Leno not doing any better Conan did...
- Thread starter T'Baio
- Start date
I just saw this. This makes me very, very happy.
Why is this surprising? NBC panicked for no reason. If they had given Conan a chance longer than six months and axed Jay's problem everything would be normal. Lettermen would still be killing NBC anyways. It's unfortunate how things turned out. I'm happy Leno isn't doing any better than Conan too.
NBC thought they could go back to Leno winning over Letterman in the ratings. I guess that ain't happening. I'm glad. Leno's only good for a few more years anyway. Now they're stuck with... Jimmy Fallon.
Honestly, they shoulda just let Conan remain on "Late Night", where he was doing perfectly fine, and let Leno continue with "Tonight Show" since he obviously didn't want to give it up. Maybe wait until Leno actually wanted to retire and then give Conan the "Tonight Show".
Or... just let Leno retire and NOT give him his own primetime show, which was a really stupid idea. NBC botched their own late-night line-up.
Honestly, they shoulda just let Conan remain on "Late Night", where he was doing perfectly fine, and let Leno continue with "Tonight Show" since he obviously didn't want to give it up. Maybe wait until Leno actually wanted to retire and then give Conan the "Tonight Show".
Or... just let Leno retire and NOT give him his own primetime show, which was a really stupid idea. NBC botched their own late-night line-up.
Um... yeah. Wake me up when Letterman beats Leno in the 18-49 demo or in total viewers.
Leno is still doing better than the current competition, and that's pretty much all that matters. NBC doesn't give a rat's ass how he's doing compared to a late night show called "The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien" that's already been canceled. That would be like canceling The Office because its ratings suck compared to what Friends was getting in the same timeslot five years ago.
Leno is still doing better than the current competition, and that's pretty much all that matters. NBC doesn't give a rat's ass how he's doing compared to a late night show called "The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien" that's already been canceled. That would be like canceling The Office because its ratings suck compared to what Friends was getting in the same timeslot five years ago.
Ummm... The point is that Conan was fired because he was getting poor ratings. That Leno's ratings aren't doing any better than Conan's were doing suggests that Conan wasn't the problem and they made the wrong decsion to axe Conan. Oh, and BTW, they used the same "metric" to axe Conan as his lone ratings weren't better than what Leno was getting.
He's doing better than what Conan was doing before Conan announced he was leaving and his ratings went way up. However, like I said so much of Conan's poor ratings were due to Jay Leno at 10PM bleeding viewers from NBC, thus bleeding viewers away from 11PM local news and subsequently leading to a very low lead-in audience for Conan's tonight show.
I don't believe that someone would watch Conan on the tonight show for 4 months and then say "ok, I don't like this guy." and then stop watching. I think that kind of reaction/decision comes very early on. Conan kept his base, what he lost was the casual late-night viewers who just leave on the local news and then slide into whatever comes on after the news.
He lost that because NBC lot that. Jay Leno @ 10PM lost the audience. I always said Jay Leno would do better with his second run on the Tonight Show then Conan was doing in the fall and winter because NBC now has an actual show at 10PM and the ratings are significantly higher right now for that show then Jay Leno was generating with his.
What NBC lost was that they should have just cut ties with Leno. Conan would have given him the same ratings as Leno (with likely a better 18-49 demo) with actual lead-in's at 10PM and Conan has more of a chance to generate growth in his audience going forward than Jay Leno does.
Leno is established people like him, hate him, or are indifferent to him. A lot of people experience Conan for the first time when he became host of the Tonight Show so he had a chance over time to add people to his audience. Two years from now I think we'd have seen Conan's Tonight Show as the leader over Letterman had NBC never gone with the Jay Leno @ 10PM experiment.
I don't believe that someone would watch Conan on the tonight show for 4 months and then say "ok, I don't like this guy." and then stop watching. I think that kind of reaction/decision comes very early on. Conan kept his base, what he lost was the casual late-night viewers who just leave on the local news and then slide into whatever comes on after the news.
He lost that because NBC lot that. Jay Leno @ 10PM lost the audience. I always said Jay Leno would do better with his second run on the Tonight Show then Conan was doing in the fall and winter because NBC now has an actual show at 10PM and the ratings are significantly higher right now for that show then Jay Leno was generating with his.
What NBC lost was that they should have just cut ties with Leno. Conan would have given him the same ratings as Leno (with likely a better 18-49 demo) with actual lead-in's at 10PM and Conan has more of a chance to generate growth in his audience going forward than Jay Leno does.
Leno is established people like him, hate him, or are indifferent to him. A lot of people experience Conan for the first time when he became host of the Tonight Show so he had a chance over time to add people to his audience. Two years from now I think we'd have seen Conan's Tonight Show as the leader over Letterman had NBC never gone with the Jay Leno @ 10PM experiment.
