The GirlAlive Blog

To sum up…

January 21, 2010 on 11:03 pm | In Movies and TV and Stuff | 1 Comment

NBC’s mistakes:

NBC wanted to have it all. They wanted to keep Conan, and in order to do that, they had to give him The Tonight Show. They also wanted to keep Jay. In order to do that, they had to give him The Tonight Show. Do we see the conflict here? Jeff Zucker didn’t. Back in 2004 they were desperate for Conan not to go to another network. So they promised him The Tonight Show. Then when they gave it to him in 2009, Leno was doing well, so they didn’t want to lose him. What is a brainless executive to do? Give them both contracts. Make Jay stay at NBC by threatening to impose a non-competition clause if he doesn’t. Cause if Jay leaves, he’s going to another network, which equals competition. They were afraid Conan couldn’t stand up to Jay as competition. So they forced Jay into a crappy prime time show. (And I do believe him when he says they forced it on him.)

So if they didn’t want Jay to leave in 2009, why give Conan The Tonight Show at all? Cause they had a contract that they would give it to him and they thought they could double their money by keeping both of them. They could give Conan the show he wanted, but make sure that Jay couldn’t wander off to Fox or anything.

The problem is, this whole thing is a little like Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog. Not to give away too much, but when your two greatest desires are diametrically opposed, you will inevitably have to lose one of them.

When they finally realized that they were going to lose one of them, they picked the wrong one. I fully believe that this is because Jeff Zucker has a long history of hating Conan O’Brien. He may have even known that he was going to screw him over back in 2004. I wouldn’t put it past him.

Jay’s mistakes:

Jay is of the generation that just does whatever their boss says, and sees ass-kissing as a key job skill. People of my generation will never understand how someone with enough money to survive without a job would ever bend over and take it from Jeff Zucker just to keep that job. We only do that level of ass kissing because we have to in order to pay our rent.

Jay’s boss is an idiot, and when he acts like an idiot, humoring him does not help anyone in the long run. When your boss is a moron, you don’t just go along with the moron ideas and claim that you were just following orders later. Have a spine. Go over the boss’ head and complain to his boss. Do what you have to do for justice.

Jay’s key mistake was something he takes pride in. He is proud of the fact that he doesn’t have agents and managers and publicists. The sad fact is that there is a reason that those people exist. Times like this are the reason. A PR manager could have stepped in and told him that by accepting The Tonight Show back, he looks like a back-stabbing hypocrite. I think that he naively thought that he did what anyone would do. Managers could have warned him about how it was going to play with the young people.

Conan’s mistakes:

Well, just the one. His biggest mistake was not accepting an offer from another network back in 2004. The one thing he should have learned at Harvard is that Jeff Zucker can’t be trusted.

So now Conan will hopefully get an offer from another network. And NBC will lose money. They have lost a huge chunk of their audience because now a lot of people (at least the 556,000 in one facebook group) will boycott NBC and refuse to watch Leno. Leno looks like a back-stabbing hypocrite (whether he is one or not). NBC has lost more respect, because we all got to see a clear demonstration that Jeff Zucker has a brain like Machiavelli mated with a banana slug.

Anyway, I have written to Fox and promised them that if they sign Conan, I will officially finally forgive them for cancelling Firefly and Futurama.

Anyone know where I can get a can of Torgo’s Executive Powder?