Really, it’s silly to look at this whole thing thinking that Jay is doing amazingly while Conan is doing crappy.
First off, Jay went from being the undisputed king of late night to now competing with Letterman on a week to week basis for second place against Nightline. Meanwhile Conan has settled to about a .6 rating, which is pretty decent for cable. Anyone who thought Conan would beat Leno in the ratings now is indeed a fool. Even if you moved Leno to cable his ratings would plummet.
The fact of the matter is all tv ratings are down these days because of all the other sources. And it’s going to affect shows with a younger crowd more.
Conan got what, around $20 mil when he got axed? And we were supposed to feel bad for him? TV shows are canceled all the time and people don’t get a dime when the show is over.
So nobody remembers Tina Fey on Leno and that’s proof he can’t draw big names? That’s pretty funny.
Last week he had Jamie Foxx, Kristen Bell, Diane Lane, Tyler Perry and John Travolta.
This week its Matt Damon, Robert Pattinson, and Bradley Cooper.
Early April it was Tracy Morgan, Emma Roberts, Gary Busey, David Arquette and Neve Campbell
I am not really invested in this either way but I read through the whole thread and would like the official answer to whether Tina Fey has been on Leno in the last year or what. Can we get a cite on this?
I’m not sure how official it is, but Tina Fey’s IMDB listing doesn’t list a Tonight Show With Jay Leno appearance since 2006. She did appear on The Jay Leno Show in 2009. Not official, but since Leno’s guest searcher is broken, it’s the best I’ve got.
She’s also not included in the Wikipedia episode guide for the show. Again, not definitive, but pretty much the best we can get.
I’m in the middle of reading this book - The War For Late Night: When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy, and it seems to be an in-depth look at what went on and what is going on with all the machinations that happened between Conan and Jay. One thing I’m learning (which is no surprise) is that a lot of what happened was caused by network execs.
Justin when I read those reviews on Amazon I don’t see that Leno or Conan are painted as bad in that book. Or did you read a different book?
Maybe Jay or his producers need to bow and scrape more for Tina Fey to show up, I’m sure they lie awake at night worried about why she is not on the show.
Conan is portrayed as a tad naive, but Jay actually pouts and cries about being “fired” and later made jokes on air that he planned to go to ABC at 11:30 after his contract ended. Maybe he’s not the exact asshole Conan’s fans painted him as, but he comes across as the “bad guy.”
Tina Fey is the star of one of NBC’s signature shows. I find it very telling that she’s appeared everywhere to promote her memoir except for Leno.
I tend to think that one person allegedly not liking Leno is not a big deal, but I guess that’s all the Conan fans have to hang their hat on.
BTW, Leno was fired from 2 shows, Tonight and the Leno show. That’s 1 more (100% more) than Conan right? And I don’t think he got $20 mil for being fired did he?
[spoiler]Leno was never fired from The Tonight Show.
And if NBC actually would have had to give him $60 million or so for cancelling The Jay Leno Show, but they worked out a deal where they fired Conan instead and gave Leno back the Tonight Show.
Did you read the book? Regardless of what the reviews said, I don’t think it painted Leno in a good light at all.[/spoiler]
Yeah, it was all about contracts and breaches of contracts and who got what if they did what (haven’t finished the book yet, but I can see that writing on the wall - Conan had a contract that would have paid him out massively if he didn’t get The Tonight Show in 2010 - all asses are firmly covered at all times).
Tina Fey lives and works in New York. Saturday Night Live is based in New York, as is Letterman, as is Jimmy Fallon. Do you also find it telling that she hasn’t appeared on Jimmy Kimmel since 2007? Or could it be that maybe she schedules her trips to the West Coast to do what she has to do and then goes back home?
That’s kind of surprising. A Vanity Fair article I read a couple of months ago portrays the opposite.
While Conan did come off as the good guy in that piece, he also seemed really pouty and pissy about the whole affair, going so far as to tell a network exec “What does Leno have on you guys?” And Jay, though he doesn’t come off smelling like a rose in the story, just seemed sort of oblivious about what was at stake. His biggest mistake, it seems, was taking NBC at their word that Conan was cool with whatever plans they had in mind, which of course turned out not to be the case at all.
Not saying that what you wrote didn’t happen, but it’s just quite different from other accounts I’ve read.
Conan had bad lawyers or agents or both because they never put anything in his contract about being on Tonight at 11:35. Guess they never thought about a time change.
You know, I think they must have - they came to Conan to get him to change the time of his show, he told them to go fuck themselves, and they paid him out $20 million to go away. They didn’t do that out of the goodness of their pitch-black network hearts.
[spoiler]That was part of the naivete (sp?) I was referring to. Conan assumes that the people at NBC would be fair with their dealings with him. When that proved to be fake, he didn’t take it well (i.e. “What does Jay Leno have on you people?”).
But Leno showed his true colors by flat out telling the executives that he’d do 11:30 somewhere if they didn’t let him do it at NBC (after The Jay Leno Show proved to be a disaster). Thus the half hour idea was born, which Leno was totally on board with and couldn’t comprehend why Conan would have a problem with it (even before the NBC guys told him it would be no problem).[/spoiler]
And I don’t think he got $20 mil for being fired did he?