Leno/O'Brien Donnybrook

January 16, 2010 7:47 PM

Please explain the current Leno/O'Brien Donnybrook to this non USAsian.

Preferably in bullet point form. Could you please try and include the meaning of the snide digs by Kimmel in this post [the 2nd video link].

http://tv.gawker.com/5448615/late-night-wars-jay-leno-turns-the-tables-and-bashes-conan-obrien-is-then-bashed-harder-by-jimmy-kimmel?wow

posted by uncanny hengeman to media & arts (40 answers total)

In 2004, Leno announced his retirement. Last year, O'Brien took over hosting duties (he was named as successor in 2004). Leno decided he didn't want to retire after all. NBC gave him a 10 pm show so he wouldn't go to another network and compete against O'Brien. Leno's show tanked, which hurt the local affiliates because people weren't watching the news, and also hurt O'Brien, since, if people weren't watching the news, they wouldn't be sticking around to watch his show. The two shows also competed for the same guests. O'Brien's ratings weren't great, but reasonable given the situation of being a new host. Leno lost to Letterman for his first three years as host. NBC decides they're going to move Leno to 11:30, pushing back the Tonight Show to midnight. O'Brien declined (you can look up his official statement for reasons why). Leno is now going to resume hosting the Tonight Show, and O'Brien is leaving the network. Kimmel's remarks were based on the fact that if Leno had just retired like he said he would, this wouldn't be happening.
posted by Ruki at 7:55 PM on January 16, 2010

Here is Leno in 2004 explaining why he's leaving the tonight show in 5 years and why he'd be a total douchebag if he didn't hand the show off to Conan.
posted by foodgeek at 8:04 PM on January 16, 2010 [5 favorites]

First, it's American, not USAsian.

Second, Ruki has it mostly correct, but I would quibble with the first point that Jay Leno retired. In 2004, I believe that Jay Leno had his contract extended until 2009 and Conan O'Brien was named as his successor. I don't think Leno effectively retired. Foodgeek's clip backs this up. NBC wanted to keep Conan, the assumed successor, from bolting and gave him the nod and a contract that would pay him if he was not named The Tonight Show host.
posted by Frank Grimes at 8:09 PM on January 16, 2010 [4 favorites]

For decades, Johnny Carson hosted the Tonight Show on NBC (11:30 Eastern, 10:30 Central Time), and was a cultural icon in the U.S.

Starting in the 1980s, David Letterman succeeded with a show on NBC that aired after Carson's Tonight Show.

In 1992, Carson retired after 30 years. Letterman expected to get the job. He didn't, Jay Leno did. Leno had been a frequent replacement host when Carson was sick, on vacation, etc.

Letterman left for CBS and started a successful show there (still on the air). Previously, CBS hadn't had a popular late nite show at all, had never competed in that time slot.

With Letterman gone from the late night slot, Conan O'Brien was picked as a replacement. O'Brien started off rough in the first year or two, but found his stride and built a very successful show in the previous Letterman slot.

In 2005, it was announced that Leno would leave the Tonight Show four years later in 2009. O'Brien would move up to be his replacement.

Leno was then offered a show at 10:00 Eastern/9 Central. This had never been done before in U.S. major network TV, to have a talk show during "prime time" Monday thru Friday.

Leno's show flopped. Now local TV stations are losing ad money because nobody's watching the 11/10 o'clock local news after Leno, because nobody's watching Leno.

NBC's response has been to try to "roll back the clock" and put Leno back at 11:35/10:35 again (local news grew 5 minutes at some point back when...)

This either means that O'Brien is out in the cold, or might have been pushed back to an "after Leno" slot. Final resolution is not in yet.

If you're a Conan O'Brien fan, it seems unfair that a failing Leno should get preferential treatment from NBC over O'Brien. O'Brien gets the cream spot at night, only to have it unfairly yanked from him 7 months later. If you're a Leno fan, obviously you feel differently.

