On his first episode of The Tonight Show, Conan O’Brien joked that Jay Leno would be coming back to NBC “in two days.” Well, not quite that soon, but starting in the fall, O’Brien’s Tonight predecessor will have a nightly talk show at 10 p.m. This was seen as a sign of NBC executives’ lack of confidence in O’Brien, but they may be doing O’Brien a favour. O’Brien’s first Tonight episode beat David Letterman in the ratings; if Leno had gotten a competing talk-show on another network, he might have beaten Conan, just as he beat everyone else. O’Brien told his audience that Leno is a friend and that “I’m looking forward to him being our lead-in.” It’s better to have him as a lead-in than competition, because audiences prefer the unhip, familiar, comfortable—in short, Jay Leno.

Even Leno’s network didn’t expect him to be this popular for this long. Sue Trowbridge, who runs The Late Night TV Page (a Web resource for finding out the upcoming guests on talk shows), points out that NBC announced O’Brien as Leno’s successor in 2004 “far enough ahead of time that maybe Leno thought that would be a good time to step down.” But “five years passed, and he’s still number one and still enjoying it.” It wasn’t hard to see why NBC might have expected his popularity to decrease: Leno is a dinosaur in a talk-show landscape dominated by people with a hip, ironic take on the format.

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