How could he say No to it? If NBC said “Your contract is expiring in 2009, and we won’t be renewing it”, what could he do?
I don’t think this is being ignored. It gets mentioned all the time.
Ebersol’s rebuttal was that Leno had worse lead-in ratings for The Tonight Show and he still turned it around and beat Letterman. So while Leno may be the cause of a bad lead-in for Conan (which NBC addressed by cancelling Leno), Ebersol still feels that Leno would do a better job with The Tonight Show than Conan. BTW, I didn’t fact-check Ebersol’s rebuttal. I am just including it here to show that the issue isn’t cut-and-dried.
Expano had a good point yesterday too. Conan has a lot of fans and they are very supportive of him, but they don’t watch the show. As a result, they are not NBC’s customers and what they want isn’t a prime concern to NBC.
FTR, I am a big Conan fan, but I have no interest in watching The Tonight Show. I personally think Conan will come out of this mess with a much better, edgier show. Oddly enough, I am also a big Leno fan; at least I was in the '80’s when he was finally breaking out. I have managed to ignore Leno since then, so I don’t harbor ill feelings about him selling out or no longer being funny.
I agree, they should have given Conan a chance to see how he performs after the 10pm Leno show is off the air.
On the other hand, if that didn’t work out, and they wanted to bring back Jay, say 5 months from now, that would have been a major shakeup, and maybe they decided to just go for one big embarrassing shakeup (Cancel 10pm Leno show + Replace Conan with Jay on Tonight show) instead of two embarrassing shakeups a few months apart.
Also, if they cancelled the 10pm Leno show and did not give him another show immediately, they would likely lose Leno to another network, and if Conan’s ratings didn’t pan out, they wouldn’t have Leno around to replace Conan with. They must have had little faith that Conan’s numbers would improve.
What Eberson’s rebuttal fails to take into account is that not only was the 10pm Leno show causing a lower lead-in for Conan than Jay used to have when he had the Tonight show, but the 10pm Leno show also siphoned off people who might not want to watch two late night talk shows in one night. Jay Leno never operated the Tonight Show while having another late night talk show preceding him.
As I said in a previous post:
I’d like it if there were an alternative to local news on at 11pm and I can’t be alone on that. The local Fox affiliate runs news at 10pm and again at 11pm, that’s just stupid. They tout their “get your news earlier” 10pm show then basically repeat it at 11? Frankly, I am a bit fed up with news reporting and I’d rather just seek out news online than rely on the idiots on TV that think everything is Big Drama!
Speaking of Fox, doesn’t Wanda Sykes have a talk show on Fox? I’ve never seen it, no idea when it’s on but every once in a while I see a promo for it.
Commit to doing the show for a longer period of time with an out clause for NBC. Or he could have called Conan, told him that he wants to do the show as long as possible, and tell him that he may want to sign somewhere else if he wants the show in 5 years. I would bet any amount of money he agreed to the hand-off at the time, then changed his mind. Classic Brett Favre behavior.
Wanda Sykes Fox show is on Sat at 11 PM
She has a comedy show at 11:00 on Saturdays. The first episode was so awful that I’ve never gone back. There was a thread about it that said pretty much the same thing. It’s irrelevant to this conversation.
It wasn’t irrelevant to me because I thought she might already be occupying a spot that Conan might be taking over which means yet another person would be screwed over by the whole mess. I did not realize that she was only on once a week. Sure I could have searched but let’s face it no one here does that as much as they should. 
To test this theory, I started a poll
But Ebersol is an idiot, and factually incorrect. If Leno got as good of ratings as the shows that were on before him, there wouldn’t be a real problem at this point. The issue was forced because affiliates saw their news ratings (and profits) drop due to Leno’s comparatively bad ratings. Conan is struggling, but that problem would not have come to a head this soon if it were not for Leno’s failures. More importantly, people will only watch so many talk shows in one day. Leno’s show significantly diluted the NBC late night brand.
But they often do watch the show; just not in ways that NBC can profit from them using their current business model. It just underscores why choosing Leno is only a temporary solution. I would bet any amount of money that Conan has more fans, and more general interest from the public. There are several ways of capitalizing on that, but NBC would rather stick to their current failing business model.
Conan has put the Tonight Show up for sale on craigslist. - make him an offer.
Leno is/was not expected to match the ratings of regular shows in primetime. In their contract, NBC has a threshold rating expected of the 10PM show, which has always been met.
Now Hitler is weighing in. (Scroll down a bit.)
Does that mean the discussion is over?
Is your link different than Nzinga’s? (I’m being lazy and didn’t want to watch them both.)
Look, you can make an argument that NBC should change its business model and I might even agree, but that is a huge point to make, much bigger than the discussion about who hosts one of the shows on the network. Conan might have millions of untapped potential customers, but before NBC can begin to address those customers they need to get their existing business squared away. This means sorting out their late night line-up which I think everyone agrees a) needs to be sorted out and b) has been handled very poorly.
Conan may have tons of fans on the internet that would love to watch him on the internet and thus NBC should broadcast The Tonight Show with Conan live on the internet. However, I personally don’t think Conan’s fans on the internet would enjoy the traditional Tonight Show.
This is quite possible and is exactly why I say the issue is not cut-and-dried. Ebersol’s counter to that seems to be that the fans that followed Jay to prime-time were not interested in Conan’s style show and that Conan consciously did not make an attempt to change his style to appeal to them.
If you look at this thread you can see Conan fans are certainly not Leno fans except in rare cases. So I don’t think people were watching Leno and getting their fill of talk shows so they skipped Conan.
Nope. They’re the same. I did a thread search for “Tim Goodman” and “Hitler” before posting my link. I didn’t know the Hitler videos were known as “Downfall”. My bad! 
ETA: My link is from Tim Goodman’s Bastard Machine, and there are links to other discussions about the situation, if you’re interested.