Jay Leno pops up again to suggest it's commercials that are really killing late night

Now, Leno has popped up to weigh in on the topic again, this time courtesy of a new interview with Deadline. (Timed, somewhat ironically, to having President Joe Biden show up to tool around on his YouTube auto show.) But besides throwing a fun little firebomb at people’s brains by suggesting “Joe Rogan is the new Johnny Carson,” Leno does have a new culprit he’d like to point to for the flagging health of late night: Commercials.

“It’s boring,” Leno accurately self-diagnoses. “But here’s the thing that I think hurt late-night the most: Too many commercials. They passed some new rules before my tenure at The Tonight Show, that after 11:30 at night you could add another like five or six minutes to the hour. It came in in waves, but by the end of my time [at The Tonight Show], instead of doing like 48 minutes of show, it was only like 42 and broken up more.” Leno makes the pretty solid point that the resulting way episodes get cut up into tinier and tinier chunks is really not doing late night any favors when it comes to combating the urges people already have to experience these very expensive productions as a series of disconnected clips.

Meanwhile, he reconnects to his point about Rogan and podcasts, noting that they’re now the home for genuine, long-form interviews: “Why watch that when I can switch over to streaming or YouTube and I can watch an hour with Harrison Ford talking off the top of his head, as opposed to just having few minutes with the guest or with the host, you know? Johnny used to have real conversations. I tried to have real conversations. That’s seems to be gone, and the audience knows it.” (He also notes that “if I see Jake from State Farm again, I’m gonna shoot myself in the fucking head,” so Jay’s working some pretty rough chuckles in 2026.)