It cost them, I think, $45 million to lose Conan, most of which went to Conan and the rest to his staff.
Has it worked out? Has Jay’s return increased ratings enough to make profit from advertising to make up that gap?
Or is it too early to tell still?
NBC just slashed The Tonight Show’s staff and Leno gave back a rumored $5 million in his own salary to save two dozen more jobs. The story they let out was that The Tonight Show breaks even rather than earning money.
I don’t know how much credence to put into that. Leno consistently beats Letterman in ratings (including the younger demographic) and nobody claims that Letterman loses money. (Although CBS did claw back a chunk of money from his production company Worldwide Pants as far back as 2009.) And ABC is dumping Nightline (making it later, but that’s dumping it) to move Jimmy Kimmel up to 11:35 to take on Letterman and Leno head-to-head-to-even-larger-head. You don’t do that if you only expect to break even.
Leno outdraw Conan from the moment he switched back and has beaten Letterman the vast majority of the time. That’s two years of far better ratings and therefore commercial charges than Conan could have given them and the expectation of more. In strictly monetary terms I’d bet that was worth $45 million.
There’s no possibility that a late night show could ever be worth the hundreds of millions a year that Carson brought in. The world has changed too much. I wouldn’t feel too sorry for NBC’s late night. Whatever happened there is peanuts compared to how much being the 4th place prime time network since 2004 has cost them.
On top of what** Expano said, network TV finances are a funny thing. Technically, both the Conan edition of Tonight and the Jay Leno Show actually made NBC money, despite their low ratings. However, NBC affiliates were screaming that their local newscasts were suffering, and some were threatening to take Leno off and run other programming in its place.
I seem to recall that had NBC cut Leno loose, they would have been on the hook for even more than $45 million and the network was more afraid of Leno jumping to cable than Conan. It may have been a simple case that the network decided losing Conan was the least-bad scenario.
this is true but many Coco-bots used Leno’s 10pm EST show as a flop to blame for Conans poor Tonight Show ratings, they convienently forget that Leno’s last Tonight Show was in late May, Conan took over in early June and Leno’s 10pm show didn’t start until mid September.
Conan’s ratings were always, even in the coveted younger demographic, worse than Lettermans, (after leno basically beating Letterman for years and years) and O’Brien had an over 3 month head start over leno’s failed 10pm show.
3 months is very little. A late night talk show needs a year to prove out. I’m not in the bag for Conan, either. The only one worth watching right now is Craig Ferguson.
I wonder how much money Craig’s show saves by not employing a band. It’s not like having a house band really adds a lot to these shows. Probably the only one that would really be missed is Conan’s because he uses Labamba and a few of the others in a lot of skits.
Craig Ferguson’s really is the only truly great late night TV show. Sorry for the hijack and not addressing the OP.
You have to also consider that the Conan experiment allow them to move Jay to 10pm, and cancel a bunch of scripted shows which cost more money (altthough Leno got worse rating than those shows). I think in the end, they likely made out well enough financially that losing Conan, in the shitty way they did it, was a net positive.
Technology has improved a lot in the last few decades. When will they bring back a clone of Carson? That should do the trick.
According to Bill Carter’s The War for Late Night, while Conan’s total ratings for the Tonight Show were lower than Leno’s, he achieved a pronounced demographic shift, lowering the median age of Tonight Show viewers by ten years. At the same time, older people who had been watching Leno at 11:30 switched to Letterman, bringing his total numbers up but making him demographically less desirable. While the press tended to report on the total numbers during the crisis, it was well known within NBC that Conan was attracting younger viewers and was profitable.
People tend to forget that the crisis was not due to favoritism and was only slightly due to Jay’s talent for Machiavellian manipulation. NBC wanted desperately to keep both Conan and Leno. In 2005, they had assumed wrongly that Leno would retire five years hence when they guaranteed the 11:30 slot to Conan. But instead, Leno started serious negotiations with ABC and Fox, a direct threat to Conan’s new Tonight Show. The 10pm slot was seen as a way to protect Conan from competing with Leno, while at the same time a brilliant move to save NBC tons of money in producing 10pm scripted programming.
Of course, it didn’t work out that way, and the affiliates revolted. That led to NBC’s plan to push Conan back half an hour (again, they wanted to keep both of them) which Conan rejected.
Did he really? Where did you read that? I’m interested.
I’m not sure about Fox, but Leno was widely rumored to be considering a move to ABC: http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/160535-Jay_Leno_Taking_Over_10_P_M_On_NBC.php
