The Hair vs. The Chin

Speaking as someone who hasn’t actually watched late night TV regularly in seven or eight years, this whole hullabaloo between Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien is absolutely fascinating. The story so far breaks down like this:

• Sometime back in the primordial chaos Conan O’Brien signs a contract with NBC to host The Tonight Show when Jay Leno retires in 2009.
• Leno did, in fact, retire from The Tonight Show and Conan did, in fact rise up to host it.

(It is at this point we take a brief moment to contemplate the fact that Leno is almost always referred to by his last name, whereas Conan is always referred to by his first. I’m sure this means something extraordinarily deep and signifigant.)

• Leno gets a new show, entitled The Jay Leno Show, which airs before The Tonight Show.
• Combined, The Jay Leno Show and The Tonight Show pull in fewer eyeballs than a fat guy getting shot with a BB gun on YouTube.
• NBC tries to apply some duct tape to the situation by putting Leno back in his old time slot and pushing Conan’s The Tonight Show into a new midnight-ish time slot.
• This plan would push Late Night with Jimmy Fallon off to… I don’t know, Antarctica or something. Nobody cares about this though because lol seriously Jimmy Fallon amirite.
• Conan correctly points out that you can’t have a “Tonight Show” that airs after midnight because it becomes way too confusing to keep track of which “tonight” the title is referring to.
• So now Leno is getting The Tonight Show back, only it isn’t called The Tonight Show. The Tonight Show airs in a new time slot for the first time since the invention of color television. It’s hosted by Conan O’Brien, except no it isn’t, because now he doesn’t want it.
• David Letterman dies on the operating table after doctors are unsuccessful in draining the enormous blood-engorged boner he popped over this whole situation.

Speaking for myself, I’ve preferred Conan to Leno practically since I was old enough to stay up and watch them when it wasn’t a school night. Leno was funny, and he got the best movie clips, but hearing Max Weinberg’s opening riff when Late Night came on was definitely the high point of many a summer night. Conan’s brand of humor is just so much more definitive than Leno’s. He and his co-host have staring contests. He drives his desk around. He interviews Alan Alda inside a meat locker. Sometimes he swings and misses, but at least he swings.

I’m sure my pal McD will remember sharing a particularly emotional evening with me as we watched Andy Richter’s last Late Night together. We were so sure it was going to be the end of Conan’s hysterical antics on late night television. We were wrong; Conan only ever got funnier. The man is like a magical font of funny.

That’s where it gets tricky, though: NBC isn’t in the entertainment business. Not really. They’re in the business of making you watch commercials, and Conan just happened to be slated to take over The Tonight Show during a very strange period in television history where a non-trivial segment of the viewership is starting to avoid commercials. The people who matter most are the people who actually for-real tune in at 11:30 and don’t fast forward through ads for cars and insurance plans, and those people apparently prefer Leno’s safer, more down-to-earth brand of comedy. (Which, from what I can tell, exclusively involves people giving stupid answers to easy questions on camera.)

So it doesn’t really matter what I think. My only exposure to Conan is when I catch up with his monologues on Hulu. I do think it’s a damn shame that NBC is willing to flush one of their most beloved personalities because they had a hard time making money off of him in a year when pretty much nobody made money off of anything, but hey. What do I know? I’m just some putz who doesn’t watch commercials.