Conan O’Brien and his team are walking away from NBC with a whopping $45 million settlement, but there’s a condition – “The Tonight Show” host can’t bad-mouth the Peacock Network and its top brass, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.
“We wanted to give him a graceful exit. Hopefully he will be graceful,” Jeff Gaspin, chairman of NBC Universal Television Entertainment, said of O’Brien, whose last show is Friday.
Thursday night, with the ink barely dry on his exit package, O’Brien didn’t spare his ratings-challenged employer. “Have to watch at least one NBC show every weeknight in order to double ratings,” O’Brien said. People familiar with the matter said the nondisparagement provision kicks in when O’Brien leaves the network.
Being tactful has never been part of his comedic repertoire. While nondisparagement clauses aren’t unusual in top-dollar settlements, this one raises obvious questions about how a comedian can go about his work when he is gagged from doing gags.
In recent shows, O’Brien joked about getting around nondisparagement constraints. “Luckily, folks, they’re not saying I can’t sing anything negative about the network,” O’Brien said on his show this week, and then broke into an impromptu tune with the line “Morons, incompetent morons, these people are morons … la de de de.” The next night, he repeated a similar sentiment, this time in Spanish.
“I would think that it would still be disparaging,” said Scott J. Witlin, an employment-law attorney at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, when asked if a sing-song or Spanish trash-talking of NBC brass still counted as disparagement.