Jay Leno gives his 5-year notice

Setting a leisurely timetable for filling one of the fastest-paced jobs in show business, NBC announced Monday that Conan O’Brien will succeed Jay Leno as host of “The Tonight Show” when Leno steps down in five years.

Leno was to give his five-year notice on the show Monday night, the 50th anniversary of the NBC late-night talk show, with O’Brien making his announcement on his 12:35 a.m. show “Late Night With Conan O’Brien” tonight. Neither was available for comment.

O’Brien, 41, signed a new contract Monday that guarantees he will take over the No. 1 late-night show in 2009 and keeps him at the helm of his show -- and away from any potential competitors -- until then. He has hosted NBC’s “Late Night With Conan O’Brien” for 11 years.

In a statement, Leno said, “In 2009, I’ll be 59 years old and will have had this dream job for 17 years.... Plus, I promised Mavis [his wife] I would take her out for dinner before I turned 60.”

When Leno’s contract was renewed in March, he and NBC Television Group President Jeff Zucker discussed a timeline for passing the baton, NBC executives said Monday.

In recent interviews, O’Brien, whose contract was set to expire in January 2006, has said that he would be looking for an 11:35 p.m. show soon. Now a hot commodity, O’Brien, who will be “Tonight’s” fifth host, started out his late-night career as an “annoying nuisance,” wrote Washington Post critic Tom Shales, who credited him with “one of the most amazing transformations in television history.”

“Conan is the best of anybody at this point,” said Robert Morton, the former producer of “Late Night With David Letterman.” “He’s a fearless performer, which is appealing to a mass audience, especially in late night. Johnny Carson was the same way. He’d jump in a tub, put on a wig.”

Though O’Brien attracts a younger audience, Morton pointed out, that audience will be older in five years, which is a calculated risk on the part of NBC. But, he added, “I think Conan is definitely the wave of the future. Other than Jon Stewart, there’s nobody else out there who could fill a 12:30 or 11:30 spot.”

The unusually long time frame for the succession caused speculation that Leno was hoping to avoid what happened when he succeeded Johnny Carson as the host of “Tonight” in May 1992.

The network’s dilemma over whether to choose David Letterman or Leno for the job became an uncomfortable public competition. As a result, Letterman eventually left his 12:30 a.m. show on NBC for rival CBS, where, with some initial bitterness, he went head to head with Leno in the 11:30 p.m. slot.

Friends of Leno told the Los Angeles Times in 2000 that he would always be scarred by the bad press that surrounded NBC’s drawn-out decision, and especially by the way Leno was portrayed in “The Late Shift,” a 1996 book by New York Times reporter Bill Carter that chronicled the tug-of-war among Leno, Letterman and NBC executives over Carson’s “Tonight Show” successor.

In 1992, “NBC kind of mishandled the whole transition,” Morton said. “They probably weren’t as fair or as cordial to Carson as they could have been. They learned from their mistakes. It’s a very impressive deal in that their executives could pull something off like this.” Considering all the egos involved, such an apparently seamless transition is “monumental,” he said.

After an initial ratings lag, Leno surged to the top-rated spot in 1995, where he has remained. But while he was winning the ratings, he was frequently considered a kind of second fiddle to Letterman, who tended to be favored by television critics.

One of the tenets of late night television hosting is “Don’t give up the chair,” Morton said. “The fact that Leno announced that Conan will follow him, and to live with that for five years, will give renewed energy to “The Tonight Show,” Morton said. “It will be a running gag for five years. It’s great material for him and it makes him look like an elder statesman,” he said.

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Staff writer Greg Braxton contributed to this report.