Conan to leave NBC in a $45m deal

NBC has brokered a $45 million severance deal with disgruntled Tonight Show host Conan O'Brien to resolve TV's messiest divorce.

O'Brien himself will collect about $33 million while his staff and crew will reportedly receive an additional $12 million in compensation from the network.

His last show will be tomorrow.

Details of the deal are expected to be announced today.

Former host Jay Leno, 59, will resume the Tonight Show throne he held for 17 years on March 1, the Associated Press says.

The last installment of his embattled 10 p.m. program, The Jay Leno Show, will air on Feb. 11.

NBC's disastrous experiment with moving Leno to prime time five nights a week collapsed after just five months, setting off the current imbroglio.

"Nobody comes out of this looking good," says Barbie Zelizer, the Raymond Williams Professor of Communications at Penn's Annenberg School. "Leno comes off as if he can't let go. The network comes off as cutthroat. And Conan comes off as being somewhat naïve."

The settlement releases O'Brien from the final two years of his NBC contract. The tufted redhead had bridled at the network's proposal to move The Tonight Show's starting time past midnight to accomodate a new half-hour program for Leno to air at 11:35.

"Now they've got a 10 o'clock problem and an 11:30 problem," says Curt Block, former vice president of media relations for NBC. "They have to try to rebuild the late night franchise with Jay and come up with successful dramatic programming at 10 o'clock, which they haven't been successful at the last several years."

It will be hard to wash the taint of failure off the Leno experiment. His 10 p.m. show had started off gangbusters in September with 18 million tuning in for the debut.

But it quickly began to slide, levelling off at about 2 million viewers a night. That's far less than Hank, one of the season's biggest failures. The ABC sitcom with Kelsey Grammer was cancelled after only five episodes.

Leno had been averaging 5.2 million viewers a night on The Tonight Show, approximately twice as much as Conan has been pulling in since taking over the storied 56-year-old franchise in June.

Analysts are convinced that recent events have so tarred Leno's image, that he will find it hard to recapture his top ratings position in late night. CBS rival David Letterman is expected to be the main benificiary of this contentious game of musical desks. Early speculation has O'Brien, 46, landing a competing new show at Fox, as soon as next September.

NBC maintained all along that because Leno's 10 p.m. show was so much cheaper to produce than drama series, it could live with the low ratings. But local affiliates carrying NBC programming could not.

With Leno as the anemic lead in, they saw ratings for their late local news, one of the only dependable revenue streams remaining in broadcast, plunge by an average of more than 20 percent across the country.

The decline was steepest in the largest markets, notably Philadelphia. According to a study conducted by Harmelin Media of Bala Cynwyd, the audience of 25-54 year-olds for NBC10's 11 p.m. news dropped by an astounding 47 percent.

As a result, Harmelin estimates that the station, one of 10 owned and operated by the Peacock network, has been losing $74,000 a week at a minimum.

The station's general manager, Dennis Bianchi, declined interview requests.

Ratings for The Tonight Show have spiked this week as people tune in to see O'Brien make fun of the network on his way out the door.

His last Tonight Show broadcast will be tomorrowwith guests Will Ferrell and Tom Hanks. They were respectively the guests on his first and second nights back in June.

The program has adopted a mock-nostalgic tone, with Max Weinberg and the Tonight Show Band trotting out Bob Hope's sentimental theme, "Thanks for the Memories".

O'Brien has had a field day on the air with reports that NBC wanted a gag order inserted in his exit package, prohibiting the spindly satirist from making any more disparaging remarks about the network.

In successive monologues, he joked that nowhere was it stipulated that he could not pillory NBC either in song or in another language, which he proceeded to do with gusto (and subtitles).

Of reports that he would not be permitted to take some of his most notorious comedic routines with him, he noted, "Isn't it great to live in a country where a cigar smoking dog puppet and a bear that masturbates are considered intellectual property?"

It isn't just Conan. Even the luminaries at Sunday's Golden Globe awards repeatedly belittled NBC, which was broadcasting the event at the time.

Now that O'Brien's departure has been ironed out, NBC is hoping it can finally take the "kick me" sign off its back.

"You don't like to see your network being the target of constant shots," says Lou Abitabilo, the general manager of WBRE, the NBC affilate in Wilkes-Barre. "It's unfortunate the network has to go through that when we should be concentrating on the upcoming Olympics. This is one of those family situations that got out of hand."