You may remember I blogged about Conan O’Brien‘s stage show coming to the Dodge Theatre. That is TONIGHT! Are you going? Let me know…love to bump into you. In a strange twist of timing, he’ll also make his first television appearance this weekend. As you can imagine, he doesn’t have great things to say about Jay Leno.
This isn’t some fly-by-night TV show, either. It’s 60 Minutes! SERIOUS BUSINESS. Steve Kroft finds out how Conan truly feels about the “Late Night Wars.”
Here’s what we know so far: If Conan had been in Jay Leno’s shoes, he would not have taken back the show less than a year after publicly handing it off to someone else. O’Brien said he decided to leave NBC because “this relationship is going to be toxic and maybe we just need to go our separate ways.”
NBC tried to please both comics by offering Leno a half-hour show at 11:35 p.m. and letting O’Brien keep the “Tonight” show name and begin a half hour later. O’Brien said no and Leno, who never wanted to leave “Tonight” in the first place, slipped back into his old home.“I wouldn’t have done that,” O’Brien said. Asked by Kroft what he would have done, O’Brien said, “Done something else, go someplace else. I mean, that’s just me. I’m not sure these people even really want me here.”
NBC and a Leno spokesman had no comment about O’Brien’s statements. His buyout by NBC forbade O’Brien from giving interviews that could be printed or telecast before May 1; the “60 Minutes” telecast will be May 2.
CBS’ release of the interview excerpts may be a technical violation of that deal, but “I don’t think we’re going to do anything about it at this point,” said Marc Graboff, chairman of NBC Entertainment and Universal Media Studios.