O'Brien has been talking about the controversy very openly and snarkily on his show; Leno as well. Letterman, who lost the same job to Leno in the 90s, can sit back and laugh from a distance.
posted by gimonca at 8:16 PM on January 16, 2010 [7 favorites]

I've only recently tried to become interested due to the insane amount of internet noise regarding this. With all due respect - I'm honestly not having a dig - the first few answers perfectly illustrate my problem. There's just too much implied knowledge.

Leno retired from what show?

Does[did] Conan's show come on after Leno's new show?

Conan "declined" to host at that time so he quit, or was sacked?

But I think I can work it out. It's all signed, sealed, and delivered. The internet discussions made me think it was still up in the air. foodgeek's post answers my Kimmel question.
posted by uncanny hengeman at 8:24 PM on January 16, 2010

Thanks, gimonca.

I was drafting my previous comment in Word before I read your reply.
posted by uncanny hengeman at 8:27 PM on January 16, 2010

NBC and Leno created essentially the same show as Leno had before and put it at 10:00.

Conan was given the opportunity to move with The Tonight Show to 12:05 with Leno hosting a half hour at 11:35 and the 10:00 show disappearing. Conan declined.
posted by Frank Grimes at 8:30 PM on January 16, 2010

Gimonica has it. A few points that might add to a nuanced take though: the Leno/Letterman history is important here. Carson himself saw Letterman as his heir with the Tonight Show, and there was some indication that the way things went down contributed to Carson's somewhat abrupt departure. My sense is that part of the reason NBC wanted Leno over Letterman is that Leno was perceived as more benign. Letterman is (was?) a lot more acerbic and unpredictable. This dynamic is exactly echoed in Leno/O'Brien. Leno is safe and boring. O'Brien is, or at least can be, pretty edgy.

The 10:00 PM Leno show 5 days a week was a HUGE gamble. 'Prime time' is from 8 - 11 PM, and gets by far the biggest ad dollars, and historically the 10 o'clock hour is when more adult, edgy, dramas are shown. NBC did great with this over the years - Hill Street Blues, Law and Order, ER, etc, and for them to bow completely out of this for FIVE HOURS A WEEK of the safest man in show business was insane. In sane. I don't know anyone who thought it was a good idea.

Also, the name 'The Tonight Show' is interesting here. If they move Leno to 11:35 and Conan to 12:35, which is the Tonight Show? Conan has (had?) the rights to the name, but if it isn't on until tomorrow, and Leno is on after the news with a Tonight style show, come on, it's the Tonight Show. AND that would push everybody back, so the last guy (Carson Daly, I think) wouldn't even START until 2:00.
posted by dirtdirt at 8:34 PM on January 16, 2010 [5 favorites]

One factoid that may be missing is the fact that Leno's Tonight Show was a ratings winner, almost always beating the competition (Letterman). So as he "retired" and/or was pushed out (to the 10pm slot) NBC was giving up a winner, and ended up with two losers: Leno's new show was a ratings loser, and so was Conan's show.

There is also a huge cultural element here. Letterman and Conan are perceived as funny and hip, new, sly, snarky, etc. Their audiences tend to be the younger, hipper people. Leno's show is perceived as funny but old-fashioned, middle-america, pandering to the middle-aged, etc. His audience tends not to be the hip people.
posted by BlahLaLa at 8:35 PM on January 16, 2010

another aspect of the american television landscape that informs a lot of this is the ownership structure of the networks and local stations. the networks themselves own stations that cover less than 39% of the television viewers in the country (these are called owned and operated stations), with the rest of the stations in their network being independently owned network affiliates.

most of the commercial during a network program are sold by the network. a few during each program can be sold by the affiliates. the advertising during the local news program (which in most markets comes between jay's old show and the tonight show) is sold entirely by the affiliate.

so when jay's show did poorly, it did a lot of damage to the local newscasts, which are a large source of revenue for affiliates. it was the affiliates threatening revolt that precipitated this drama. if you go back to the leno/letterman tonight show succession fiasco, it is said that one of the reasons that leno got the gig was that he relentlessly worked on relationships with the affiliates, whereas letterman did not. bill carter's book the late shift covered this well. don't be surprised to see a sequel in a year or two.

this article in the wall street journal also covers the complicated relationship that some comedy aficionados have with jay leno.
posted by jimw at 8:48 PM on January 16, 2010 [3 favorites]

In 2005, it was announced that Leno would leave the Tonight Show four years later in 2009. O'Brien would move up to be his replacement.

