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| An emotional Jay Leno bids goodbye |
| An emotional Jay Leno bids goodbye to 'Tonight'
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| UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
, 7-February-2014
4:56:32 AM |
| Johnny Carson's departure from "The Tonight Show" was an abdication. Jay Leno's last show, on Thursday, was closer to a retirement party - a bittersweet send-off for a loyal executive pushed out after 22 years.
"It's fun to kind of be the old guy and sit back here and see where the next generation takes this great institution," Leno said about his successor, Jimmy Fallon.
More gamely than convincingly, he added, "But it really is time to go and hand it off to the next guy. It really is."
Ratings in the last week soared, but it wasn't that audiences were anticipating a train wreck or a cultural milestone. Many viewers weren't feeling loss so much as pinpricks of projected anxiety: Leno's emotional last bow was poignant not because he is a legendary figure who can never be replaced but because he is the nice guy who worked really hard, did a great job and will barely be missed come on Monday morning.
Newer viewers were like the younger employees down the hall who barely know the retiree but are still drawn to the drama of a forced exit and also the free Champagne and cake. For his older, longtime fans - his audience's median age is 47.5 - there was a there-but-for-the-grace-of God frisson: Leno, 63, is such a familiar fixture of network television that his last hurrah became a dreaded rite of passage, an acting out of people's deepest fears about their own obsolescence. (That could be the reason David Letterman, 66, of CBS put aside his long-standing grudge against Leno and congratulated his rival on "a wonderful run.")
It happens to almost everyone. Thursday night, it was Leno's turn. He tapped Billy Crystal, his first guest in 1992, to be his last, and asked his favorite singer, country star Garth Brooks, to perform. And he smiled through skits and cameos by the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Carol Burnett and Kim Kardashian about his departure. (President Barack Obama paid his respects in a taped message.) Crystal led what he called the Shut Your Von Trapp Family Singers in a parody of a "Sound of Music "song reworded in his honour.
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