Jay's In. Conan's Out. But NBC's Nightmare is Far From Over - By Ed Martin

What a month NBC is having. I can't remember a time when a broadcast network has been so thoroughly trashed by its own talent, in primetime and in late night, on its own air! During the last two weeks, Conan O'Brien and Jay Leno seized every opportunity to belittle their employer. Throughout NBC's recent telecast of the Golden Globe Awards and its red-carpet arrivals, past and present NBC primetime stars (Julianna Margulies and Tina Feyamong them) got their digs in, too.

NBC, one of the mightiest communications companies in the world, is currently a laughingstock. The situation is much worse than the late Seventies and early Eighties, when the network was burdened with so many primetime misfires that class-act Johnny Carson dubbed it "the House of Hits." Indeed, in terms of public perception, NBC now finds itself in worse shape than did CBS twenty years ago, when the median age of its audience kept moving in the wrong direction and the network was often spoken of in the same breath as adult diapers and denture cream. It took CBS years to get past that. How long will it take for NBC to move past the mammoth mess it has made?

The root cause of this crisis has been marginalized amid all the malicious merriment in the media. The facts are these: When rising to an exciting new challenge, O'Brien and Leno proved equally ineffective.

O'Brien did a lousy job of hosting The Tonight Show, beginning with his first few shows back in June and continuing right up until two weeks ago, when he finally caught fire and transformed Tonight into a platform from which to hilariously vent against his employers, at least through last Friday, after which he joined the swelling ranks of America's unemployed, albeit with a comfy $32 million cushion for his troubles. Had O'Brien lived up to the expectations of the executive team NBC had in place five years ago when it made the decision to jettison Jay Leno in 2009 and give him the Tonight show, much of the recent drama would never have occurred. NBC's only problem would have been Leno's failure to live up to the expectations of the executive team NBC had in place one year ago when it made the decision to strip a Tonight-like show starring Leno each week night at 10 p.m.

So what went wrong?

Team O'Brien didn't so much take on Tonight as take it over, turning it into Late Night with Conan O'Brien 2.0. Situated in a gigantic state of the art studio, O'Brien's Tonight played like an unnecessarily over-produced version of Late Night; one utterly devoid of the hip late-night intimacy that had made O'Brien so appealing since he entered the arena way back in 1993.

Meanwhile, Team Leno slapped together The Jay Leno Show, a lifeless comedy-variety program for its new 10 p.m. home. They turned over entirely too much time to pre-recorded bits by comedians of marginal talent, not to mention the ridiculously repetitive Green Car Challenge segment in which celebrities tried to drive fuel efficient cars around a track in less time than had previous celebrity drivers. (This was the stuff of bad basic cable programming.) Leno and his in-studio guests were made to sit and squirm in boxy blue chairs that made even the most attractive people look lumpy, rumpled and generally uncomfortable. The set was a study in sterility; it had all the charm of a mid-range hotel lobby filled with potted shrubs from a nearby Home Depot. Even Leno's monologues sucked until the shit hit the fan. (Like O'Brien, he kicked ass these last two weeks.)

As I've said before, if NBC had to move Leno into primetime he should have been slotted at 8 p.m., a time period NBC executives had previously spent a lot of time telling us was largely dead to them. Remember, the network has a long history of providing outstanding quality dramas at 10. They got it bass-ackwards with the Leno experiment: They chose to play to their weaknesses (at 8) and against their strengths (at 10)! No wonder it all went to pieces.

So what happens in the months and years to come? The questions are certainly exciting. The big one concerns Conan's future. Where will he end up? There was much talk about Fox until word spread that its affiliates are feeling fat and happy with their current late-night syndicated fare. Why mess with success? Comedy Central and FX have both come up amid the rampant speculation, but isn't O'Brien too expensive for basic cable?

I'd like to see him land at ABC, the network that wanted to snatch up Leno before NBC offered him a shot at primetime glory. Imagine the possibilities inherent in a late-night block consisting of Conan O'Brien and Jimmy Kimmel.

Someone asked me if I thought CBS might cast off the likeable Craig Ferguson and slot O'Brien after Late Show with David Letterman, the logic being that Dave is getting old, Ferguson isn't strong enough to one day move into Letterman's spot, and wouldn't it be grand to have Conan on deck? I would love to one day see O'Brien hold court in the legendary Ed Sullivan Theater, but I don't see this happening.

Meanwhile, with Leno back at 11:35 p.m. and Conan out of the picture, does this mean Jimmy Fallon is now the Tonight Show's man on deck, the heir to the throne when Jay calls it quits (or is "fired" for a third time by NBC, as Leno himself might put it)? I think Fallon is just fine on Late Night, but I think he would have a harder time with Tonight than O'Brien.