Five Equally Awkward Solutions To The Jay/Conan Dilemma
Pardon The Late-Night Interruption
As Conan attempts to interview Cameron Diaz, Leno, poised just off-camera in a Model-T he's rebuilt with his bare hands, drives laps around the stage while honking an enormous horn, its bleating oooooga-oooooga hilariously drowning out Diaz's every attempt to set up a clip for her latest romantic comedy.
All Hands On Deck
Realizing that it must nurture the careers of its entire stable of late-night talent to ensure the network's long-term future, NBC extends The Tonight Show to run from 11:35 pm to 2 am, promoting Jimmy Fallon and Carson Daly to positions alongside Conan and Jay for a The View-style gabfest. Especially appealing will be the relationship between exasperated old-schooler Leno and the boundlessly energetic Fallon, whose constant badgering of his late-night father figure with challenges to beer-pong and X-box contests will serve a wide range of demographics. (No idea where Daly fits into all this, but they'll figure it out. They can't risk anyone snapping him up to replace Byron Allen on the graveyard shift.)
Conan Takes A Buyout
Understandably enraged at how NBC is jerking him around after anointing him the network's late-night messiah and making him wait five years to assume the Tonight Show throne, O'Brien takes his reported $40 million buyout, uses a portion to erect a 50-foot, solid-gold statue of himself defecating on a peacock that will forever cast a shadow across Rockefeller Center, then moves his show to another network. Jeff Zucker somehow convinces the Comcast board that the O'Brien statue is fantastic branding -- it shows that the NBC doesn't take itself too seriously, an attitude cherished by the most important demographic -- and earns a promotion to Chairman For Life. Leno goes on to host The Tonight Show for 40 more years.
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Comments
One word: THUNDERDOME!
Two hosts enter, one host leaves.
Televise the battle, and you could have a ratings winner!
hahahaha, this is amazing and hysterical! I'd be up for any of these solutions.
Well, due to Leno, NBC is now treating "The Tonight Show" and Conan like one of Leno's prized Ford's:
F#!%
Or
Rip apart
Daily
"All Hands On Desk" sounds like it could be a version of one of those radio contests where you attempt to win something by touching it the longest.
Sounds like a winner for NBC - I'd watch, if only to see them all ripping each other to shreds.
Actually, I kind of suspect this is a fake feud engineered by NBC to get more people watching, a la the Conan/Stewart/Colbert version.
The coincidence with an option labelled "The Hand Off" is that in the book "The Late Shift", Leno's manager Helen Kushnick's had a specific suggestion for the Carson/Leno transition. She suggested that on Carson's last show, Johnny could bid farewell for the last time, then walk over to Jay Leno's new "Tonight Show" set, and hand Jay his microphone, "passing the baton", as it were. Unsurprisingly, Carson's producer, upon hearing this suggestion, looked at Kushnick like she had "peed on his shoe".
Actually, the All Hands solution doesn't sound that bad. It works for The View. Those women don't mind sharing a stage and you get all sorts of view points, including disagreements. Or are the egos of these men too large to allow them all to sit comfortably on the same stage?
I already thought Zucker should just combine all three for a host-to-host 2 hour variety show. Start with Jay for the older crowd, hand off to Conan 30-40 minutes later to spike it up, who hands off to Fallon after another 30-40 minutes to put the night-howlers to bed, or... whatever. They get all three to compete, they can -can- any of them and tie them all up in knots while we watch. Have host-wars, host sandwiches, guest passing, all kinds of novel situations.