Well, yeah, using that metric at the time made sense because Leno was still with the network and could be brought back to his old timeslot. But now, Conan is gone, gone, gone, and whatever ratings he got are completely irrelevant. Ancient history. Leno is still doing better than whatever alternative NBC might have at this point, and that's all that matters.
And Conan was getting beat by Letterman repeats. When Letterman starts beating Leno on a regular basis then we can crow that NBC made the wrong decision. But there's no chance that's ever going to happen.
That was not an option. Conan said he was gonna leave if he wasn't promised the Tonight Show many years ago so they said alright June 2009 it's yours, and that's the only reason he didn't leave NBC several years beforehand.
Uh, please provide a source for that claim.
NBC promised Conan the Tonight Show because they were future-proofing. They remembered the problem with Letterman and how Letterman left and became a big competitor for Leno. They wanted to prevent Conan from becoming a competitor and they assumed that once Leno started pushing 60 that he would naturally retire, so they created an exit strategy, which is something they did not have with Carson (who announced plans to leave the show on numerous occasions dating back to the 1970s before finally following through in the early 1990s).
Problem was Leno either never wanted to retire or changed his mind. If you have an actual source that paints Conan as the instigator, please by all means offer it. Otherwise the official party line - everything I've heard from not only NBC but from Leno himself, and Leno put out some pretty cheap shots at Conan during the fiasco - was that it was NBC's idea.
Back to the original topic, I think this is vindication, as well as evidence that not everyone just automatically went back to the Tonight Show because Leno was there again. My only concern is that knowing the attention deficit disorder that NBC suffers from -- hence their "giving up" on Conan after only 7 months, as opposed to the several years Leno had to establish himself -- that they could simply use this as an excuse to cancel Tonight and replace it with something cheaper and potentially more audience-grabbing, like another reality show.
Alex
^ What WeAreTheBorgis saying is that O'Brien was being courted by other networks at the time and he was considering it as his contract was nearing expiration/renewal. NBC didn't want O'Brien to go and lured him back with the promise of the Tonight Show, something that O'Brien desired. That is when the exit strategy was conceived. At that time, all parties were peachy with the deal.
Leno is greedy and in no possible way is he funny. The only people I (personally) know that like Leno are old and they have no scene of humor or imagination. I can't wait for Conan to be back on the air in Sept.
I'd say it wasn't as simple as just quitting. Conan refused to participate in destroying the entire concept that the show was built on, since 1954, the last show of the night, The Tonight Show
You can't really be certain even Leno would've accepted a deal that essentially destroys the longest running tv show ever. What host would want that legacy? A whore maybe. NBC began scrambling to fix their 10PM ratings woes, & rather than just address that problem, they began to concoct horribly botched plans to redesign their lineup
Their obvious goal was to get Leno off 10PM, & were likely convinced that all would be wonderful if he was back at 11:35, & were even willing to destroy The Tonight Show, to see that happen. Utter classlessness, to which Leno's contribution could not have been absent. Conan made the classy choice, & may have single-handedly saved a 56 year old television legacy, by refusing to do business with unscrupulous people. Integrity & balls is what he's got
Fittingly, all they've done is try to return things to what they were, before this fiasco, & sort of did, but now NBC's & Leno's classlessness is apparent to everyone, & there will be a deserved loss of respect for them, throughout the public & throughout the industry. More importantly, they lost Conan, which is what they were afraid of, when they offered him the job, to begin with. I'd also add, that it's the same ruse they used to keep Letterman around, back in that time, because they were afraid of him becoming a competitor
This is the exact same kind of piss poor management, & shysterism that went down in '92
Nowhere Man
Commodore
All I can say is good.
Interesting article. Too bad it is complete bullshit. Leno's demographic always skewed older than Conan's and that older demographic has returned now that Leno is back. So actually Leno has been able to keep Conan's demographic and add back his own. Which is why Leno's overall ratings are much higher than Conan's were. Anybody who is trying to insinuate that bringing Leno back wasn't a ratings boost for the Tonight Show is lying.
It's mostly people who seethe with so much blind hatred for Jay Leno that it distorts their perception of reality.
I wouldn't watch Leno if you paid me, but I see no reason to twist my brain in knots trying to deny the facts, which are that Leno has easily beat Letterman every night since he came back.
Does anyone seriously think Letterman is going to start beating Leno regularly, the way Letterman was beating Conan regularly? If you really believe that, I have a bridge I'd like to sell you.
Leno's demographic skewing older is still problematic if you're NBC or some network TV executive who believes that only the 18-49 year old crowd matters for advertising revenue. Like it or not, good 18-49 ratings mean more to them than those for people in other age groups and Leno hasn't improved any in that area.
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