Conan who?

I’ve been keeping my head down in recent discussions about the current late night television kerfuffle, as my defense of Jay Leno has proved very unpopular among my peers. Needless to say, I was pleased to see a column in this Sunday’s New York Times expressing what I’d been trying to say all along. Of course, David Carr probably succeeded where I failed because he didn’t start with a thoughtful interjection of, “Now come on, is Jay Leno really so bad?” But first, some back story.

My mother is one of those people who has a sort of knee-jerk reaction to David Letterman (she called me in the wake of the latest scandal for a “see, I told you so!” conversation), so in my house, Leno was the late night comedian we watched. Although my bedtime was 10 p.m., I almost always convinced my mom to let me stay up for the news, which almost always extended into the first five minutes of Leno’s monologue. I rarely got to watch the whole show – I was usually shuffled upstairs during the first commercial break – and I didn’t always understand the jokes. But I liked Leno’s delivery, and I liked the way my mom laughed when she was watching “The Tonight Show.” She must have watched almost every night, between tucking us in and saying good night to my dad, waiting for the late night host’s take on the events she’d caught on the world news earlier that night. My mother was one of those people who was well-informed before it was easy to be well-informed, before the internet, before “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report,” back when network comedians provided commentary for middle America on the news of the day.

My mom never liked Conan O’Brien. The few times I was allowed to stay up with her to the very end, she’d always change the channel before “Late Night” came on. If a commercial so much as mentioned Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, she would appear scandalized, complaining loudly that she didn’t understand how people thought Conan was funny. The week Leno announced Conan would be taking up his mantle in 2009 (mind you, this was five years before it actually happened), my mother roamed the house like some kind of mourner that only came out after the evening news. I think she even threatened to switch to Letterman that week, but surely he said something that offended her straightaway, sending her back to Leno’s waiting arms.

Of course, my mother’s loyal viewership of “The Tonight Show” was about to go into sharp decline. Somewhere circa my junior year of high school, we acquired our first DVR (video-on-demand was still new at the time, and everyone called it a TiVo even though it was some off-brand machine we’d gotten through our cable company). Suddenly, Leno had to compete not with Letterman, but with missed episodes of “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Desperate Housewives.” It was almost too much for my mom. Deb – devoted Deb – found herself being pulled in many directions as once. I think the arrival of a high capacity DVR a few years later (one that could store 40 or 50 shows instead of just four or five) sealed the deal. Of course, the fact that my mother now records and attempts to watch every show on television is a story for another day. Her viewership of “The Tonight Show” dropped off long before Conan took the reins.

In his aforementioned column, David Carr (if you’re scratching your head and wondering where you’ve heard that name before, he’s the one that writes The Carpetbagger every winter during awards season) chalks the whole mess up to people like Deb leaving the late night shows in droves as their attention is pulled into all different directions, to things like “Netflix, laptops and a remote that can pull up favored prime-time programs on the DVR.” Why did my mom watch “The Tonight Show” for so many years? Your guess is as good as mine, but I suppose it has a lot to do with the fact that there wasn’t much else competing for her attention at 10:35 p.m. My generation will shell out for internet but not a cable subscription because we know we can get the same content online – and you can bet we’ll point our browser towards something more substantial than any late night montage.

That said, I’m still not sure I can say the whole thing wasn’t a cleverly planned made-for-television fight meant to remind people that the late night shows still exist.