At the risk of info overload, the reason for this announcement is also important. Conan's contract with NBC was up (for his Late Night show, which followed Tonight), and NBC was concerned that the popular Conan would switch to another network and compete head to head with Leno. To prevent that, they asked him to stay with the Late Night show for 5 more years, at which time he could host Tonight. Leno, at the time, supported this plan and agreed to it.

Conan's people blame the current low rating at least partly on the fact the Leno's show earlier in the night has so few viewers. That means less viewers for the local news, and then less for Conan's Tonight show.

A few key passages from Conan's official statement (bolding is mine: references to "prime time schedule" are at least partly about Leno's poor ratings on his new 10:00 show)

People of Earth:
...
Six years ago, I signed a contract with NBC to take over the Tonight Show in June of 2009. ... I worked long and hard to get that opportunity, passed up far more lucrative offers, and since 2004 I have spent literally hundreds of hours thinking of ways to extend the franchise long into the future. It was my mistaken belief that, like my predecessor, I would have the benefit of some time and, just as important, some degree of ratings support from the prime-time schedule. Building a lasting audience at 11:30 is impossible without both.

But sadly, we were never given that chance. After only seven months, with my Tonight Show in its infancy, NBC has decided to react to their terrible difficulties in prime-time by making a change in their long-established late night schedule.
...

Some people will make the argument that with DVRs and the Internet a time slot doesn’t matter. But with the Tonight Show, I believe nothing could matter more.
...
Have a great day and, for the record, I am truly sorry about my hair; it’s always been that way.

posted by The Deej at 8:51 PM on January 16, 2010

His audience tends not to be the hip people.

This is fairly well-reflected if you look at the men themselves. Conan O'Brien is Irish-Catholic¹, a smart-ass former writer for The Simpsons during what many fans feel to be the series' peak. While at Harvard, he was a writer and later President of the comedy club/publication called the Harvard Lampoon. This was not to be confused with the much-more-serious Harvard publication just down the road: the real-news journalism Harvard Crimson. Guess who the editor was when Conan was at the Lampoon? None other than Jeff Zucker, later writer for the amazingly pedestrian, amazingly popular-in-middle-America Today Show. Jeff Zucker who later went on to become the President of NBC, and later still caused all this shit-storm.

A table to make things easier:

Jeff Zucker        Conan O'Brien
Harvard Crimson    Harvard Lampoon
Today Show         The Simpsons
Serious, but       Irresponsible/lazy,
  boring             but funny
Alcohol            Marijuana
Middle America     New England
Protestants        Catholics
Andrew Clark       John Bender2
Richard Nixon      John F. Kennedy

Anyway, it's a little more complicated than this, but hopefully this is enough to get you started.

¹Middle-America is highly suspicious of smart, young Irish Catholics—just look how close the Kennedy/Nixon race was in '60.

²This is only going to make sense to you if you've seen this movie.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 9:50 PM on January 16, 2010 [11 favorites]

In addition, the gamble of putting Jay Leno's new show at 10PM ET is also notable. As mentioned before, this time slot was saved for the one-hour procedural dramas such as Law and Order and ER. Competition on other networks include The Mentalist and CSI: Miami.

The creative community was not happy about this move. This was exemplified by NBC's cancellation of Southland, a more adult LA police drama that would probably air at 10PM due to its content. The executive produced stated this when the show was canceled two weeks before the second season was set to air:

"So I wish NBC and Jay Leno well, personally. He's a very nice guy. But I hope he falls flat on his face and we get five dramas back."

Southland was quickly picked up by a cable network, TNT.

Part of this is also watching a train wreck. Industry news gets a lot of coverage in the national media, with TV viewership numbers frequently making news. NBC, a former giant and the first broadcast network in the United States, is currently in freefall. Here's the current ratings going back to the start of the Fall 2009 season. Notice NBC has zero non-sports programs in the top 20 shows. NBC also announced that they will lose money by showing the Winter Olympics.

