It’s all but a done deal that Conan O’Brien will produce his last show on NBC in three days, and no later than after the Winter Olympics, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno will be back at 10:35 PM to fail spectacularly because Leno is both unfunny and damaged goods.

Leno and NBC both seem to be catching on to the latter part, because they’re doing damage control. From a recent New York Times story:

Mr. Leno described the series of events that led to his situation; they began in 2004 when, he said, an NBC executive came to his office and said the network wanted him to step down from “The Tonight Show” in five years even though he was still first in the ratings at that time. (Watch Mr. Leno’s on-air announcement from 2004 here.)

Mr. Leno said he agreed to the plan based on his unwillingness to “go through what we went through the last time,” when NBC chose him over David Letterman as host of “Tonight.”

At the end of the five-year period, he said, he was still No. 1 and NBC suggested he move to prime time after showing him charts and graphs indicating the audience would follow him to the 10 p.m. time period. …

OK, we need to interrupt here because this is, at best, half-true. Two and a half years ago, Leno staffers were making it known publicly that he wanted to renege on the deal. (You’d think the New York Times would know this because they linked to the piece.) Leno spent about a year before the announcement of his prime-time show openly threatening to move to FOX or ABC, just as he did in his monologue two weeks ago on the day it was clear his failure of a prime-time show would finally be terminated. NBC “suggested” he move to prime time because Leno had been threatening, in public, to go to another network and compete with The Tonight Show.

He’s not the “good soldier” here. Continuing with the current article:

He said that NBC had given him a two-year contract for the 10 p.m. slot. Now, he said, four months later, because of problems with NBC’s affiliated stations and low ratings, network executives informed him they were canceling his show but “told me you’re still valuable.”

“I said, I’m still valuable? You fired me twice.” The network asked him to move back to 11:35 for a half-hour show, with Mr. O’Brien to follow at 12:05 with “The Tonight Show.”

Mr. Leno said he asked whether Mr. O’Brien would go along with this plan and was told that NBC was sure that he would.

Mr. Leno said he agreed to the change—as he had to the move to prime time—because he wanted to protect the jobs of his staff members. …

OK, again, here we have a slight problem with reality.

Leno’s staffers were mostly those who worked on his Tonight Show, where Leno also lived before he got The Tonight Show (he was Johnny Carson’s “permanent guest host”). It’s a safe bet that most or all of the staffers already lived in Southern California then, much less now.

Conan O’Brien’s staff moved to Los Angeles, moved their families, bought homes, and moved their kids to new schools to take up the Tonight Show mantle less than one year ago. (Late Night with Conan O’Brien went off the air in February 2009; The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien started in late May. Late Night with Jimmy Fallon was ready to go in February 2009 because they had been preparing it for a year in Studio 6B, compared to Conan’s Studio 6A, now used for The Dr. Oz Show. No, I’m not kidding.)

Who do you think has a rougher time: the people who have lived in L.A. for 20 years who seek new work because a prime-time show got cancelled (as about 15 prime-time shows do each year), or the people who just moved from New York to Los Angeles on what seemed like the safest bet in television? The delay in announcing the end of Conan’s time at NBC is that he’s negotiating for more money for his displaced staff members, while NBC is now publicly bad-mouthing him for doing so.

According to Mr. Leno, the network learned that Mr. O’Brien would not accept the shift but he said he does not blame Mr. O’Brien at all, calling him “a gentleman and a good family guy.” He said he had never had any animosity toward Mr. O’Brien.

He added that the network’s decisions were driven by the fact that neither host had succeeded in the ratings and that NBC expected “us to help him and we didn’t.”

Again, a lie from Leno: Conan’s ratings are about what Leno’s were when he started, adjusted for the fact that for the first year-plus, Leno had no competition in late night. (The Tonight Show with Jay Leno started on May 25, 1992; The Late Show with David Letterman premiered on August 30, 1993.) And what’s more, Leno said as much publicly not six months ago:

As for his successor, Mr. Leno said NBC should not be worried at all about the early performance of Conan O’Brien on the “Tonight Show.”

“Conan is going through exactly the same thing I went through,” Mr. Leno said. He recalled being lambasted after he had been on for only a couple of months and the show went off for coverage of the Olympics. “ ‘I hope he never comes back,’ ” he said, recalling the kinds of comments directed toward him.

“Everybody goes through this,” Mr. Leno said. “It’s a rite of passage when you take over the ‘Tonight Show.’ ”

The only difference is that Johnny Carson had enough class to not take the prime-time gig when Leno’s manager forced him into retirement (yes, NBC offered), and to not try to take The Tonight Show back after 7 months.

This notion that Leno is just a good soldier who’s doing what the network says forgets the simple truth that Leno could say no. As Kimmel put it, he’s got like $800 million in the bank, and still does like 160 stand-up gigs per year to give him all the money he lives on, including for his Detroit-sized car collection. He led the late-night wars for about 14 years and does not have to go to whatever time-slot NBC tells him. He could just say no.

Obviously he’s not doing that, so either…

1. NBC is so truly unaware of how unfunny Leno is to anyone under 55, or so desperate for short-term ratings at the cost of long-term irrelevance, that they’re truly throwing everything they have at him to get him to stay, or

 

2. Leno is still threatening NBC to go to FOX or ABC (although ABC has said they don’t want Conan, they were always interested in Leno) if they don’t keep him on the air five nights per week, or

3. NBC executives are trying to destroy the company to profit from some illegal scam with Comcast or another buyer, or

4. Leno has photographs of Jeff Zucker with JonBenet Ramsey’s body.

None of these reflect well on NBC or Leno, and none of them leave Leno as the “good guy” he’s now presenting himself in a belated attempt to repair his shattered reputation. It doesn’t matter if he engineered this coup or not (though it still looks possible, and maybe even probable), because he could have ended it at any time by saying “No, I’m done, give Conan his chance.”

He obviously will not do that and wants everyone to forget it. I don’t think people will forget that, though. No one’s organized any protests in favor of Jay Leno, ever, anywhere. Younger viewers are through with Leno. They were starting to love Conan, so NBC is taking him off the air.

Conan’s blood may be on Jeff Zucker’s hands, but it splattered onto Jay Leno’s face. Good luck getting that damned spot out, Lady MacChin.