Leno In Hot Water With The WGA

Leno’s return to late night TV may have been a success for the network. After all, his ratings were up and he managed to score 2.2 million more viewers than Letterman did with his own comeback on Wednesday night. Unfortunately for Leno, not having the consent of the WGA has put him in hot water with the guild after he admittedly wrote his own opening monologue for the episode.

Wednesday was a big night for late-night television and with the strike tension just as intense as ever, it’s not that surprising that there would problems after the fairly successful return of the most popular late night talk shows. According to the Hollywood Reporter, there seems to be a bit of confusion between the WGA and NBC over what’s allowed in terms of pre-written material for the show.

Leno admitted in the opening monologue that he worked on the bit prior to the episode. Apparently that sort of thing is against the rules and according to reps from WGA West, it was brought to Leno’s attention when they met with him prior to the episode airing, “to clarify to him that writing for The Tonight Show constitutes a violation of the guild's strike rules.”

Meanwhile, NBC says, “The WGA agreement permits Jay Leno to write his own monologue for The Tonight Show. The WGA is not permitted to implement rules that conflict with the terms of the collective bargaining agreement between the studios and the WGA.”.

The return of late-night TV could probably be considered step backward for the WGA, especially considering NBC successfully beat out CBS in the ratings. This surely wasn’t what the WGA wanted to see after making a deal with Letterman to allow his writers to return for his show. The desired result would probably have been for NBC to suffer without the help of the writers. In the end though, chances are a lot of the late-night TV watchers out there were more curious to see how Leno would do without the help of his writers than they were in watching a regular episode of Letterman.

Regardless, the whole spat doesn’t look good in terms of the strike. Between this and the guild’s plans to picket the Golden Globes, it doesn’t look like there’s any end in sight.