NBC moved Leno to 10 p.m. to keep him — the fix cost $45m to undo

On 1 June 2009 Conan O'Brien took over The Tonight Show, drawing over nine million viewers to his premiere — and NBC immediately had a second problem. Jay Leno's contract was running out, Fox and ABC were making interested calls, and NBCUniversal chief executive Jeff Zucker wanted to keep him off a rival network. The answer was an hour of Leno five nights a week at 10 p.m., a slot the network normally sold to scripted dramas. The show premiered on 14 September 2009 to 17.7 million viewers — the biggest audience the experiment would ever have.

The audience fell away almost at once. By the second week it had roughly halved, and it eventually bottomed out at 4.799 million viewers. The worse damage was downstream: with a weak 10 p.m. lead-in, NBC's affiliates saw their late local news audiences fall by twenty-five percent on average nationwide, and by as much as fifty percent in some markets. The stations that carried the network's schedule began pressuring the network that had sold it to them.

On 7 January 2010 NBC told O'Brien the fix: Leno back to 11:35, The Tonight Show pushed to 12:05. On 12 January O'Brien answered with a statement addressed to People of Earth: The Tonight Show at 12:05 simply isn't the Tonight Show, and he could not participate in what he honestly believed was its destruction. NBC announced the settlement on 21 January — 45 million dollars in all, 33 million to O'Brien and around 12 million to sever his staff. His last episode aired on 22 January; The Jay Leno Show ended on 9 February after 95 episodes, and Leno was back at 11:35 on 1 March.

The story is still told with the speed of a box-score recap. Bill Carter of the New York Times published The War for Late Night within the year — Viking, November 2010 — having spoken with enough of the participants that New York Magazine said the account included re-created conversations and dialogue; BusinessWeek called him the Bob Woodward of the 11:35 time slot. Fifteenth-anniversary retrospectives in January 2025 walked the same timeline again, and the People of Earth letter remains American television's canonical refusal.