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O’Brien gets his parachute

Conan O’Brien told NBC good riddance Thursday in a $45 million deal for his exit from The Tonight Show, allowing Jay Leno to return to the late-night program he hosted for 17 years.

NEW YORK — Conan O’Brien told NBC good riddance Thursday in a $45 million deal for his exit from The Tonight Show, allowing Jay Leno to return to the late-night program he hosted for 17 years.

Under the deal, which came seven months after O’Brien took the reins from Leno, O’Brien will get more than $33 million, NBC said. The rest will go to his 200-strong staff in severance.

Compensation for O’Brien’s staff and crew was the final hurdle in negotiations. O’Brien was said to have been “dug in” on the issue out of concern for the workers, while NBC said this week that it had already agreed to pay “millions of dollars to compensate every one of them” and deemed it a public relations “ploy.”

On Wednesday night’s show, speaking of a push to get a severance deal for his staff from NBC, O’Brien joked, “At first they thought I was gullible. They said the staff would be taken to a big farm, where they’d be allowed to run free forever.”

O’Brien’s final show will be Friday, with Tom Hanks scheduled to appear as well as Will Ferrell — his first guest as Tonight host last June.

Leno will return to Tonight on March 1.

“In the end, Conan was appreciative of the steps NBC made to take care of his staff and crew, and decided to supplement the severance they were getting out of his own pocket,” his manager, Gavin Polone, told The Wall Street Journal. “Now he just wants to get back on the air as quickly as possible.”

O’Brien will be free to start another TV job after Sept. 1, NBC said in its statement, released Thursday, which confirmed that “under terms of an agreement that was signed earlier today, NBC and O’Brien will settle their contractual obligations and the network will release O’Brien from his contract.”

There has been much speculation on where he might go next. ABC (which airs Nightline and Jimmy Kimmel Live!) has said it wasn’t interested, while Fox, which lacks a network late-night show, expressed appreciation for his show — but nothing more. Comedy Central has also been mentioned.

A spokesman for O’Brien said he would be unavailable for comment.

O’Brien landed the Tonight show after successfully hosting “Late Night,” which airs an hour later, since 1993. But he quickly stumbled in the ratings race against his CBS rival, David Letterman.

Under Leno, the “Tonight” show was the ratings champ at 11:35 p.m. Eastern, but he proved an instant flop with his experiment in prime time.

Last week NBC announced that the five-hour vacancy in prime time left by Leno will be filled by scripted and reality fare calculated to bring NBC affiliates a more robust lead-in audience for their local news than Leno had been delivering. It had been no secret that the 46-year-old O’Brien was scoring puny ratings numbers on Tonight, averaging 2.5 million nightly viewers, compared with 4.2 million for Letterman’s Late Show, according to Nielsen figures.

It was even more obvious that The Jay Leno Show, airing weeknights at 10 p.m. Eastern, was a disaster. Mostly justified by the network for its bargain-basement production budget, it not only was critically slammed, but also found a disappointing popular reaction. It has averaged 5.3 million nightly viewers since its fall debut — about the same number that watched Leno’s final Tonight season, in a time slot when far fewer viewers are available. By comparison, the season’s top-rated 10 p.m. network drama, CBS’ The Mentalist, has an average audience of 17 million.

But few observers expected the abrupt upheaval that erupted publicly just two weeks ago, when two Web sites posted unsourced stories that the 59-year-old Leno’s show would soon be cancelled or moved into O’Brien’s late-night domain.

Days later, NBC executives unveiled a plan to restore Leno to 11:35 p.m. with a half-hour program, then slide O’Brien’s Tonight Show to 12:05 a.m., followed by Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, also pushed back a half-hour.

Disgruntled affiliate stations, which have lost viewers and advertising revenue for their late local newscasts since The Jay Leno Show premiered, appeared to spur NBC’s sudden changes. The 210 local NBC stations saw their late news audience drop, on average, by 25 per cent in November compared with the previous year among desirable 25- to 54-year-old viewers, with the Leno experiment costing the stations collectively $22 million over a three-month period, according to research firm Harmelin Media.

In a clear vote of no confidence, some rebellious stations were threatening to drop The Jay Leno Show and air their own programming.

O’Brien said that shifting Tonight would “seriously damage what I consider to be the greatest franchise in the history of broadcasting,” and he declared his disappointment that NBC had given him less than a year to establish himself as host at 11:35 p.m.

The escalating mess furnished plenty of material for jokes by competitors of Leno and O’Brien, as well as the two NBC hosts at its centre, who bashed each other and their network.

As recently as Wednesday’s monologue, Leno said the rainy weather in California “couldn’t have come at a worse possible time. Today was the day NBC was supposed to burn down the studio for the insurance money.”

For many observers, this clash of talk-show hosts recalled the late-night follies played out by NBC in the early 1990s as the network wavered confoundingly over who — Letterman or Leno — should inherit The Tonight Show from Johnny Carson.