A note: in American (sorry) television lingo, "season" refers to a single run of episodes of a show, usually 22 episodes for network shows. The UK tends to use the word "series" in this case, not sure what Australia uses.
posted by ALongDecember at 10:20 PM on January 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

Civil_Disobedient: "While at Harvard, he was a writer and later President of the comedy club/publication called the Harvard Lampoon. This was not to be confused with the much-more-serious Harvard publication just down the road: the real-news journalism Harvard Crimson. Guess who the editor was when Conan was at the Lampoon? None other than Jeff Zucker, later writer for the amazingly pedestrian, amazingly popular-in-middle-America Today Show. Jeff Zucker who later went on to become the President of NBC, and later still caused all this shit-storm."

Even more interesting: when they were at Harvard, Jeff Zucker had Conan arrested for a prank he pulled. From a Nikke Finke article:

The Harvard Crimson described the incident this way in a 2004 article about Conan landing The Tonight Show courtesy of Zucker: "O’Brien cut his teeth in comedy as president of The Harvard Lampoon, a semi-secret Sorrento Square social organization that used to occasionally publish a so-called humor magazine. In fact, O’Brien first met Zucker, his current boss, one day when O’Brien and the Lampoon editors stole all the copies of that morning’s Crimson. Zucker, then Crimson President, called the police and met O’Brien face to face while he was being arrested."

In 2001, Conan told The New Yorker this about the incident: "College pranks are supposed to be clever, but our rivalry with the Crimson had degenerated into us stealing something, Jeff calling the police, and the police making us haul it back," said O'Brien. (Other Lampoon pranks on Zucker included "a fake phone-sex ad with Zucker’s dorm-room phone number. Zucker did not find any of this particularly hilarious.")
posted by sharkfu at 10:29 PM on January 16, 2010 [6 favorites]

I just want to highlight gimonca and jimw's points about the affiliate/network structure, because that's probably the bit that's most alien to those outside the US.

(Aussies have a slightly easier time, because there are more obvious parallels, especially in regional broadcasting.)

The late local news -- usually at 11pm Eastern, with FOX as the exception -- represents 30-40 per cent of affiliates' ad revenue: they're selling around half of that time to their big local advertisers. There's a degree of stickiness -- since most local markets have all three 11pm affiliates operating out of the same area, your choice of late local news is generally determined by which 10pm show you watched, as opposed to the inherent qualities of the broadcaster. (They all generally suck in equal amounts.) However, the competition between local affiliates -- and by extension, what they can charge those big advertisers -- is premised on the popularity of the news, and the pretense that having the most eyeballs means you're doing something better than your rivals.

NBC's gamble with Leno at 10pm was that lower audiences and lower ad rates would be offset by the lower budget. What they didn't gamble on was the affiliates feeling the pain immediately -- when the competition gets to post up "most watched" promos and billboards, it hurts -- and then making it clear to the network that, if a change wasn't made, they'd be prepared to "pre-empt" Leno and either replace it with other programming, or move their news to 10pm and compete against FOX affiliates.

Absent that veto, NBC could have conceivably stuck with the original plan; Letterman was winning the late-night battle, but that has ebbed and flowed -- his extramarital dalliances and scrap with Sarah Palin pulled in a floating audience that's now watching Conan kick NBC in the balls until he walks away with his $40 million payoff.

Anyway, the planned transition was meant to avoid a repeat of the Carson/Letterman/Leno mess. Guess that didn't work out.
posted by holgate at 10:46 PM on January 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

Just letting you know I'm still reading. Probably won't "best answer" any more, but I still appreciate the titbits.

