Jay Leno and Conan

So far the biggest story of the new decade is NBC's insane plan to give the Tonight Show back to Jay Leno.

Everybody involved in this fiasco needs to CALM DOWN. Let's not do anything RASH. (I hate when people do rash stuff.) Take a deep breath and I will explain how to fix things.

Okay first of all I have never encountered anybody that likes Jay Leno. People that have known him personally claim he is a nice guy, yet he always seems to be stabbing everybody in the back. So I'd say he is a bit two-faced (and with that face of his that is saying a LOT). I bet he does not even actually like Doritos.

What people DID like was the Tonight Show. When he stole it from Johnny Carson, he was very shrewd in not changing anything. Well he got rid of Ed, so that was one thing, but people were pretty mad at that guy anyway for all those false hopes that came in the mail. Conan's Tonight Show is very Conan, that's why it's been a difficult adjustment for people. It's like if Leno tried to make the show all about lisps and chins. People wouldn't have been receptive to that. At least not right away.

Leno's 10pm show gets very poor ratings. That is because it is just "The Jay Leno Show," which people hate, and not "The Tonight Show," which people like. It's all about Jay, there's no tradition, nobody has a fondness for it. That doesn't NECESSARILY mean that you need to CANCEL it though, you can just re-tool. Instead of his boring run-of-the-mill interviews, let the celebrities that come on the show talk about how much they hate him. I'm pretty sure a large audience would tune in to see Jay Leno getting screamed at nightly. "YOU COULDN'T HOLD JOHNNY'S JOCKSTRAP. HOW'S THAT FOR A HEADLINE?" Imagine Sandra Bullock yelling at him like that. The guests could also whack him with pillows, dump paint on his head, trash the set, etc. Anything that wouldn't actually injure him. (Injured circus animals can't perform.) and don't say you'd feel sorry for Jay, he gets paid plenty. BELIEVE me.

Conan drawing ratings at 11:30 is a little bit trickier. I'd say he should probably go the Letterman route where you do bad immoral stuff and then apologize for it on the air. People love seeing celebrities apologize for their bad behavior. (Examples: Kobe Bryant, Don Knotts.) So he could just keep pretending to make "mistakes" in life and then tell the audience that he's sorry. "Dogfighting is wrong, I realize that now." Sooner than later they would be drawing big numbers.

So THERE. Once again I have solved NBC's problems. If anybody knows anybody that works there, please tell them my ideas but do not take credit for them.