Today's Oprah Winfrey Show hasn't aired yet here, but while it aired in Chicago, Maureen Ryan of the Chicago Tribune was kind enough to take copious notes.
Based on what Mo has to say, after seeing this, people who think Jay Leno is the victim of unfair treatment (including Jay Leno) will continue to think so; people who think he's been acting sketchy will continue to think that, too. He mostly repeats the same arguments he's been using for quite a while, the leading one of which is that he was "fired" twice by NBC: once when it asked him in 2004 to agree to step down in five years, and once this year, when it took him out of the 10 PM job he didn't want and put him back in the 11:35 PM job he did want, which is a little bit of an interesting definition of "fired," to say the least.
The most interesting tidbits:
• Leno's claim that he couldn't possibly have had any power to get The Tonight Show back even if he'd wanted to, because his 10 PM show had just been canceled so there are no "strings to pull." He may be entirely correct that he didn't pull any, but the idea that he couldn't have ignores reports that his contract for the prime-time show included a giant kill fee (some reports peg it at $150 million), which could have given him enormous leverage if NBC found that it desperately needed to end the prime-time show and couldn't afford to pay him ... you know, $150 million. That doesn't mean that's what happened, but his argument that a guy whose show is canceled has no way of making demands ignores the realities of contracts that can force the network to pay a penalty -- sometimes a big one -- for canceling a show early.
• I found the exchange fascinating where Oprah brought up the joke Leno made at the expense of David Letterman's wife (in effect, the joke was, "If you want David Letterman to totally ignore you, just marry him"), where Leno's response was based on his absolute confidence that it was, whether tasteful or not, a really funny joke, and he was pretty sure Oprah would agree.
• Saying that he didn't retire because that would have been "selfish" is the sort of thing that will continue to aggravate people who fall into the category of thinking Leno did nothing particularly wrong by taking the show back, but has been annoyingly disingenuous about it. (This is the category into which I personally fall, as I've discussed before.) Leno will never, as long as he lives, simply say, "The combination of Conan's disappointing ratings and the network's desperate need to cancel my prime-time show immediately gave me an opening to get the show back, and I took it back because I wanted to. There are winners and losers; I won, and Conan lost, because it's that kind of business." That would go a long way.
• I was surprised to hear him admit that he didn't try his luck at another network after NBC replaced him with Conan because it would have been "a lot of work." That's as close, I think, as he's going to come to acknowledging that he didn't really want to risk competing with Letterman and Conan with a new show any more than they wanted to have to compete with him.
• His riff about how badly NBC handled it is one of the funnier things I've seen him say in quite some time: "Anything they did would have been better than this ... If they had come in and shot everybody. It would have been 'Oh, people were murdered,' but at least it would have been a two-day story. NBC could not have handled it worse. From 2004 onward, this whole thing was a huge mess." That is a very nice line, about how they'd have been better off shooting everybody. Funny, dark, and true. Well done.
• There are times in the interview when he makes a pretty convincing argument that networks are merciless, and it's dog-eat-dog, and it's not show friends it's show business, and so forth. If I were his PR advisers, that's what I'd tell him to stick with, rather than "I am just as much a victim of NBC's incompetence as Conan."
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