Pardon me if I fail to squeeze out a tear for Conan O’Brien.

It’s not just the fact that nearly everyone in the world has larger problems than whether to walk away from a job that pays more than $10 million a year because you feel your employer has treated you unfairly. Though that’s a perfectly sufficient reason.

It’s that, amid all the public vilification of Jay Leno and the NBC Universal chief executive Jeff Zucker, no one seems to want to trace this slap fight back to where it began: the 2004 deal in which Mr. Leno agreed to step aside as “Tonight Show” host in five years. That arrangement was a huge concession to Mr. O’Brien, negotiated by NBC out of fear that he would leave for another network. No one tied him down and forced him to sign it, even though it was nearly as wrongheaded, given its duration and the stakes involved, as NBC’s subsequent decision to move Mr. Leno to 10 p.m.

Today’s situation flows directly from that weak-kneed compromise of 2004, which created the Original Embarrassment: Mr. Leno’s status as lame duck. How did the nefarious, underhanded, egomaniacal Mr. Leno respond? By doing his job: he continued to put on the highest-rated late-night show on television throughout the intervening five years, making so much money for NBC that they felt they had to find some way to keep him around.

The demonizing of Mr. Leno and corresponding beatification of Mr. O’Brien seem to be based on some weird notion of noblesse oblige: that ceding the stage to Mr. O’Brien would be the proper thing to do. This ignores the obvious facts that (1) television is a business and (2) it’s NBC’s money. Mr. Leno, his predictably dismal prime-time ratings aside, is the reigning king of late night; NBC wouldn’t be at this pass if it didn’t think that he could immediately return to 11:35 and outperform Mr. O’Brien.

It seems obvious that what’s really at play here is a generation gap. A younger, more vocal, more online audience simply doesn’t like Mr. Leno’s show, which has gradually come to represent an entire pre-digital, Middle American culture that the Internet commentariat wishes would just get out of the way. Unfortunately for them, their parents are more likely to be watching television at 11:35 p.m. than they are.