by bintangkecil on Thursday, January 28th, 2010 | Entertainment, News

The battle of Team Jay Leno versus Team Conan O’Brien continues on the Oprah Winfrey Show today.

As Winfrey pointed out during an hour-long interview on the set of Jay Leno’s prime-time show, Leno is now seen as “the bad guy” in the affair of The Tonight Show.

Earlier this month, Conan O’Brien walked away from the late-night institution when NBC executives announced that they wanted Leno to once again follow the local news and that they wanted to move O’Brien’s Tonight Show to 12:05 a.m. EST.

Leno admits that his public reaction to NBC’s “Tonight Show” succession plan back in 2004 amounted to “a white lie,” and in private he took the news a good deal harder than he let on.

“It broke my heart. It really did — I was devastated,” Leno says on Thursday’s (Jan. 28) “Oprah Winfrey Show.” “This was the job that I had always wanted, and this was the only job that ever mattered in show business — to me. It’s the job every comic aspires to. It was just like, why?”

“I did tell a white lie on the air,” Leno says, per The Watcher’s Mo Ryan. “I said, ‘I’m going to retire.’ It was just maybe easier that way.” He also says he “assumed” that when he left “Tonight,” he’d end up at another network.

The interview also touches on Jimmy Kimmel’s takedown of him on “The Jay Leno Show” (”I got sucker-punched. … I could have edited it. But I said, ‘No, no, put it out there’”); whether he talked to O’Brien about the now-scrapped plan to move “The Tonight Show” to midnight (”It wasn’t my place to call Conan”); and the hit his nice-guy image has taken in recent weeks (”I think it’s a little unfair. And I’m going to work hard to rehabilitate that image”).

Leno also had some less-than-kind words for NBC — “NBC could not have handled it worse. From 2004 onward, this whole thing was a huge mess” — and what seemed like genuine wishes for O’Brien to find a new gig soon.

“I hope Conan gets a job somewhere else,” Leno says. “I hope he gets on at FOX or somewhere, and we all compete together. And it raises the level of interest. And you know what happens, the best one wins. Maybe I’ll get my butt kicked, maybe we’ll win.”

By ending up back at The Tonight Show, wasn’t he “taking away Conan’s dream?” Winfrey asked.
“No,” Leno replied. “Because, again, this is an affiliate decision. Affiliates felt that the ratings were low. This was the first time in the 60-year history of ‘The Tonight Show’ that The Tonight Show would have lost money. And that’s what it comes down to. It’s really just a matter of dollars and cents.”

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