By Eric Ditzian
I thought I was done.
Last week, Jay Leno was officially re-gifted with his "Tonight Show" gig, Conan O'Brien fluttered (at least temporarily) out of late-night on his golden parachute and I expected nothing else needed to be said until after the Winter Olympics (when Leno is set to return to "Tonight"). Then on Thursday (January 28), Leno appeared on "The Oprah Winfrey Show," giving an interview that was equal parts whiny and disingenuous, a master class in oblivious victimology, an hour that will by no means heal his damaged public profile.
"It all comes down to numbers in show business," said the man I have dubbed Chinny McGimmeMyShowBack.
And therein lies the problem. This most mealy-mouthed of mea culpas — don't blame me, I'm just a cog in this vast Hollywood machine — displays both an inability on Jay's part to take at least a share of the responsibility for the late-night mess on NBC and a lack of understanding about the importance of "The Tonight Show." (That is, if we can even take Leno's statements at face value — as truths rather than spin.)
"Tonight" is not just a TV show, not just show biz, a point even Oprah got wrong. Booting Conan out of the studio is hardly akin to recasting the role of Will Smith's aunt on "The Fresh Prince of Bel Air." "Tonight" is an institution, one of the only ones left in pop culture, and it must be treated with respect, not just as a historical artifact but so that it continues to have a vibrant future.
Conan understood this, and decided to leave rather than futz with tradition. Meanwhile, Jay chose to seize back what he believed was rightfully his, and in the process disrupted the show in a way Johnny Carson never would have when he ceded the chair to Leno in the early '90s. On "Oprah," Leno spent an hour plausibly trying to present a case that he was some unsophisticated rube dumbly saying yes to every hare-brained scheme the fancy NBC suits threw his way. Jay has been in show biz for almost four decades, and one thing he is not is ignorant about the entertainment landscape. Is Jay really asking us to believe he's just a go-with-the-flow dude, moving from late-night to primetime back to late-night back to "Tonight" just because the network asked nicely?
If Leno didn't like NBC's plan to replace him, he shouldn't have agreed to it five years ago. If he still didn't like it in 2009, he didn't have to move to primetime. Once "The Jay Leno Show" was canceled, he could have walked away. What he couldn't do was the one thing he in fact chose: To retake his chair. Leno's back at "Tonight" for one reason and one reason only: He wants it. No one can fault Leno for having a high estimation of his own value; in this, he shares a trait with the rest of Hollywood. What he can be faulted for is being unable to suppress this ambition when it comes to a sacred entertainment institution. And, further, what he can be faulted for are gallingly transparent excuses to mask the truth.
It's hard to select the most damning exchange of the "Oprah" hour. Was it when Leno admitted it never occurred to him that airing his primetime show would put thousands of crew members ordinarily employed at 10 p.m. dramas out of work? Or when he argued that Jimmy Kimmel sucker-punched him on TV, as if one professional comedian zinging another professional comedian is an unfair fight? How about when he whined about being made the bad guy by the media? Or when he stated that Conan had already destroyed "Tonight" by coming in second in the ratings, as if Leno didn't suffer the same fate for years? Or when he suggested a sufficient programming decision would involve the mass murder of Conan's staff?
And so it goes. Unable to admit his true motives — or perhaps unaware of them — Leno's latest bit of crisis management served only to highlight the very things audiences and the media have taken issue with for weeks.
"[W]ho wouldn't take that job, though?" Leno wondered at one point on "Oprah," as oblivious as ever. "Who wouldn't do that?"
Well, Conan, for one, who declined an opportunity to chat with Oprah, instead choosing to let his final shows and his epic press release stand as his collective response to the "Tonight" debacle. As he wrote, "I cannot participate in what I honestly believe is its destruction."
http://newsroom.mtv.com/2010/01/29/jay-leno-oprah/