unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’re aware that nbc is ousting conan o’brien from his ‘tonight show’ spot to give it up for their golden child, jay leno. they only gave him 3 months! 3 months to prove himself is frankly not a fair enough shot. but, nbc doesn’t care.

what they should care about is that they are in a bit of a pickle with conan’s contract. by trying to move the time of his show to after jay’s time slot, nbc is in breach of its agreement. which means, conan’s got a decision to make. according to tmz and their sources, he has three options:

1) get outta the biz & collect some checks… some BIG checks. if conan quits, nbc would have to pay him the value of his contract, up to $80 million bucks over the next 4 years.

2) check out the view from other networks’ late-night lineups. fox? abc? i’m sure they’ll all come a-callin’. but if conan were to make a deal with a competing show, nbc would still have to pay him! let’s say fox paid him $10 mil/year. nbc would then have to ante up the reamining $10 mil to equal his original nbc contract. sounds good to me, mr. o’brien!

3) orrrr, he could once again come second to jay leno and take the shortened 12:35-1:05am time slot.

so, what’ll it be, sir?