Hulu Doesn’t Trust Me? Or They Just Don’t Want Me to See ‘The Jay Leno Show?’

A few weeks ago it was pointed out that if you do a Google search for The Tonight Show the first result is, in fact, the new smash hit* The Jay Leno Show. A dig at Conan?  A dirty attempt to point viewers to the floundering 10pm program?  Part of Leno’s contract?  Google Conspiracy?  We’ll probably never know.

However, I recently noticed a few results that pointed to opposite motives.  If you type “hulu” and “jay leno” into your Firefox toolbar, as I often do to find videos of Leno humiliating himself on his new show, you’ll instead be brought to The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien Hulu page.  Curious.  Even more, if you type Jay Leno into the Hulu search box the first show result is Leno’s Tonight Show, and his new venture is hidden beyond an adjacent tab.  Are they trying to keep us from seeing clips of the disastrous The Jay Leno Show, distracting us with his former, actually no more entertaining show?

Well, probably not, as NBC probably doesn’t care who watches the show or if it’s actually funny, just as long as its profitable.  And the truth is the top result is probably just related to search statistics, not to any conscious corrupt decisions.  But it’s fun to speculate that people have horrible intentions, right?  Right.

And how ’bout that David Letterman?  It wasn’t enough to just consistently beat The Tonight Show for the first time in years, he decided to up the ante by admitting to a sex scandal and then top a whole night of NBC programming.  Man, the dude is just killing it!

But it’s okay,  Conan has proven that while you can knock him down he’ll always get back up (just give him a weekend to recover).

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*insofar as a “smash hit” could be defined as a show that is devoid of any legitimate entertainment value but pulls in enough viewers to make it more profitable than a Law & Order spin-off.