What I read in that graph is that Leno consistently score a tenth of a ratings point below Conan. I’m no expert but I think to TV executives that’s a significant amount.
In prime time, it would be a bigger issue, but the networks are locked in to who is hosting late night and none of them will be fired over this. NBC certainly would not take another risk.
I’m a Letterman man and don’t have a major stake in the issue. Dave is not as good as he was in the Eighties, but none of us are. He’s reported to be retiring soon and likely isn’t going to make a major effort to improve ratings. Leno is likely to bow out three years later.
My belief is that Fallon will move to 11:30 because he likely has a contract that requires it. I don’t think Ferguson wants Dave’s job and he would likely move forward to midnight.
Many young people don’t have cable packages, or they only have basic. I have basic but I watch a lot of stuff on Hulu. I watched Late Night w/ Conan because back then I had Comedy Central, but I’d be a lot of Conan’s target audience (at this point) simply doesn’t have cable and really don’t watch other shows they can’t find on Hulu. If you started watching Conan in high school and progressed through college and have now graduated there’s an excellent chance that you don’t have get TBS now. The only non-Hulu exception I can think of is Mad Men, and people often have Mad Men parties (at the one person’s house who still gets cable) or wait until a season is over to get the DVD’s.
Agreed. As someone who started watching a few months into its inception, I’m disappointed at his overt political schtick and stopped watching about a year ago. I always liked his flat out comedy and his willingness to poke fun of both sides. Now he rarely goes after the Democrats. He no longer reads the books of his guests; he always used to ask them such pointed questions that there was no doubt he was actually reading them. Ah, well. 10 years is a long time.
I can’t imagine that NBC would have done that considering the mess Conan’s agreement got them in. Although I guess I can’t put it past the hapless NBC execs to make the same mistake twice.
It’s not that great of a comparison though. It includes Conan’s launch when ratings were high as well as the bump he got after being fired. Including those one-time ratings boosts implies the article is biased.
Excluding those, Conan is still ahead more often than not, but not by a lot. I’m not sure if the difference can be attributed to different years, additional late-night talk show competition, or regulars finding Nightline while the Tonight Show was down.
aceplace57’s link (which is a press-release and clearly biased) implies that Leno’s show is the #1 late-night talk show for most of this season.
Okay, I’ve finished the book now - you’re right, Conan didn’t have any time specificity in his contract. In all fairness, everyone was as astonished by that as I was.
It also seems that no one really knows if Jay was an asshole or not; he’s very closed-off to everybody, and the final consensus seems to be that either he’s just a guy who wants to tell jokes at 11:30 at night, or he’s some kind of Machiavellian genius.
I want to say the networks were the bad guys, but the networks were just doing what networks do. All in all, it was a very interesting read.
ETA: Oh yeah, Conan wasn’t fired - he chose to quit rather than move his show back by half an hour. An…interesting choice.
The stuff about him being an asshole is generally based on external observations, combined with the fact that a similar incident happened earlier. and we know his agent at that time was an asshole.
I think it’s more likely he’s just socially clueless.
