I find this Conan O’Brien vs. NBC thing so riveting, especially now that Conan has released a statement saying he won’t do The Tonight Show if it airs at 12:05. Oh my god! Drama!! What’s gonna happen?

Seriously, I do think it’s riveting. Jeff Zucker has really driven NBC into the ground. When I was a kid, NBC was the network to watch. My parents watched The Today Show with Bryant Gumbel and Jane Pauley every morning while having breakfast or getting ready for work. At night, NBC had all the great sitcoms that kids my age enjoyed: Diff’rent Strokes, The Facts of Life, Silver Spoons, Gimme a Break, even Punky Brewster. On Saturday mornings it had the Smurfs. When I was an adolescent, I would watch Days of our Lives and Santa Barbara. As I got a little older, NBC had Family Ties, and then The Cosby Show, and then Friends and Seinfeld. Even today, it has some great comedies on Thursdays: 30 Rock and The Office. And we watch Brian Williams on NBC Nightly News every night.

I used to feel this weird loyalty to NBC, even though it was just a TV network. I felt like the three networks had personas. Even though I watched some CBS and ABC shows, watching CBS and ABC felt like going over to a friend’s house where everything seemed slightly off. NBC just seemed like the network that had everything I liked.

But Jeff Zucker has ruined NBC: first the horrible but cheap-to-produce reality shows, and then this debacle of Jay Leno at 10 p.m. Moving Leno to 10 p.m. was a risk, and while it’s true that if you don’t take risks, you don’t get anywhere, you also don’t mess with something on TV that works. Zucker messed with something that worked. Jay Leno at 10 p.m. is New Coke.

On the rare occasions when I’ve watched Leno on TV, I’ve found him annoying and boring. But for whatever reason, lots of people like him — as long as he’s on at 11:35 and not at 10. You can make fun of the public for liking him, but really, what’s the point? Many people like things that I don’t, and vice versa.

And I have to admit, I watched Leno’s final Tonight show last May and was entertained. He did a “best of” compilation of those idiots on the street who don’t know the answers to questions, and it was pretty funny.

But these days I’m generally ready to go to sleep by the time I finish watching the first half of The Daily Show. And you know what? Once you get used to watching Jon Stewart every night, it’s really weird to watch the old-fashioned host-striding-out-and-doing-jokes-before-an-audience thing. Even if the host is Conan O’Brien, and even if the jokes are funny.

Oh, and as for David Letterman? He’s not always easy to watch, and I don’t always get or like his humor, but I admire him deeply and I’m in awe of his talents. I guess it has something to do with this terrific profile of him from last September, when he was caught up in his sex scandal. An excerpt:

Craggy, bewildered, irascible Dave, with his gray crew cut, designer suits, and white socks — a nightly mind-blowing image in HDTV — has become a persona, a distinctive agglomeration of character traits, even more than his idol Johnny Carson, much more like Carson’s own idol, Jack Benny. His monologues are indifferent as one-liners and jokes, but the character who delivers them is one memorable American. He can reel off dozens of Obama jokes and McCain jokes and Paris Hilton jokes, but it is when Letterman begins to invert and mutter, when his personal neuroses and raw wounds are inflamed by the assaults of everyday life— and whose aren’t? — that is when he becomes something more than a good comedian and something like the scarred protagonist of his own comic novel — a bewildered, gutty mid-lifer at the crash intersection of American culture.

As for Conan O’Brien — he’ll be okay. He’s rolling in dough no matter what happens. Maybe he’ll go to Fox. Maybe NBC will cave in and put Jay somewhere else (doubtful).

The network has treated him like shit, but that’s showbiz.