I don’t write a whole lot about television, as I usually don’t watch a whole lot of it. When I do watch, it’s only for specific shows, and most of the time it is time-shifted (DVR, Hulu, Netfilx, etc).

I’m not taking sides in this very public fiasco involving the Tonight Show, Jay Leno and Conan O’Brian, because I don’t care that much. I do disagree, however,  that Jay Leno should be bearing the brunt of the criticism here, because NBC created this problem.

NBC wanted to avoid the kind of issues they encountered with the last Tonight Show transition, when Jay Leno took over for Johnny Carson, and David Letterman jumped ship to CBS, taking with him the larger share of viewers in the Tonight Show time slot, at least, in the beginning.

Leno would later reclaim the #1 ratings spot from Letterman and hold on to that spot for 12 years, up until he left the show last year. As Conan became more popular, he began to get offers from other networks, and NBC cooked up a disastrous plan to keep Conan at NBC without losing Leno.

As we all can see, NBC’s plan failed miserably.  Conan didn’t do nearly as well as Leno in the ratings at the outset, but NBC expected that to pick up after Jay started his prime-time show this past fall.  They were wrong again.

It’s obvious Leno didn’t want to quit. But NBC wouldn’t release him from his contract for fear of him going to another network. NBC didn’t want to lose Conan to another network either, and risk him taking ratings from Leno. And so the dueling talk-show set up was born.

Personally, I don’t think NBC can easily recover from this.  Word is they are paying Conan $40 million to leave the Tonight Show, so that they can put Leno back in.  They are rushing to fill in the blank spots in their prime-time line-up.  And NBC’s ratings are taking a nose-dive in the process (although Conan’s have been better during the scandal, they still never reached Leno levels).

At this point, I don’t think NBC will recover from this. Leno may be going back to the Tonight Show, but due to all of the ill will created by NBC, his ratings probably won’t recover.  Conan will get his own show somewhere else (next year maybe, due to his contract with NBC), and the late night ratings pie will get sliced a little slimmer everywhere.

I blame all of this on NBC’s bad karma. It’s what they get for canceling “My Name is Earl”.