Last night on The Jay Leno Show, the host set the jokes aside for a few minutes and provided an earnest account of the late night NBC network programming drama from his perspective, beginning in 2004 when NBC executives first approached him about handing The Tonight Show over to Conan O’Brien up until the present likelihood of taking back over following O’Brien’s departure from NBC.Leno explained the reasoning provided to him by NBC executives when they informed him in 2004 that the network had decided to give O’Brien The Tonight Show, which Leno had, at that point, been hosting for 12 years. “I said, ‘That’s fine.’ And don’t blame Conan O’Brien. Nice guy, good family guy, great guy. He and I have talked and had not a problem since then.”
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=131813