Conan: Becoming the host of the Tonight Show has fulfilled a long-time dream of mine. So kids, remember: You can accomplish anything you set your mind to…unless Jay Leno wants it too.
Gloves are off-- Conan’s naming names!
Saw that too. cool
What’s news to me is Jay saying he would walk too.
That would skyrocket his respect level to astronomical heights for me.
I feel really bad for Conan in this and he’s just gonna be left in the cold saying “What did I do wrong?”
Although this will give colleges and schools classroom fodder FOR EVER!
Boxes are fairly rare. The viewer log one fills out by mail is not so rare, I have done them several times.
NBC messed up. Look, it is clear by this thread there are Leno fans and Conan fans, but rarely are they the same people. You generally like one or the other. All the Jay fans I know despise Conan (and vice-versa) so there was no way Conan could take Jays place- even if Conan was a better host that Jay, even if he had a large fan base. It just plain is not that SAME fan base.
That’s a good point. Conan clearly scores well with the young audience but of course that is not the traditional audience of the Tonight show. Many viewers of that show just did not take to Conan, he lost about half the audience during his tenure of the show. It’s all very well to say give it time but time is big, big money in network TV and the affiliates would not have put up with the situation much longer.
NBC now have the worst of both worlds, Leno and Conan are damaged goods. The only real option is to cut Conan loose, give Leno back the Tonight show and hope that he can get his audience back again.
Looks like the only way to solve this is have them co-host The Tonight Show together. They could put a desk on each end of the guest’s seating area and take turns firing questions at the guests. Then they could combine Conan’s desk driving bit with Jay’s Man on the Street.
It seems to me like the best thing Leno and Conan could do is try to be gracious to each other, so they both come off looking like the good guys in this situation. If I were Conan, I’d try to get Leno to make an appearance on the Tonight show and do a quick bit. Something like at the start of the show, have Leno come out as if he were the host and about to do the monologue. Then while the crowd is doing the usual cheering Conan would come out looking confused, make a few jokes about the situation with him, and then shoo him off before continuing the show as normal. I dunno if there’s too much bad blood between them to pull it off, but something like that would go a long way toward making them both look like class acts.
It doesn’t seem to me that either Leno or Conan have done anything wrong.
Five years ago, in an effort to keep Conan happy and not lose a great 12:30 draw, NBC promised him the Tonight Show. This wasn’t something that made Leno happy, but they were hoping that as the five years drew out, ratings would start to make that decision look like a good one.
Fast-forward the five years… Leno’s numbers look even better than they did, and this move is looking not so bright after all. So NBC comes up with the idea of offering Jay what amounts to a 10:00 PM version of the Tonight Show. They recognize it won’t pull in the numbers that their dramas did, but they figure the loss of revenue will be nicely offset by the vastly smaller production and licensing costs – plus they keep Leno happy and keep Conan happy. What’s not to love?
What they didn’t predict was the local affiliates, who took the hit from the decreased 10:00 PM numbers in the form of lower lead-in numbers to the local news, and in turn passed on lower numbers to the Tonight Show.
Leno was a middleweight champ, but they put him into the light heavyweight division and he couldn’t compete there. Conan was a promising welterweight and they put him into the middleweight division and didn’t give him enough time to bulk up.
I haven’t heard anything that makes me believe Leno is demanding his old show back. So far as I can tell, the offer to him came from NBC, and his crime was to tentatively agree to it – and maybe not even that, if reports are true that he’s saying he’d leave NBC as well are true. And Conan is completely innocent – he’s done nothing wrong, and has had a bare seven months to try to tune his show to the 11:30 time-slot, when Jay had at least a couple of years to manage the same task.
But this may be a product of the times. Seinfeld was one of the most widely successful sitcoms ever, but it struggled its first season and a half. Would Seinfeld have been given a chance to establish itself in today’s TV market?
I’m an old fart, and it’s thus not too surprising that I tend to like Leno better than Conan. But Conan deserves a chance to build a successful 11:30 show. It’s too bad his contract doesn’t seem to have locked that chance in for him.
He’s never recovered for me from the time I heard Bill Hicks destroy him.
I guess I am in a very small minority, but I think all the late show hosts are good. I don’t see any that are way better than the others.
But like a lot of things, people have “their guy” so they need to say the “other guy” sucks. Sort of like Red Sox fans always saying “Yankees suck”
Except the Yankees do suck. :rolleyes:
Yankees may suck, but they are smart!
You realize don’t you that Bill Hicks was reprising an episode of the Simpsons where Krusty the Clown channels Lenny Bruce.
No, Krusty was (arguably) reprising Hicks. Bill Hicks died in 1994 and “Last Temptation of Krust” aired in 1998. I believe Hicks and Leno were friends at one point, but at the end of his life Hicks was bitter about his terminal cancer diagnosis and his lack of greater commercial success and he objected to Leno doing that Doritos ad while hosting the Tonight Show.
I usually hate it when people do this, so I won’t actualy say the word, but can you point me somewhere that shows where Leno said he’d walk? I’d like to see what the context was, etc.
Here’s the original source at PopEater.com. Other news sources have been running with this. Note this comes from an unnamed source and that there has been no official confirmation (so far) from Leno or his representatives.
Rather than starting a new thread, I’ve been wanting to ask: why do the late nite shows always start 5 minutes later than normal shows? I realize that the local news usually precedes The Tonight Show, for example, but why do the local shows need that extra 5 minutes?
Thanks,
Greg
Local stations asked for 5 more minutes to run a few more ads. As people have said, they make a lot of money on local news. One station here has 4 hours of local news from 5-9 AM.
Oooooh. Take that, commercial product representatives!!