Not sure if Australia has many[any?] affiliates, so I had never appreciated that variable with regards to the Leno/O'Brien thing. I think Channel 9 Perth is[was?] the only big city exception.
posted by uncanny hengeman at 11:06 PM on January 16, 2010

Civil_disobedient and the others really nail the cultural/demographic issues at play here as well. Very broadly speaking, Conan (like Letterman) is viewed as the guy of younger, liberal/progressive urban coastal types who love the obscure smartass references on the Simpsons that Conan probably wrote in the first place. Leno is viewed as the guy of older, moderate/conservative suburban middle-America folks who are more invested in American Idol.
posted by scody at 12:19 AM on January 17, 2010

There have been rumors that Conan will start a late night show with Fox. However, there are several sticky points. One, Fox has taken the position that they are interested in talking but they also didn't want to make the situation worse by making it seem like they were trying to lure Conan away during the negotiation process, so it's very likely that any Fox negotiations wouldn't start until after the ink has dried on his separation deal with NBC. Two, Fox has never programmed the late night slot, so they would have to campaign all the affiliates to give up their local use of that slot and turn it over to the network, which is a pretty massive undertaking. Three, the NBC payout will almost certainly require him to be off the air for some amount of time. One of the reports out there says that a proposed version of the deal was that he gets $30 million on a sliding scale -- the sooner he returns to TV the less of the $30 million he gets. So from a financial and contractual side, there could be great delays in any potential Fox deal. And four, NBC is also claiming to own the rights to the numerous characters/routines/bits that Conan has written over the years, which means that any show he were to launch on a competing network would have to start from fresh. (And it's not that I don't think he and a writing team would not be able to come up with new bits, it's just that being able to reference a large established base of bits really would be a significant advantage.)
posted by Rhomboid at 2:04 AM on January 17, 2010

Lets not forget that Leno (and his representatives) basically orchestrated the Tonight Show coup. Leno plays like he is all agreeable, and then behind closed doors, he pulls out the big guns.

Also, lets not forget that Leno was not the ratings winner until he got the Hugh Grant interview after he was caught picking up hookers. Inertia is a powerful thing in TV, especially late night tv. People decided that Leno was relevant and Letterman was a smartass, and that was that. Letterman consistently puts on better shows and wins all the awards.

I think Conan is playing it exactly right, and Leno is really showing his true colors. Wouldn't be surprised in the least if he was doing mediocre shows on purpose.

Lets not forget either that Leno IS a funny guy. His standup back in the day was top notch. So he knows how to dial it back.
posted by gjc at 3:32 AM on January 17, 2010

For those interested, The London Times recently attempted to explain the whole fiasco to UK readers.

I'm an American who has lived in the UK for six years and even I had a difficult time making sense of what was going on. It took me asking about it as a status update on Facebook and getting my American friends try to explain it all to me. What a clusterfuck.
posted by triggerfinger at 4:10 AM on January 17, 2010

If it makes you feel any better, uncanny hengeman, I'm American and this whole thing was about as clear as physics equations to me. Even after reading the rather thorough responses here, I still feel like I'm missing some sort of key cultural context or relevance.
posted by threeants at 6:20 AM on January 17, 2010

Thank for this question, I'm an American and didn't understand most of this either. I used to watch Letterman in the '80s but other than that haven't really watched any of the three hosts in question more than once or twice.

From the explanations, it does seem like NBC is eating their seed corn here. What are they going to after Leno really does retire and they don't have a replacement?
posted by octothorpe at 6:46 AM on January 17, 2010

I also recommend Bill Carter's book "The Late Shift" mentioned above. I don't normally care for books about celebrities or tv shows, but this one was fascinating. Probably because I watched Carson as a kid and Letterman through high school.

I emailed him via the NY Times website and he said he's definitely doing another book.

I'm surprised at how quick they've been to dump O'Brien. When Leno and Letterman first went up against each other Letterman consistently beat Leno for the first 2-3 years. Here they're dumping O'Brien after seven months.
posted by beowulf573 at 6:50 AM on January 17, 2010

[Folks, put the American/USian debate to bed. This is not the place for it.]
posted by cortex at 7:07 AM on January 17, 2010

Watching Leno's 10:00 show was the equivalent to getting a lobotomy. It was a horrible, horrible, unfunny piece of crap.

Leno deserves all of the shit he is getting. Conan is basically being screwed over by Leno and NBC, not unlike how Letterman was screwed over in the 1990s.

