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The deal is that Conan was going to go somewhere else (Fox, ABC) when his last contract was up --- so in order to resign him a few years ago, they promised him the Tonight Show in 2009, and Leno signed off on it, saying it was OK with him. NBC had an out, that if they decided to keep Leno on the Tonight show after 2009, then Conan would get a $40 million dollar penalty payment.
Fast forward to 2008 - Leno is still willing the ratings war bigtime, and several networks, plus outside syndicators, were ready to give him the big bucks to go at 11 or 11:30 against Conan and Letterman. So NBC was going to either lose Leno who would quite possibly beat them in the ratings - or have to pay $40 million to Conan and then have to compete against him.
So they came up with an idea (first surfaced by a TV columnist a year ago) to do this 10pm show for Leno. Leno's happy, NBC is thrilled that they keep everyone and cut costs (as mentioned in an earlier post) --- the only one who must be truly pissed is Conan who has been totally undercut, but to my knowledge he hasn't said anything yet.
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