...Jay Leno-Conan O'Brien thing after all. What the heck. Where should I begin? First of all, I was a huge Johnny Carson fan. I started watching the "Tonight Show" as soon as I was old enough to stay up late. I used to watch Carson with my mother. Heck, I used to watch him with my grandmother. We moved into our current house in 1992 on the day of his last show. I stayed up and "watched" it on a TV with no picture (we weren't hooked up yet) and sat on a cardboard box. It was great! Carson will always be the "King of Late Night" to me.
Having said that (my apologies to Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld), I'm also a fan of both David Letterman and Conan O'Brien, although I rarely stay up that late. As for Leno, not as much. I always thought his comedy was too vanilla, too formulaic. He's kind of a modern-day Bob Hope. But maybe that's what gives him such wide appeal.
Having said that (again), I thought Leno got a bit of a raw deal when he got kicked off the "Tonight Show" in favor of O'Brien. The champ deserves to either get beaten in the ring or retire on his own. But inexplicably, the bigwigs at NBC never called me. (I could have saved them a lot of trouble.)
Having said all that (last time, I promise), one thing that has struck me about all this is the amount of vitriol directed at Leno by his late night peers and now Howard Stern. This is not a well-liked man!
So that's it. That's all I have to say on the subject. Leno will go back to 11:35 Eastern, O'Brien will move on and have a great career somewhere else (he is funny), and I will continue to go to bed at 11:00 Eastern, 10:00 Central (on a good night).
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