It was his lifelong dream to host the Tonight Show. And when Conan O’Brien (a 47 year old Gen Xer) finally got his chance, he kicked ass.
But his Baby Boomer predecessor, Jay Leno, didn’t like it. So even though Leno had made a commitment to leave the Tonight Show - and even though the organization had made a comfy new position for him elsewhere - Leno wanted his old job back, so NBC sent CoCo packing.
Generation Xers, this is a cautionary tale. A story of Boomers who don’t know how to gracefully exit. (Update: Conan referred to this in his 2011 Commencement address at Dartmouth here.)
Truth is, Boomers don’t really want to move on. They haven’t saved enough for retirement, even though their Depression-era parents warned them about this. (See this Wall Street Journal article here.) And many Boomers don’t know how to have a life outside of work. “Without work,” they sigh, “who am I?”
I can’t blame Boomers for wanting to hang out as long as they can. But I sure don’t respect them for it.
As Douglas Rushkoff, media theorist and author of Program or Be Programmed writes, “The boomers have overstayed their welcome. Generation X is finally at the stage where they can have the jobs the boomers had, and the economy crashes. There’s nothing left for them: There’s no Social Security; there’s nowhere to invest. Conan was a great stand-in for the frustration with this never-ending boomer legacy.”
The real losers are our institutions that are crumbling under the weight of what Business Week calls a “gerentocracy.” While Boomers camp out in a grab for money and meaning for themselves, our companies and communities are being robbed of the new ideas, energy, and spirit that only fresh eyes - the next generation - can bring to the table.
But there is a measure of revenge.
When NBC and Conan parted ways, the network made pages of stipulations, e.g. Conan couldn’t be funny on television for months. But the old media dinosaur didn’t consider how Conan could use new media to shred them. Within days after CoCo lost his spot on The Tonight Show, a campaign of Conanites rallied around him. He got a Facebook page, a Twitter account, and set a single-record day for gathering new followers.
Tonight, Conan’s show will air on TBS, a Gen X punchline to a Baby Boomer joke. I hope you’ll tune in.
