I keep waffling back and forth; after it was announced that Jay Leno would be getting a prime time show on NBC, I felt like Conan was seriously undermined; not only will he continue to follow Leno, but Leno will steal potential guests who would rather go on a prime time show in the same town.
But I notice there’s very little fanfare for Leno’s last Tonight show; it’s four days away, and there’s no mention of it on Leno’s NBC website. They’re not really making a big fuss over the new show either, but I have seen commercials, and the website for his version of the show is up and running.
Not only that, Leno will be off the air for the next three months, and I feel like that’s plenty of time to give Conan enough momentum to make Leno seem like yesterday’s news. Of course, I’m biased, since I’ve always loved Conan and been bored/annoyed by Jay.
Anyway, the videos on Conan’s site have gotten me excited about Conan, Andy (!) and Max getting back together, and I’m newly optimistic that Conan can overcome his drab new surroundings and second fiddle status, and do the Tonight Show proud. What do you think?
Leno was pushed out, of that there is no doubt. But NBC, not wanting a repeat of the Leno-Letterman fiasco, did manage a nice, slow, friendly transition.
Then the rumors started that Leno might jump to ABC, whjich would have been a more serious threat for Conan than it would be to Letterman. That, combined with NBC’s freefall in primetime, led to the Hail Mary pass idea of putting Leno on in prime time.
My guess is that Letterman will hold most of his audience while the Conan version of Tonight loses some older viewers but gains younger ones. So Conan will be okay.
Leno, on the other hand, will be expected to pull at least decent ratings every night of the week, and I’m guessing it won’t happen. After a season of inconsistent ratings, Leno will be gone and the great experiment will be seen as a failure.
I can’t imagine that is true. For one thing, he announced his departure about five years in advance! If they wanted him out, they would have wanted him out immediately.
For another, he was beating the competition in the ratings, one of the few NBC shows to do that. The suits at NBC would have been bending over backwards to get him to stay…TRM
I seem to recall this being more about keeping Conan than pushing Jay out. Didn’t Conan only renew his contract a few years ago with the understanding that he’d take over the Tonight Show by a certain date?
I guess at the time Jay didn’t have a problem with it.
Jay actually did have a problem with it. He has said so. But being the pro he is, he didn’t let it become a big deal.
Here’s what happened: Conan’s contract was coming up, and the word was that Conan was demanding some kind of deal to ensure his place as host of The Tonight show. In the meantime, Leno’s ratings were steady, but it was felt that he was maybe a little past his prime, and that in four or five years when his contract was up NBC would let it lapse and give Conan the gig. Leno wasn’t even really consulted. Since he was under contract until then, there really wasn’t much he could do about it.
But then the years go by, and Leno becomes even more popular. He’s killing Dave in the ratings, and his other gigs like his garage website, his articles for various magazines, and his willingness to make appearances all over the place are finding him a new audience among younger viewers. But there’s that pesky deal with Conan. What to do? How do you let go of a star at the peak of his popularity? The answer was to give Jay his own, even more visible show, live up to the agreement with Conan, and presumably everyone’s happy.
When Conan signed his last contract with NBC, he agreed to stay with the network if he could have the Tonight Show in five years. As part of the deal, Leno had to state on his show that he was retiring in five years. There was a good article in the Sunday magazine of the NY Times this week.
It should be noted that Leno is not funny, while Conan is funny. This has been established by science.
What I see is that Leno will get cut down to three nights a week, then two then one. where he will stay for a while. In the meantime, maybe NBC will be able to develop some programming that does not require the use of “da-dum” between each scene.
I saw him on an interview and he flat out said he’d have liked to stay longer. He was pushed.
However, with regard to his new show…isn’t it going to be completely different from the old show? Like, no possibility of competition? Does anyone know what the new format is? I thought I heard that it was going to have a lot of car/motorcycle stuff. I don’t watch late-night TV so I don’t really care, but I’m curious.
If he was pushed, it’s ironic, if you believe the book and movie The Late Shift (which suggested that he pushed Carson out).
As Leno’s show is going to be cheap to produce, NBC will make money at it. But in the long run will they suffer from not having developed dramatic series running at 10pm? Such shows can be rerun and then sold into syndication.
The casts and crew of the shows canceled to make room for Jay.
The only thing Jay does that I find funny is the headlines and he doesn’t need an hour to do those. In fact he doesn’t even need to do them, they write themselves.
I absolutely hate when he takes some idiot from his Jaywalking segments and makes them a star, like that annoying Fran Drescher wannabe or those two brain dead chicks he sent to the political conventions.
Bingo. Also, from what I’ve read, Conan doesn’t have much respect for Leno as a host. Most comics and comedy writers (Conan’s background) look up to Letterman and Carson. Conan had pictures of Dave, Johnny, Jack Paar and Steve Allen on his set. Conan wanted the Tonight Show soon for two reasons: to advance his own career and because he didn’t think Jay deserved it.
Being the Tonight Show host is a lot like being Roman emperor. You have to constantly watch your back for powerful rivals who wish to take your place.
I don’t think his pushing Carson has anything to do with whether or not Leno himself was pushed. One does not cancel out the other. It’s showbiz, plain and simple.
I didn’t say that the one thing had to do with the other. It’s just that the movie The Late Shift made it seem that Leno and his manager Helen Kushnick didn’t give Carson the respect he deserved and pushed him out of the way. So it seemed ironic to me that the same thing might have happened to him.
The way I see it, Leno was popular but stale. Conan still had a cult following and could do some nice goofy stuff in his 12:30 timeslot. Leno won’t last long in his 10:00 slot, and Conan will probably get less wacky, like Letterman when he moved to CBS.
I doubt it. The 10 PM slot has been a bomb for a while. I read one article that said that is when people watch the shows the recorded earlier. To go into syndication you need enough seasons, which is getting rare for one hour dramas. Much easier to syndicate half hour comedies.
I can see why they did it - the new show is cheap, fills up a lot of time, and keeps Jay on the plantation. Maybe they hope they’ll get old folks who go to bed before the Tonight show comes on. I agree that it will bomb over time, though, but by then Jay will be a failure and less attractive to ABC.