General

Conan to leave NBC?

Tonight Show host reportedly miffed at having to make way for Leno

Conan O’Brien seems surprisingly reluctant to stay with a network that betrayed him. The tall red-haired host moved to Los Angeles to take over The Tonight Show, a job he was promised in 2004. And he went along, publicly, with NBC’s decision to give his predecessor Jay Leno a show at 10 o’clock. Now the network is trying to fix this failed experiment by forcing O’Brien to change time slots and make way for Leno. A source told the New York Post that NBC’s “level of sh–iness was not expected. He’s done a great job for NBC. He moved his entire staff, he moved his family to L.A. And five months later, they repay him like this?” O’Brien hasn’t yet accepted the network’s take-it-or-leave-it offer to move to 12, and the Post‘s source says that he might be “happier somewhere else”; he’s already in talks with the Fox network about moving there to anchor a late-night show. It was the threat that Leno might move to Fox that caused NBC to give him the 10 o’clock show in the first place; it may be that Fox will be just as happy with O’Brien. And if that doesn’t work out, he can go across the Fox lot and write for The Simpsons again.

New York Post

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