Jay Leno is coming to the defense of... Jay Leno.
The future host of "The Tonight Show" used his broadcast Monday night to give his side of the story, saying he's basically just been doing what his bosses at NBC wanted for the past five years-- and making it clear he never wanted to leave "The Tonight Show" in the first place.
When NBC told him in 2004 that it wanted to promise "Tonight" to O'Brien, "I said, ‘Well, I’ve been number one for 12 years,'" Leno said. "They said, ‘We know that, but we don’t think you can sustain that.’ I said, ‘Okay. How about until I fall to number two, then you fire me?’ ‘No, we made this decision.’ I said, ‘That’s fine.’ Don’t blame Conan O’Brien. Nice guy, good family guy, great guy. He and I have talked-- and not a problem since then. That’s what managers and people do, they try to get something for their clients. I said, ‘I’ll retire just to avoid what happened the last time.’ Okay."
And yet, when the time came to retire, Leno apparently changed his mind. He said he asked to be let out of his contract early so that he would be free to move to another network without having to wait a year or 18 months due to a non-compete clause. Rather than let him go, NBC concocted Jay at 10.
"Didn’t seem like a good idea at the time," Leno said. "I said, ‘Alright, can I keep my staff?’ There are 175 people that work here. I said, ‘Can I keep my staff?’ Yes, you can. Let’s try it. We guarantee you two years on the air, guaranteed. Now for the first four or five months against original shows like “CSI” you’ll get killed, but in the spring and summer when the reruns come, that’s when you’ll pick up. Okay, great. I agree to that."
Leno's decision to say his staff was the reason for his decision to stay is interesting, since NBC insiders in recent days - through a report in the New York Post -- have tried to push the line that O'Brien is abandoning his staff by not agreeing to stay on at 12:05 as host of "Tonight." Now, Leno is arguing that he couldn't leave because it would mean his staff would be out of work.
Later in his statement, Leno says he agreed to move back to 11:35 even after NBC canceled him at 10 p.m because it would "keep our people working."
Leno also picks up on another NBC talking point, noting that while Leno's primetime show did O'Brien no favors, the host wasn't doing well before Leno signed on at 10.
"Conan’s show during the summer-- (when) we’re not on -- was not doing well. The great hope was that we would help him. Well, we didn’t," Leno said.
In fact, while O'Brien began bleeding viewers over the summer, he was still comfortably ahead of David Letterman in adults 18-49 by the end of August.
