Nonsense. He wanted to leave. Not everything is politics.
When? When it was first announced that O’Brien would be taking over the show? Or months later, when they announced that Jay would have a new 10 pm show after he stepped down? Or when O’Brien said he’d leave if they pushed Leno back to 11:35 and O’Brien after midnight? Or, maybe after all that and the Olympics when they brought Leno back with a new theme song, etc., and he had low ratings then? (Yes, I do believe he wanted to leave at that point!)
From Newsweek, July 2013...
-snip-
The irony—and it’s a rich one—is that Leno has never been more dominant: the Nielsen ratings for the second week in July have him beating CBS’s David Letterman by a 43 percent margin in the all-important “viewers 18 to 49” category (on which advertising rates are set) and swamping ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel by a crushing 75 percent.
The “total viewers” number is a similar story, with Leno delivering 3.3 million compared with Letterman’s 2.6 million and Kimmel’s 2 million. Not counting a two-year rough patch after Letterman was enthroned at CBS in 1993, that makes 17 seasons in which Leno has won his time period since he started hosting the iconic show on May 25, 1992.
So why sack him now? “I don’t get it,” says Ohlmeyer, who as president of NBC’s West Coast operations in the mid-1990s helped guide Leno to victory over Letterman.
“It’s like nobody understands history.
Here they take him off the air four years ago, and naturally he loses his impetus, and now he’s come back, and he’s kicking ass again—so let’s take him off.” ...”
Ohlmeyer retorts: “Oh, bullshit. I’m sure Jay says that to everybody who asks him, but for the Jay that I know, his heart has to be breaking about this. All he wanted to do in his life was The Tonight Show. ...”
https://www.newsweek.com/2013/07/24/jay-lenos-top-his-game-so-why-nbc-replacing-him-237746.html