So the ish hit the fan and all the dust has settled over at Rockefeller center following the whole NBC late night musical chairs fiasco. In the end, popular opinion has Jay Leno looking like the scum bag.

So in effort to clear his name, he took to, who else, fellow channel mate and exclusive interview maven, Oprah Winfrey to clarify some “misinformation” as he called it.

Leno’s claim is that the NBC brass forced him to announce his planned retirement from the “Tonight” show way back in ’04 so they could start making the transition to Conan O’Brien, who at the time was being heavily courted by other networks and the network was scared they would lose.

“It broke my heart, it really did. I was devastated,” Leno told Winfrey of being asked to step aside. “This was a job I always wanted.”

However, when the transition was made it was a disaster ratings wise, old viewers didn’t take to the new “Tonight Show” host while Leno’s show tanked leading NBC to ask for a mulligan.

“If the numbers (ratings) had been there, it wouldn’t even be an issue.” Meaning, Winfrey asked, he would “never have been asked to go back” to “Tonight?

“Anything (NBC) did would have been better than this,” Leno explained.   Anything. Anything they did. If they had come in and shot everybody, I mean, it would have been ‘Oh, people were murdered,’ but at least it would have been a two-day story. NBC could not have handled it worse. From 2004 onward this whole thing was a huge, huge mess.”

I’m not crying no river for either of these cats.  Both of them are paid now for generations to come. Leno clearly doesn’t get it. This is the TONIGHT SHOW, not some here today, gone tomorrow variety show. We’re talking Johnny Carson here. Did you really expect you could conspire to boot your red headed replacement out of your old chair and no one would notice?