Jay Leno Tells Bill Maher He Didn’t “Deliberately Sabotage” Conan O’Brien to Win Back ‘The Tonight Show’

Jay Leno is clearing the air about rumors that he “deliberately sabotaged” Conan O’Brien to win back his Tonight Show spot. In an interview on Bill Maher’s podcast Club Random, Leno talked about the controversy surrounding his show, even admitting he apologized to Jimmy Kimmel for failing to keep him in the loop about his potential move to ABC, which would have impacted him if it happened.

In 2009, O’Brien took over The Tonight Show from Leno in a move that NBC had announced five years earlier. However, when the network decided to give the veteran host his own show, The Jay Leno Show, leading up to The Tonight Show, both programs did not do well. It resulted in O’Brien leaving NBC and Leno returning to his originally scheduled programming, leaving many to assume that he had “deliberately sabotaged” his successor.

However, Leno cleared up the rumors, saying, “No … it doesn’t work that way. You try and do the best you can — and it didn’t work.”

According to Leno, whose show was taken over by Jimmy Fallon in 2014, other networks such as ABC and Fox tried to lure him in at the time he was going to be replaced by O’Brien, but he ultimately declined.

“Sometimes the czar you have is better than the one you’re gonna get,” he said regarding why he didn’t jump networks. “Then you have your old team shooting at you as well. I figured: Let’s just play this out and see what happens.”

If Leno had moved to ABC, it would have pushed the Jimmy Kimmel Live! time slot back and when the news that ABC was after him became public, it caused friction between the two hosts, despite them previously speaking about the possibility. Looking back, Leno said he “should have called Jimmy and explained to him” that he was staying at NBC.

He added, “I thought he probably would figure it out. But I think maybe he was hurt by that, and I apologized to him for that.”