  Jay Leno. (Handout) |
You have two co-workers.
One of them is brilliant, but surly.
The other is less brilliant, but always in a good mood.
Who would you rather sit beside for a decade and a half?
Now imagine the entire North American TV audience works in the same office building. The numbers don’t lie. More viewers have preferred to sit beside Jay Leno than David Letterman.
When you look at it that way, it kind of makes sense, doesn’t it?
The affable Leno will end his successful 17-year reign on The Tonight Show this coming Friday (NBC, A). Conan O’Brien takes over The Tonight Show on Monday, June 1 — and Leno will be back with a new 10 p.m., Monday-to-Friday show in the fall (NBC, Citytv).
“I’m glad we’re going out as No. 1,” Leno said in a recent conference call.
“We’ve won every sweeps period since ’93 or ’94, whatever it is. With the exception of the first year or so that we went up against Dave, we’ve been No. 1 since then.
“When I hand it off to Conan, it’s like, ‘Here you go, I left it in exactly the (same) shape.’ When you bring the rent-a-car back and there are no dents in it, you got a full tank, you’re happy. You feel good about it.”
Speaking personally, accepting that the Leno-Letterman competition is ending with Leno victorious is a tough thing to do.
Let me say unequivocally that I have nothing against Jay Leno. I quite like the guy, actually. And I always thought he was very funny as a standup comedian, dating back to his pre-hosting days.
It’s just that for someone of my age, David Letterman is a cultural touchstone.
Letterman was ground-breaking with his silliness and surliness and innovation and prickly irreverence in the 1980s, during his run on Late Night with David Letterman, which aired at 12:30 a.m. on NBC. With an aging but still potent Johnny Carson steering The Tonight Show at 11:30 p.m., NBC ruled.
Letterman always assumed he’d get promoted to The Tonight Show when Carson left. Carson loved Letterman, for God’s sake. What could go wrong?
But Letterman was so confident, he didn’t think it mattered if he regularly was an arrogant jerk when dealing with various executives, big and small, at NBC.
Meanwhile, with Letterman hosting his show in New York, out in Los Angeles Leno often filled in for Carson as a guest-host on The Tonight Show. No one thought Leno was as cutting-edge as Letterman, but Leno was nice to work with, he was quick to volunteer for all the glad-handing promotional work that Letterman despised, and slowly but surely people started to wonder if Leno might be a better fit as Carson’s replacement.
When Carson confirmed he would retire in 1992, NBC was in a Sophie’s Choice predicament with Leno and Letterman. The network didn’t want to lose either of them. But Leno and Letterman were caught up in an East Coast vs. West Coast power struggle at NBC, and this time the West won.
Leno got the job on The Tonight Show. It was one occasion when the nice guy did not finish last.
Predictably, a devastated Letterman bolted for CBS and went into direct competition against Leno at 11:30 p.m.
Letterman still was seen as the golden boy, and for the first few years he bested Leno in the ratings. But by 1995, Leno had inched ahead.
“We started to win a little bit, not by much,” Leno recalled. “And the Hugh Grant interview (Grant’s first TV appearance after getting busted with a hooker) was two months or something after that.
“That just got us such a huge rating. It gave us such a big win for that week. We beat Dave that time by such a huge margin, instead of just a tiny margin, and it remained from that point on.
“It’s fair to say (the Grant interview) was a turning point, but we had actually turned the corner a couple of months earlier. It’s like, Christopher Columbus discovered America. Leif Ericson, what happened to him? Same deal.”
A big factor in Leno’s long-term success has been his obvious continued love of what he does. You wouldn’t be alone if you concluded that Letterman kind of gave up six or seven years ago.
Letterman has gone from brilliant to stale, while Leno has continued to put on the same show he always has: Sort of bland and middle-of-the-road, but infectiously upbeat.
Look at Leno’s face. He’s 59.
Now look at Letterman’s face. At 62, he’s only three years older than Leno.
True, Letterman has had some significant health issues. But check out the sparkle, or lack thereof, in their eyes. This may have been the most cut-throat period in the history of late-night TV, and Leno simply has emerged with fewer emotional battle scars.
To be fair, Leno recently made a trip to the hospital for exhaustion.
“No alarm went off (about slowing down a little),” said Leno, who still tours compulsively. “The only alarm that went off was when I said, ‘This is a huge mistake. I let them talk me into this stupid, idiot idea of going to the hospital.’
“The only reason I went to the hospital was because (The Tonight Show) is hugely successful. If I was on Lipstick Jungle, I could have had a bullet in my head, and I would have been sitting in this chair for three weeks before anybody even moved me.”
Countless TV critics have wondered just how Leno could have won the war with Letterman. At a certain level, it doesn’t make sense. But the customer never is wrong.
And I have to say, I get it now.
David Letterman always will be special to me. But over the long haul, I understand why more office workers sit beside Jay Leno.
bill.harris@sunmedia.ca
