Leno and O’Brien will return to the air
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NEW YORK — NBC announced this morning that late-night hosts Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien would return to the air Jan. 2 with new episodes even if the writers strike was not resolved, citing a similar move by Johnny Carson during the 1988 labor stoppage.
‘During the 1988 writers strike, Johnny Carson reluctantly returned to ‘The Tonight Show’ without his writers after two months,” Rick Ludwin, NBC’s executive vice president for late-night and prime-time series, said in a statement released by the network. “Both Jay and Conan have supported their writers during the first two months of this WGA strike and will continue to support them. However, there are hundreds of people who will be able to return to work as a result of Jay’s and Conan’s decision.”
But unlike Carson, Leno and O’Brien are members of the Writers Guild of America. That means they will be crossing their own union’s picket line when they go back on the air, unless the walkout is settled in the next two weeks.
In a statement, O’Brien called himself an “ardent supporter” of the writers guild but said he was “left with a difficult decision: either go back to work and keep my staff employed or stay dark and allow 80 people, many of whom have worked for me for 14 years, to lose their jobs.”
Leno said he had hoped for a quick resolution to the strike.
“Now that the talks have broken down and there are no further negotiations scheduled, I feel it’s my responsibility to get my 100 non-writing staff, which were laid off, back to work,” he said in a statement. “We fully support our writers and I think they understand my decision.”
Their writerless programs will have to rely on quite a bit of ad libbing; under the WGA’s strike rules, the NBC hosts will not be able to write material for their shows that would have otherwise been penned by their writing staffs.
So far, the only late-night host who has returned to the air since the strike began Nov. 5 is NBC’s Carson Daly, who is not a WGA member. The rest of the late-night comedy shows have been in reruns for the last six weeks, and most of them have suffered steep ratings declines as a result.
The labor dispute has forced comedians such as Leno, David Letterman, Jimmy Kimmel and Jon Stewart into a tricky balancing act, pulled between their loyalty to their guild and their responsibilities to their programs. As they’ve waited out the strike, all the hosts have worked to make sure that their non-writing staffs continue to be paid, either by their networks or out of their own pockets.
As that tab mounted and ratings dwindled, however, their return to the air seemed inevitable.
The announcement from NBC comes two days after Letterman’s production company, Worldwide Pants, said it wanted to strike an interim agreement with the WGA to cover the writers who work on its two programs, “Late Show With David Letterman” and “The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson.” The guild is set to formally approach studios today to discuss its willingness to strike individual deals with companies.
Talks between Worldwide Pants and the WGA have not yet begun. But if the terms can be hammered out in the next two weeks, Letterman could be back on the air after the new year as well, but with an advantage over his rivals: writers.
-- Matea Gold