The Tonight Show | Conan Conflict

As you may recall, Leno had retired from The Tonight Show and moved on to his own NBC primetime series, The Jay Leno Show, in Sept. 2009. But when it failed to catch on in its 10 p.m. time slot, the network announced in January 2010 that it would shorten The Jay Leno Show to a half-hour, and move it to 11:35 p.m—the time slot The Tonight Show had held for nearly 60 years. O'Brien's Tonight Show would therefore have been pushed back to 12:05 a.m., which was effectively the time slot O'Brien had been keeping warm on Late Night with Conan O'Brien for 16 years. "I cannot express in words how much I enjoy hosting this program and what an enormous personal disappointment it is for me to consider losing it," O'Brien said in a statement. "But I cannot participate in what I honestly believe is its destruction. Some people will make the argument that with DVRs and the internet a time slot doesn't matter. But with The Tonight Show, I believe nothing could matter more." Unfortunately, NBC would not budge, so O'Brien decided to say goodbye to The Tonight Show. On Jan. 22, 2010, as the Tonight Show band played a rendition of Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Free Bird," O'Brien signed off, making his stint as host the shortest of all time. Seeing as O'Brien has been killing it for years with his late-night TBS show, Conan, it's hard to believe that just 10 years ago, he was dealing with what Entertainment Weekly deemed the biggest "late-night disaster" of all time.Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.