Leno needs to retire and go away.
posted by camworld at 7:35 AM on January 17, 2010

There have been rumors that Conan will start a late night show with Fox. However, there are several sticky points.

The single biggest "sticky" point is that FOX is evil. Pure, unadulterated evil. And Conan knows it. However bad it was working for NBC, working for FOX will be that much more soul-rotting. But FOX has no player in the late-night talk show race, so he could go there without stepping on any toes, go head-to-head with Leno, and make an imperial assload of money.

But he won't go with FOX. Nope. The smart money says Conan goes to Comedy Central.

Some historical context...

The old guard (terrestrial broadcast media) is fading. Almost 90% of American viewers get their television from cable these days. The past decade has seen revolutionary changes in the way people get their media... as dramatic as the 1940->50 were for radio->television. And right now, Comedy Central is pretty-much the political polar opposite of FOX (thanks to Jon Stewart). This could be the perfect chance for cable to finally steal the Nielsen thunder from the networks. The Daily Show, followed by the Colbert Report, followed by The Night Show with Conan O'Brien.

Think about it: You know Comedy Central would let him do anything he wanted. And Conan's best comedy is when he's comfortable. His stint with the Tonight Show has been anything but. He'd be back on familiar soil (NYC) surrounded by friends... he might not make as much as he would at FOX, but then again, who's to say that CC doesn't completely steal the late-night left-wing crowd with this trifecta.

It would be better for Conan, better for his staff, better for late-night television, hell, better for America!
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 7:44 AM on January 17, 2010 [11 favorites]

Even discounting the jump to cable, tho, moving back to midnight would be seen as a demotion, right? CC isn't going to kill their golden goose Stewart/Colbert combo for Conan, and Conan is too big now to play second banana to those two. What about ABC? Did they ever kill Nightline? What do they show at 11:35 (don't watch TV and too lazy to look it up)...
posted by rikschell at 8:22 AM on January 17, 2010

Having only seen a few clips of Leno's new show (it's not broadcast in Europe, though Conan's Tonight Snow is), I have to ask, am I the only one who thinks he stole a few things from Top Gear (on which he's been a guest more than once)?

I mean, the interview style with the right-angled chairs, the celebrity driving challenge -- that's all Clarkson & Co, innit?
posted by macdara at 9:18 AM on January 17, 2010

Not sure if Australia has many[any?] affiliates

Southern Cross, Prime and WIN have a variety of affiliate relationships with Seven, Nine and Ten-- primarily outside the cities, and in Perth (as you mentioned) and also Adelaide. Unlike US affiliates, though, they tend to take daytime programming directly from the networks.

I'm surprised at how quick they've been to dump O'Brien. When Leno and Letterman first went up against each other Letterman consistently beat Leno for the first 2-3 years. Here they're dumping O'Brien after seven months.

In 1993-4, both CBS and NBC had a decent lineup of 10pm shows to keep the affiliates happy. The prime mover here was that the 10pm Leno experiment failed the affiliates at 11pm, and something had to be done with Leno.

The Letterman-O'Brien matchup only becomes relevant as a knock-on, and the interesting question is why NBC apparently never considered paying off Leno's contract, perhaps with a non-compete clause to give O'Brien time to establish himself at 11:35pm. Instead, the immediate response from Jeff Gaspin was to roll back as much as possible, shoehorn Leno into the late night lineup, and we know the rest.

The old guard (terrestrial broadcast media) is fading. Almost 90% of American viewers get their television from cable these days.

This is true, but the networks still have the money and eyeballs to demand the ad revenue. The highest rated non-sporting cable shows (and I'll count wrestling as sport here) are repeats of NCIS, children's shows and The O'Reilly Factor. A failing network drama like Dollhouse still pulls in more viewers than an acclaimed cable drama like Mad Men, and until it becomes clear that other revenue streams than commercials (foreign sales, DVDs, downloads and streams) can balance the books,
posted by holgate at 9:42 AM on January 17, 2010

[finishing sentence] ...network programming and budgeting is still going to matter.
posted by holgate at 9:43 AM on January 17, 2010

I work at a television show that was a direct competitor of Jay Leno these last few months, and I just wanted to underline how seriously Leno's move to ten o'clock was taken by the creative community. A very important part of understanding why NBC moved Leno to ten is that an average original episode of network television costs around three/four million dollars to create (and that's above and beyond the millions it takes to develop a show, not to mention the millions spent on shows that don't make it past their original order of episodes or that the networks don't even air). An hour of Jay Leno yammering at Kevin Eubanks is much cheaper, and therefore much more attractive to NBC.

