EW talked to The Late Show executive producer Rob Burnett about David Letterman’s surprising decision to include Jay Leno in a promotional spot during the Super Bowl.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Why did you decide to do this?
ROB BURNETT: Well, the 10 seconds we did with Dave and Oprah for the Super Bowl in 2007 went pretty well and CBS came back and said we got 10 seconds again for this one. Nothing is more simultaneously exhilarating and fear-inducing than hearing you have 10 seconds in the Super Bowl. We were banging heads together. How do we come close to topping the last one? Then Dave got this idea. My first call was to Oprah – she got it right away – and then I called [CBS Corp. Chairman] Les Moonves to make sure he was OK with Jay being on CBS. I have to give Les credit … he got it immediately. And then I called [Leno's executive producer] Debbie Vickers … who said, ‘Dave and Jay, in the same room?’ She laughed for a good minute and said Jay would want to call. I hung up, and two minutes later it was Jay. He said ‘This is the way show business should be.’ Debbie then cleared it with NBC Entertainment Chairman Jeff Gaspin and NBC-Universal CEO Jeff Zucker.

How did you manage to pull it off without the press catching wind of it?
We began having logistical meetings that would make the CIA proud. We had to figure out a way to keep it a surprise. NBC arranged to have Jay fly on the NBC jet at 7:30 in morning on Feb. 2 and he was at the Teterboro Airport [in New Jersey] at 3:30 p.m. We snuck him through the front door on Broadway. Jay wore a disguise …a  hooded sweatshirt, dark sunglasses and a mustache. Fifteen minutes later, Oprah arrived … but not in a disguise. We shot it in the balcony of the Ed Sullivan Theater.

What was it like when Leno and Letterman first saw each other?
It was great, very professional, very cordial. We shot it in 25 minutes, and it went really, really well. It felt like one of those things where you wake up and say, “I had the strangest dream.”  There was no frostiness. We were focused on trying to execute the joke. It would have been a more taxing event had it been us all going out to dinner. If anything was awkward, it was how it wasn’t awkward. It’s interesting… there was a lot of internal conversation about whether this was a good thing to be doing from a PR standpoint. Are we rehabilitating Jay’s image? Dave has a simple edict: If it’s funny, we do it. When CBS says it needs 10 seconds, it’s incumbent upon you to do the funniest bit you can do. Then we learned we had another five seconds. That may not sound like a really big deal but let’s face it … that’s someone’s college education [given how much the typical per-second spot goes for during the Super Bowl], so we were really thrilled about that.

You and Dave must have realized you had the potential to upstage the Super Bowl.
Well, that’s not our problem! [He laughs]. I’ve been asked the question more than once about all these advertisers who spent millions of dollars on their ads. My response is: They had a year, millions of dollars,  and 30 seconds! We had one week, no money, and 15 seconds. The bottom line is, if you’re a comedian and you have the chance to do something funny in front of 100 million people, you should do it.

Watch Leno and Letterman declare a grumpy truce during the Super Bowl

More bad news for the ratings-challenged FlashForward: Variety reports that showrunner/co-creator David Goyer is leaving the ABC series to focus on his film career. Goyer, who often boasted of having outlined the high-concept drama for the next several seasons, will remain as an executive producer. It’s unclear who will replace Goyer, who was the second showrunner to serve on the series (after Mark Guggenheim) that stars Joseph Fiennes and John Cho.

The freshman show will likely have a tough time attracting new viewers when it returns with originals on March 18. Despite lots of early fanfare, FlashForward’s audience dropped from 12.5 million to 7.07 million in just three months. Not coincidentally, ABC has had an equally tough time launching its other high-concept show, V –  which lost 35% of its audience (14.3 million to 9.3 million) over just four airings last fall. It will return March 30.

The difficulty of programming such sci-fi dramas surely played a role in NBC’s decision to downgrade Day One – an apocalyptic drama from Heroes scribe Jesse Alexander — to a two-hour backdoor pilot that may (or may not) air sometime this season.

To promote Jay Leno’s appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show tomorrow, Harpo Productions released a short transcript from the interview that was taped yesterday on the set of the comedian’s cancelled primetime show. There’s nothing extraordinary about this particular exchange – Leno typically keeps his feelings to himself during most interviews — but apparently, he goes on to address his decision to return to The Tonight Show and the public reaction to the negotiations, which is obviously being reserved for tomorrow’s broadcast. Here’s an excerpt from the interview:

Winfrey Have you talked to Conan in person?
Leno I haven’t talked to him through all this.  No.  I haven’t.
Winfrey Did you want to pick up the phone?
Leno Yeah, but it didn’t seem appropriate.
Winfrey Why?
Leno I don’t know.  I think it — let things cool down and maybe we’ll talk, you know.
Winfrey Were any of the things that he said about you hurtful?
Leno No.  They were jokes.  And that’s okay. I mean –
Winfrey So jokes don’t hurt you.
Leno It’s what we do, you know?  You can’t — it’s like being a fighter and say when you got punched in the head, did it hurt?  Well, yeah.  But you’re a fighter.  That’s what you do.

NBC has quietly indicated that its doomed franchise, The Jay Leno Show, will go off the air on Feb. 9 – two days earlier than expected. The network released an updated programming schedule for February today that announced plans to air a repeat episode of Law & Order: SVU at 10 p.m. on Feb. 10, followed by two back-to-back repeat episodes of The Office on Feb. 11.  The network had originally said that Leno’s final day in primetime would be Feb. 11.

Ratings for The Jay Leno Show have remained largely consistent since NBC announced that he would return to 11:30 p.m. During the week of Jan. 18-22 – when just about every media outlet was focusing on the late night bruhaha at NBC – Leno averaged a 1.5 ratings among adults 18-49 and 4.8 million viewers, which was about equal to his season-to-date average. He attracted his biggest audience on Jan. 19, when an average 5.9 million tuned into hear him comment about the ongoing negotiations with Conan O’Brien.