10 Resurrected TV Shows That Should’ve Stayed Dead

9. The Tonight Show With Jay Leno

A book could be written about what happened here. Hell, Bill Carter did write one, and it was great. So I'll try to keep this down to the essentials. In the early naughties, Conan O'Brien was on fire. Riding a wave of popularity off widely acclaimed performances as host of the Emmy Awards and on his own 10th anniversary special, his NBC contract was almost up and he had interest from several rival networks, most notably Fox. He had spent most of his adult life at NBC, though, first as a writer at Saturday Night Live and then hosting his show, with a gap as a writer for The Simpsons in between. More importantly, NBC was home to the crown jewel of comedy: The Tonight Show. Sure, with an increasingly stale Jay Leno as host, it wasn't what it once was, but for Conan, it was the dream, and he arranged a deal where he would get the gig when Leno's then current contract expired in 2009. At the time, though Leno wasn't crazy about giving up his show while number one in the time slot, he put on a friendly face publicly, talking about wanting to avoid the ill will generated by his war with David Letterman for the job a decade earlier. http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xbvc97_jimmy-kimmel-destroys-jay-leno-as-a_fun Come 2009, it seemed inevitable that Leno would go to ABC, so NBC, not wanting him on a rival network, signed him to do a new show. That doesn't sound so bad until you hear what it was: It wasn't a weekly variety show or sitcom or anything like that. It was a Tonight Show clone with slight changes that was on every weeknight at 10 PM. Conceived as being a "DVR-proof" home of topical humor, it completely flopped. Even worse, as the lead-in for the late local news and thus Conan's network lead-in, it hurt Conan's ratings, too. When the local NBC affiliates revolted because of how badly their newscasts where doing, the 10 PM show was dropped. Sort of. Leno's show was cut to half an hour...and moved to 11:35 PM, home of The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien, which would be moved to 12:05 PM. Yes, The Tonight Show was going to move to tomorrow. All hell broke loose. Conan's representation had, somehow, not built time slot protection into his contract in spite of it being a standard term, so he couldn't block the move short of quitting. So he quit. The Tonight Show didn't mean anything if NBC cared this little about it. He negotiated a settlement payoff for himself and his crew and did a farewell week of shows. Leno, obviously, got The Tonight Show back, and became a huge villain in the eye of the public. He finally retired from the show a few months ago, thank God.