One challenge Leno, on his new set, faces is pleasing old fans without seeming to copy The Tonight Show.
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The last half-hour will close with segments familiar from Leno's Tonight, like "Jaywalking," a segment that captures the paradox of Leno's populist, Main Street appeal. His signature bit is a feature in which he hits the street in his denim shirt and asks questions to prove how ignorant average Americans are. And yet his fans somehow accept that Leno is mocking all those other Americans, not them.
Many of those viewers have drifted away from O'Brien's Tonight. But the difference between Conan's and Jay's Tonight is not just about personal style; it's about two different philosophies of TV.
The idea behind giving Conan Tonight is that there are no more Johnny Carsons. No one is going to unite a mass audience of all ages and persuasions and from all walks of life every night. The audience is dispersed, by Comedy Central, TiVo, DVDs, video games and the Internet, and the key to success is to do well with the right niche. In Conan's case, that's younger viewers--an audience that doesn't want "something for everyone" but watches, say, Jon Stewart because he's not for everyone.
The corollary to this is that smaller crowds can't support as many expensive network shows at once. Hence, The Jay Leno Show. And yet few entertainers are more antithetical to this idea of niche programming than Leno, Mr. Big Tent. "Everybody gets a little something" in his monologues, he says. He doesn't work blue. He doesn't make his political jokes too pointed because that would make someone feel excluded. "There's the close-the-goddam-window school of thought," he says, "and there's the is-it-cold-in-here-or-is-it-me? school of thought. I come from the is-it-cold-in-here? school."
Leno grew up when mass media were mass. He recalls how "comforting" it was to watch Eric Sevareid with his parents, before kids had TVs in their rooms and a different network for every stage of childhood. "We don't gather anymore," he says. "It's the difference between standing outside a comedy club and looking through the window and standing on the other side of the wall in the room. The experience is a hundred times better when you're in the room because you're part of a communal thing with other people. And that's what TV is to me, a gathering place."
If Leno feels at all vindicated that Tonight's ratings have sunk since he left, he doesn't say it. Conan will be fine, Leno says; he's going through the same new-guy hazing Leno did. NBC, meanwhile, says Conan is a success anyway because his audience is younger than Jay's--by 10 years, on average--and advertisers pay a premium for that. I ask Leno if he buys that argument. "Whatever you want!" he says, laughing. "Whatever works for you, babe! 'Sure, honey, great, you look thin!'"
Is it cold in here?
Down by the Mainstream