is treating him. Well, they are also paying him some outrageous figure like $25 million a year. I wish we could all be treated so badly. Of course, Leno makes no mention of the fact that this situation is of his own creation, because he was the one who came out years ago to announce his eventual retirement. He set his own firm deadline, when instead he should have quietly talked to people behind the scenes and said, "Hey, I'm thinking I only have a couple years left. Plan ahead." Then when he changed his mind no one would have been any the wiser and none of this would have happened.
What I can not get over is the fact that no one expected this to work, everyone told NBC this and yet they did it anyway. As soon as Leno started to have second thoughts about leaving The Tonight Show then they should have just shrugged their shoulders, given O'Brien a huge buyout and left things as they were. I mean, this isn't family - it's business and sometimes in business you just have to play favorites. Leno had great ratings. Instead they tried to shuffle things and make everyone happy and the result was that no one was happy: Leno was pissed he had to move, O'Brien was pissed that he still was in Leno's shadow and the affiliates were pissed because Jay Leno's rating sucked and killed their local news ratings. It was a giant mess. If only someone at NBC had listened to... everyone else. I understand that not everyone is privy to all the information available, but when 10 million people are telling you something is a bad idea, perhaps it's time to listen.
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