Jay Leno

Discussions about the Leno-to-Fallon Tonight Show transition started more than two years ago, says Bob Greenblatt, but the Olympics were an irresistible catalyst to launch Fallon.

David Letterman poked fun at Leno and NBC. Leno poked fun at Letterman and NBC. Jimmy Kimmel mocked himself. Fallon played it cool. And Conan O’Brien took the high road after NBC said Wednesday that Fallon will inherit Tonight from Leno in 2014 — as O’Brien did in 2009, before Leno took it back.

Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels will take over as producer of the new Tonight Show, which will move back to New York with new host Jimmy Fallon.

NBC’s two late-night stars, Jay Leno and Jimmy Fallon, who have said nothing publicly about the rumors of a potential changing of the hosting guard at the Tonight show, got together Monday night to perform a rather romantic music video commentary on their much-publicized situation.

The embattled Tonight Show host continues to joke about his network’s ratings amid reports it is planning to replace him with Jimmy Fallon.

The dinner meeting comes amid a flurry of news related to the network’s timetable for replacing the latenight host with Jimmy Fallon.

NBC confirmed Wednesday it’s creating a new studio for Fallon in New York, where he hosts Late Night. But the network did not comment on a report that the digs at its Rockefeller Plaza headquarters may become home to a transplanted, Fallon-hosted Tonight. Leno’s contract is up next year.

NBC has aggressively denied recent reports that it plans to replace Jay Leno soon as host of The Tonight Show, but the network’s top entertainment executive, Robert Greenblatt, recently stirred up a bit of a feud with the latenight star over jokes about the network. Three executives close to the situation report that Greenblatt took offense to monologue jokes Leno made in the wake of news stories about NBC’s ratings struggles and how the network had fallen into fifth place in the February sweeps — behind Spanish-language Univision.

Howard Stern has been reprimanded by an NBC executive over some harsh words for Jay Leno. The radio personality might have given America’s Got Talent a much-needed boost of star power, but the network wasn’t laughing when Stern tore into the Tonight Show host this week, calling him a “spineless maggot” on his SiriusXM Radio show.

NBC has a little over a year to decide whether to stick with Tonight Show host Jay Leno or make the switch to Jimmy Fallon, the host of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. Although Leno’s contract isn’t up until September 2013, ABC’s decision to move Jimmy Kimmel Live from midnight to 11:35 a.m. starting early next year may have NBC executives thinking about the future.

So what would David Letterman and Conan O’Brien talk about when the two late-night hosts got together for a chat Thursday night? The Indy 500? The two men traded barbs about Jay Leno last night, about how he would surely be watching the interview, and what kind of relationship O’Brien had with him, before and after the Tonight Show turnaround.

About halfway through the season, NBC’s latenight moves are still moving in the right direction. TNT’s Conan continues to be a different story. NBC says through the first 20 weeks of the season The Tonight Show with Jay Leno is up 42% to 3.9 million viewers; CBS’s Late Show with David Letterman is down 14% to 3.6 million. While a significant improvement, the two shows on a long-term basis are much closer than they have been in their history.

A year after NBC upended its latenight world, order has quietly been restored: Jay Leno is back on The Tonight Show and topping the ratings virtually every week. NBC executives say this proves that a latenight show can be broadly appealing and still bring in more young viewers than any other entertainment show in the same time slot.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) — Massachusetts native Jay Leno is Harvard University’s Hasty Pudding Man of the Year. Hasty Pudding Theatricals is the nation’s oldest undergraduate drama troupe. It says “The […]

BURBANK, Calif. (AP) — Conan O’Brien says he got a phone call from David Letterman over the holidays. The CBS host wanted to make sure a year of late-night TV […]

Through exhaustive research and interviews with the major players, Bill Carter’s book The War for Late Night tells the story of the Conan O’Brien-Jay Leno battle. Through exhaustive research and interviews with the major players in this battle Carter demonstrates that, while the usual oversize Hollywood egos were forming secret alliances and stockpiling armaments, it was NBC that fired the shots that sank the Lusitania.

Ratings are the best revenge. And if these numbers hold, “Conan” had a very sweet debut for TBS. Conan’s new TBS show scored a 2.8 rating among Nielsen’s 56 metered markets. In contrast, Leno earned a 2.7 rating, Letterman drew 2.5, and Kimmel received a 1.7.