O'Brien out, Leno back in?
- Thread starter Professor Zoom
- Start date
Probably due to his buyout agreement stating that he can't appear on television until mid-April.
I'm used to them ignoring me, too.
I think you meant mid-September as that's what I heard reported.
As long as Conan was invited, that's what counts, and pushes Letterman up another notch or two in my respect.
Alex
He can't appear for 90 days. He can't host for about 6 months.
Some interesting news, it appears that Conan's contract did cover a specific time slot after all.
http://hollywoodinsider.ew.com/2010/02/10/conan-timeslot-restrictions/
http://hollywoodinsider.ew.com/2010/02/10/conan-timeslot-restrictions/
Sounds like somebody at NBC should be fired for giving Jeff Zucker bad legal advice...
So NBC was always hedging its bets by changing that Conan would host "the show after primetime" to The Tonight Show. Wow.
In other news, it appears that all references to Conan have been removed from NBC, the NBC offices, Hulu, and NBC is on the warpath to get any and all Conan O'Brien clips removed from youtube.
^Stalin would be proud.
Hence the 45,000,000 dollar buy out. If Conan was the one in breach of contract then there wouldn't have been any money.
Word is that conan is selling his NYC penthouse, quietly shopping it for a nice $35 mil, which is a $25 mil profit. Some of the pages reporting it are questioning if he needs the money to keep paying his staff, the ones who weren't covered by the NBC deal, until he finds a new "show home."
This just keeps getting better and better. I hope between Letterman and Conan (assuming he gets a gig), they destroy Leno and NBC in the ratings.
Which would elevate him to saint.
Strange actions for a network that kept him on in reruns for a few weeks after his final show. Those reruns the last couple weeks have been really weird. It's like the walking dead of television. Plus, some of them have been really early episodes, where we see Conan as a naive young pup blissfully unaware of the cancellation that would befall him in a few months.
^ Well, they had to fill that hour of programming with something. What were they going to do? Drag out reruns of Leno's Tonight Show from last spring? But the web site and other promotional tie-ins they could trash quickly and easily without leaving a hole to fill. Maybe what they should have done would be to put classic episode of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson on. I bet that would have drawn some ratings. 
