You know what day it is today, right? You don’t? It’s only the most important day in the history of all days. This is the day you will tell your children about, and they will tell their children about, and they will tell their children about, and so on and so forth until the zombie monkey apocalypse of 2113. This is a day that towers above all days before and yet to come.

Today, America, is the day your best friend comes home. Today is the day Jay Leno returns.

That’s right, kids. The big harmless marshmallow man is coming home to lull you gently to sleep each night with his generic, non-offensive comedy. No more of this crap of having to choose between watching The Mentalist or Jay. Now you just have to leave your TV running after your late local news and you can mildly titter your way to sleep each and every night with Headlines, Jaywalking, and all of the other NBC focus group approved comedy bits of Jay Leno every Monday through Friday. Glee!

Now assuming you have had your head buried in a pile of sand in your backyard for the last 365 days and this is the first you’re hearing of any of this, you’re wondering to yourself how this can be possible. Where has Jay Leno gone to? Why is he coming back? Well, see, it’s like this. Slightly less than a year ago, moderate talent Jay Leno gave up the Tonight Show after 17 mostly mediocre years, because NBC nicely asked him if he would. Not wanting to rock the boat, Leno agreed to do this, because he’s America’s Nicest Man. As a reward, NBC decided they’d give him his own prime time show. Again, Leno agreed, because he is both nice and not terribly intelligent. Like most people you know!

In September of last year, The Jay Leno Show debuted at 9:00 Central Time each and every weekday night. It was a huge success! For exactly one day. After that, it was a terrible, horrific failure. In the meantime, Leno’s former Tonight Show was taken over by Conan O’Brien, a superior talent who had diligently worked as the host of Late Night following the Tonight Show for 16 years prior. This was also a big hit at the beginning, and less so afterwards. But this was in late night, where viewing habits are usually deeply ingrained in viewers and a certain amount of patience are required for a show to become a hit. For instance, it had taken horrific prime time failure Jay Leno a whole three years before his ratings had risen from godawful to better than David Letterman levels. So Conan O’Brien was plugging away determinedly, building his own audience from the ground up and gradually improving.

Meanwhile, mediocre comedian Jay Leno was in prime time, a segment of television which is a bit more demanding, where you either become a hit as quickly as you can or you find yourself unemployed. Jay Leno was doing the latter. In fact, Jay Leno was doing so terribly that he was almost single-handedly sinking an entire network. Local news programs saw their ratings sink nearly as much as half of their previous levels, thanks to the atrocious lead-in of prime time bomb The Jay Leno Show. Affiliates were fuming, and threatening to revolt if NBC did not act immediately to remove prime time cancer Jay Leno from the schedule immediately. NBC executives heard their cry, and they knew they would have to act in a way that would satiate the network affiliates while also ensuring the long-term health of both their prime time and late night lineups.

After much deliberations, they came upon the ideal solution: fire Jay Leno. And then they did the opposite.

Now in most work settings, if you were promoted to a new level within your work place that carried with it new responsibilities and higher expectations and you responded to it with complete and utter failure, you would expect to pay a price for your having failed at your duties. Not if you work at NBC and (this is the crucial part) your name is Jay Leno. If that’s the case, then you are to now be rewarded for having been a screwup. So it was that NBC decided they would move Not Ready For Prime Time Player Jay Leno back to 10:35pm Central Time, while bumping Conan O’Brien’s Tonight Show to 11:05pm and failed movie star Jimmy Fallon to 12:05pm. Conan O’Brien, being a Harvard educated man and smarter than your average bear, noticed that this was a dumbass idea and bolted, taking $45 million with him, because that is the price you pay when you are a network like NBC and you are so damn stupid. With Conan gone, NBC decided that the new host for the future of the Tonight Show would be 60-year-old Jay Leno, who now will likely host the Tonight Show until he drops dead at his desk, probably from that horrific tumor growing out of his face most people mistake for a chin.

So that’s where we are today, preparing for the arrival of the new Tonight Show with Jay Leno, which airs for the first time tonight. But before you have a panic attack at all the times I used the word “new” in that last sentence, settle down, Gertrude. Rest assured that despite this being a supposed “new” thing, there will be absolutely nothing new about the new Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Except that one-man laugh track Kevin Eubanks is leaving the program, probably after realizing that he’d be laughing at Jay Leno jokes from here to perpetuity, and settled on resignation of his position over jumping out of a building. But the chances are good that Leno will be able to find another guitar player somewhere willing to fake laugh for sixty minutes every night and everything will go back to exactly how it used to be – me watching Letterman every night.

Remember this day, people. Jay Leno is coming back today, after refusing to leave in the first place. This is a glorious day for the U.S. Finally, mediocre blandness triumphs over quality in pop culture, for once.

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