How It Didn't Go Down...

Let's bid adieu to Conan O'Brien, for now. Details of his settlement with NBC, via What Would Tyler Durden Do: 

[Just seven months after he took the job as host of the Tonight Show, Conan O'Brien and NBC agreed early this morning on a buy-out for the remainder of his contract, which will allow NBC to replace Conan with Jay Leno. And to make sure they pissed away as much money as possible, NBC caved on the "mitigation" clause. If that were still in place, and Conan had signed a deal with Fox paying him 25M a year for example, then NBC would only have been responsible for 7 of the 32M. Now he gets 32 no matter what.

So, to recap, Conan hosted a very successful and popular talk show on NBC for 16 years, but then his show moved 60 minutes earlier and NBC decided he forgot how to host a talk show. Then they freaked the fuck out and panicked like some kind of woman. By some accounts this will cost NBC $250 million, partially because of lost ad revenue but mostly between moving Conan, firing Conan, hiring Jimmy Fallon, and creating a show for Leno. It's fiscal leadership like this that took NBC from a $1.8 billion profit 8 years ago to a $600 million loss this year. Horny 16-year-olds think about the consequences of their actions better than this. You could take Steve Jobs, chase him with a bear, and he still would have figured this all out better than NBC did.]

I don't know what magic voodoo Jay Leno and his people used on NBC - but I'm confident that they'll eventually wake up and regret it. There's no way they'll recoup from this "investment" - especially after the cascade of negative press. I'd be worried about ultimately being blamed for all of this if I were Jay. Someone is going to be the scapegoat when NBC fails to secure the numbers they're aiming for...