And in trying to burn the candle at both ends, NBC's hands still got burned.
The NBC brass had planned for years to replace Leno as host of "The Tonight Show" with O'Brien, who was pulling in the younger, disposable-income viewers that advertisers covet. After flirting with a move to ABC or Fox, Leno decided to stay loyal to the Peacock and agreed to a new prime-time program set aside just for him. He said it was an experiment for himself and NBC and knew it could either succeed or fail. NBC bragged that even though the ratings were not stellar, its bean counters confirmed Leno's new gig was turning a profit and doing as well as predicted.
NBC's affiliates, however, didn't see it that way, complaining that they lost large audience lead-ins for their local late-night news and threatening to go public with their problems. That would have been another PR nightmare for the network, which is known for its iron-fisted approach to making affiliates run the entire NBC schedule without pre-emptions. Just ask Boston NBC affilate WHDH, which almost lost the Peacock when it threatened to replace Leno's 10 o' clock slot with local news because it rightly feared lackluster ratings.
Poor Conan is the odd man out in this real-life soap opera. After moving his family and entire production staff to Los Angeles, making a heavily promoted and anticipated June debut, and establishing himself on a custom-built soundstage at Universal Studios Hollywood, he's suddenly being snubbed and abandoned by the same NBC that groomed him for "The Tonight Show" for several years. So it doesn't surprise me that there are reports Conan is talking with Fox, for whom he a staff writer on "The Simpsons", about starting a late-night show there and that he may let NBC buy out his long-term contract if he says no to the bump-up to midnight.
NBC has exercised a double mind in trying to keep both Leno and O'Brien in the network fold. And like most other double-minded ideas, it collapsed on itself. It tried to placate a jilted Leno and keep him from moving to the competition, while trying to stop its hemorrhaging fourth-place ratings, save as much money as possible and hype O'Brien as the new king of late night. Sounds a lot like Miley Stewart trying to keep her Superman-like Hannah Montana popstar identity a secret until it collapsed on her private life and she finally came clean with it to her family and closest friends. (My apologies if you haven't seen the Hannah movie yet as I just gave away the plot.)
But where the fictional Miley made peace with herself and continued Hannah like a stage name, the real-life NBC has seen its Leno-O'Brien-Jimmy Fallon trifecta collapse in dramatic fashion and fears losing one of its comics to a rival network, all the while claiming that everything is well in Peacock-land. And CBS' David Letterman has been laughing all the way to the bank, routinely pummeling Conan in the ratings and picking up Leno's former audience.
I'm not too keen on much of Conan's comedy style, which is essentially PG-13 on up and at times borders on the dirty. I don't get the popularity of either Triumph the cigar-shomping Celebrity Insult Hound or the bear who does stuff that can't be described on a family-audience blog like this. And then there's Conan's gravity-defying pompadour, but that's something totally different. But I still feel sorry for a guy who was courted and led on by NBC to make a cross-country move to "The Tonight Show", a program he grew up with, always dreamed of hosting, and was virtually guaranteed to him... then have the network go psycho like Britney Spears and dump him like nothing ever happened when it realized it wasn't going like the bean counters wanted.
In the Bible there are at least two warnings about trying to have your cake and eat it too. In Matthew 6:24 Jesus told his disciples “No one can serve two masters. For you will hate one and love the other; you will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money" (New Living Translation). The apostle James warns that a double mind is "as unsettled as the wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind... They can't make up their minds. They waver back and forth in everything they do" (James 6b, 8).
A few years out of college I had a night-shift job at a local newspaper proofreading ads. One year into that job I applied for and got a weekend DJ job at a local radio station. The demands of both positions, especially the last-minute substitute shifts for other DJ's who called in sick, collided with each other and I ended up losing both. Instead of sticking with a stable job albeit with strange hours, I had to have more and have the dream job I always wanted. In trying to have my cake and eat it too, I tripped Chevy Chase-style and my face fell into the cake on the floor. The current NBC debacle is a similar situation.
I learned from my experience to let my yes be yes and no be no, and not take on more than I could handle. I also learned not to compartmentalize my life in the sense that I hold one worldview or personality in one area of my life while being a polar opposite in another. As a Christian I try to follow a biblical worldview in all I do, not just at church but at work (when I am working), with my family and friends, and online. Because I have a sinful nature, there are and will be times when I stumble and fall, admit my sin and then carry on. But life is a lot less complicated when you're not putting up a menagerie of fronts and lies to this person or that.
I believe that NBC will lose Leno or O'Brien to Fox, which hasn't had a late-night show of its own since "The Late Show with Joan Rivers", which launched the fourth network in the late 1980's. The Winter Olympics will be a money-making bonanza that may cover NBC's losses, but the Peacock will still have to live with the consequences of its double-minded, and possibly double-dealing, prime time experiment.
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