We thought that Friday's LiveTweet of Conan O'Brien's final Tonight Show would be the last we'd need to worry about The Great Late Night Wars of 2010, really, we did. After the final bars of "Free Bird" faded out, we took off our foam CoCo wig, placed it on a high shelf, and were ready to move on with our lives. (Well, at least until O'Brien, rising like a phoenix that had just eaten a peacock whole and pooped out a pile of rainbow-colored ashes, alighted at Fox some seven months hence.) But: Leno. Here he comes again, offering us not even a week of peace, to give His Side of the Story on Oprah later today. The Chicago Tribune's Mo Ryan has already heroically provided a transcript of Leno's first stop on his damage control tour; after the jump, the choicest quotes from Leno's effort to buff his irrevocably tarnished Nice Guy image before reassuming the Tonight Show throne in March:
1. On letting the world know that contrary to published reports, he actually does have a heart, and being forced into a slow-developing retirement hurt, and hey, let's get on the record that Conan O'Brien's not the first comedian who thought The Tonight Show was the best and most desirable gig in television, have you already forgotten Leno hid in a closet and did all sorts of unpleasant things to get that great job in the first place? Hiding in a closet takes a lot out of a guy, you never really shake that reputation as a weasely closet-hider, you know?:
"It broke my heart. It really did I was devastated. This was the job that I had always wanted and this was the only job that ever mattered in show business -- to me. It's the job every comic aspires to. It was just like, why?"
2. On his confusion between a "white lie" and "totally insincere nonsense that would temporarily make him look like a good guy," when he gave that famous torch-passing speech back in 2004, with the retirement thing and all the disingenuous talk about how Conan is great and some humble stuff about how he's no Johnny Carson, that has since been replayed millions of times as evidence of his self-preserving mendacity. What was he supposed to say? "I have no idea why I just agreed to the most insane plan in late-night history, instead of just taking my first-place audience across the street to crush the network that had the balls to ask me if it could suck the life out of me for five more years, then toss my desiccated husk in a canyon off Mulholland once they've decided I'm all used up?":
"Well, I did tell a white lie on the air. I said, 'I'm going to retire.'" It was just maybe easier that way."
3. On why the show failed, i.e. the reasons basically everyone on the planet saw coming the minute the crazy-sounding plan was announced, except the people at NBC too terrified to let Leno leave:
"I think the show failed because it was basically a late-night talk show at 10 o'clock. You're competing with dramas that are $3 to $6 million an episode."
4. On whether or not he was given enough time to make the 10 p.m. experiment work, and how stunned he was to discover that people might take an interest in a fiasco where two of the biggest TV stars in the world were essentially pitted against one another in nightly gladiatorial combat, a nasty, gore-splattered battle that evoked David Vs. Goliath, Young Vs. Old, Jauntily Bepompadoured Good Vs. Anvil-Chinned Evil, with nothing but the most coveted job in show business at stake:
"I was given enough time. It didn't work. It's a TV show that got canceled. I am actually surprised that this got this much attention."
5. On the numbers, the odds, and reminding people that this was really Conan's fault for not performing following NBC's devastated primetime lineup:
"It all comes down to numbers in show business. This is almost the perfect storm of bad things happening. You have two hit shows -- 'Tonight Show' No. 1 and Conan No. 1. You move them both to another situation. And what are the odds that both would do extremely poorly? If Conan's numbers had been a little bit higher, it wouldn't even be an issue. But in show business, there's always somebody waiting in the wings. Being me."
6. On still not understanding that "fired" means "having a job taken away," rather than "getting back the better job you've always wanted and didn't really want to leave in the first place" :
"You fired me twice. How valuable can I be?"
7. On using O'Brien's "destructive to the franchise" reason for not accepting a Tonight Show move to 12:05 as an another excuse to remind people this was really Conan's fault for not performing following NBC's devastated primetime lineup:
"Well, if you look at where the [Conan 'Tonight Show'] ratings were [long pause], it was already destructive to the franchise."
8. On -- quite admirably! -- choosing to endure Jimmy Kimmel's withering takedown on his own show without complaint, and not editing it out just because Kimmel took Leno's ass, gift-wrapped it with a cute little bow, and handed it back to him as his audience squealed with delight at how brutally awkward the situation was:
Leno: "[W]hen you get sucker punched, you just get right back up again. You don't whine or complain -- 'Oh, I'm going to take that out, he said something bad about me.' That's all right."
9. On blaming the affiliates, and the numbers, and the money for "taking away Conan's dream," and once again reminding people this mess was really Conan's fault for not performing following NBC's devastated primetime lineup:
[A]gain, this is an affiliate decision. Affiliates felt that the ratings were low. This was the first time in the 60-year history of 'The Tonight Show' that 'The Tonight Show' would have lost money. And that's what it comes down to. It's really just a matter of dollars and cents. If the numbers had been there, they wouldn't have asked me. And they only asked me after Conan turned down moving ['The Tonight Show'] back half an hour."
10. On working through the tricky questions about "the right thing," self-interest vs, selfishness, what it means to be a "good guy," why people care so much about a "television show," self-delusion, self-aggrandizement, messianic complexes, why any of us give a sh*t about two multimillionaires fighting over one really really shiny toy, why he's sitting on a couch across from Oprah having to explain to America why he did the entirely reasonable thing of taking back what he wanted from a guy who took it from him before he was ready to give it up, how funny life is sometimes, how exactly you got here, how much longer it's gonna be before people figure out it's been Mavis pulling the strings from behind the scenes for 30 years and that she's actually just a split-personality you've concocted for yourself that emerges only when tough decision must be made, or why the air tastes just a little better when you're puttering through the Hills in a 1913 Mercer Raceabout while wearing the actual pair of flight goggles the Red Baron donned when he made his last confirmed kill, and hey, whose internal monologue is this anyway GET OUT OF MY MIND! OPRAH, YOU THOUGHT-PILFERING WITCH!:
"I always thought, 'You're doing the right thing.' I always felt I was doing the right thing. How can you do the right thing and just have it go so wrong? Maybe I'm not doing the right thing, I would think. Maybe I'm doing something wrong. This many people are angry and upset over a television show. I mean, I had a show. My show got canceled. They weren't happy with the other guy's show. They said, 'We want you to go back,' and I said, 'OK.' And this seemed to make a lot of people really upset. And I go, 'Well, who wouldn't take that job though? Who wouldn't do that?' It was really agonizing. I would spend a lot of time just thinking about it, going, 'I think I'm a good guy. Am I a good guy? Maybe I'm one of these guys who thinks I see everything with rose-colored glasses and the world is falling around you.' Yeah, it was a real agonizing time. [...] I mean, I like the job, I like all that goes with it. I fight for the people who work here. I fight to keep the jobs here. OK, is that selfish? Maybe it is, because it's self-aggrandizing, maybe because it's pumping me up."
Jay Leno tells his side of the story on Oprah [chicagotribune.com]