People above have explained the flaw in this logic (the affiliates getting screwed). What's interesting about this is that everyone in Hollywood, with the exception of NBC, said that this would happen. I'm not sure I can think of a move that was so accurately predicted as a disaster by so many people since the start of the war in Iraq.

When the writers at my show learned we were going head to head with Leno, one upper level writer described it as a "St. Crispin's Day" moment: if it had succeeded, even more writers, art departments, directors, actors and crews would have been put out of work as other networks followed suite. Everyone in Hollywood knows someone who isn't working, even in good times, so no one wants times to get any worse. Look at it this way: NBC is now going to have to add five more hours of programming to its line-up. With each show getting 22 episodes and with each episode costing 4 million, that's around four hundred million dollars getting put back into the industry (of course those numbers are extremely rough).

I'm very proud to have kicked Jay Leno's ass.
posted by Bookhouse at 10:09 AM on January 17, 2010 [10 favorites]

A failing network drama like Dollhouse still pulls in more viewers than an acclaimed cable drama like Mad Men

This is true. One of the nails in Leno's coffin was that he was getting beat up by Sons of Anarchy on FX (a cable channel).
posted by Bookhouse at 10:11 AM on January 17, 2010

Inevitably, Hitler weighs in.
posted by scody at 3:07 PM on January 17, 2010

I have to ask, am I the only one who thinks he stole a few things from Top Gear

That's no accident. Jay Leno wrote in 2008 in the Times of London about how he was asked to host a US Top Gear but didn't want to ruin it.

"I would prefer to do a different show rather than try to copy something that works so well already."
posted by ALongDecember at 5:36 PM on January 17, 2010 [1 favorite]

Mark Evanier's take on Leno/O'Brien is the best I've seen yet, for whatever that's worth.
posted by Lazlo at 8:07 PM on January 17, 2010 [2 favorites]

Very broadly speaking, Conan (like Letterman) is viewed as the guy of younger, liberal/progressive urban coastal types who love the obscure smartass references on the Simpsons that Conan probably wrote in the first place. Leno is viewed as the guy of older, moderate/conservative suburban middle-America folks who are more invested in American Idol.

It's also important to note how closely this demographic aligns with the average internet user, who would not have watched Leno at any point in the entire successful Tonight Show, and wanted Conan to replace him from day one. So since your exposure to US culture is entirely through the internet, you are getting a bit of a one-sided perspective. It's kind of like "How can CSI or 2.5 Men be the most popular shows on TV????", which also tends to surprise people from outside the USA.
posted by smackfu at 6:54 AM on January 18, 2010 [1 favorite]

If there were ever a perfect setup for O'Brien, it would be Comedy Central, which already has a powerhouse double bill of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Conan would be a great fit following their shows, inheriting a small (by network standards) but intensely loyal audience of viewers primed for his droll, irony-filled comedy routines.

The LA Times seems to agree with Civil_Disobedient.
posted by GregorWill at 2:54 PM on January 18, 2010 [1 favorite]

The Hollywood Reporter: Eight ways NBC has damaged itself
posted by sharkfu at 12:50 AM on January 19, 2010

Also: the story retold retold through the magic of animation by NMA News (a Taiwanese Hong Kong-based news organization) (via boingboing)
posted by lioness at 6:32 PM on January 22, 2010

If anyone's still following this, here are some numbers, some hard numbers and some estimates, on just how much the Leno experiment cost NBC affiliates:

Analyst: Leno cost KARE $39,000 per week

(KARE = channel 11, the NBC affiliate in Minneapolis/St. Paul)
posted by gimonca at 2:44 PM on January 27, 2010