Well, I like Conan, I’ve watched his show since he first took over Dave’s chair on Late Night, and I absolutely despise Jay Leno, not as a person, I just don’t think he’s funny. I think when he did stand up, he was occasionally funny, but his show was just so painfully white bread that I couldn’t stomach it. I was thrilled to hear the Conan was going to take over the Tonight Show, and I expected he would eventually become the future of late night television. I expected Dave would clean his clock, because Dave is more seasoned, more in touch with the older crowd which watches more late night TV, he has become an incredible interviewer, and his show is genuinely entertaining. However, he lost the edge he had in the early/mid 1980s when he first started his show…he used to be a renegade, donning a suit of Alka Seltzer and having himself dipped in a vat of water, or dropping stuff off a 5 story tower. These were the types of things that set him apart, but as he got older, his humor became more institutionalized, more predictable, more familiar, and less off the wall…he was able to connect with a larger audience, and the sensibilities of late night viewers had evolved as well. So, it was always my expectation that it would be years before Conan would ever overtake Dave, or that perhaps Dave would retire on top. But I expected a gradual build in Conan’s audience, I expected an ebb and flow over time, basically I expected Conan’s sensibilities to find a happy medium with audience sensibilities after a few years on the air, which is how it happened for Jay after all…he wasn’t a hit right off the bat either.
So, I’ve been following this quite closely, and I have a lot of thoughts on the matter. First of all, I did not realize until this happened that NBC had essentially forced Jay Leno out of the Tonight Show to make room for Conan, because Conan was getting other offers. You know, as I see it, that was the biggest mistake they made in the first place. Even though I don’t care for Leno’s humor, he was a hit on the show, he hosted it for 17 years, and he would have remained successful until he felt it was time for him to go. As for Conan, it seems quite logical that what he would have wanted would have been the same thing Dave wanted when he had that show…to eventually move to the Tonight Show. A smart business decision would have been to re-negotiate Conan’s contract to make sure that NBC had the right to match or beat any competing offers Conan may have gotten, and to give him some sort of guarantee that when Jay decided to leave the Tonight Show, whether that was in 5 years or 20, Conan would get the show. I mean, Conan knew that Johnny Carson had the show for 30 years, he probably wouldn’t have minded waiting another decade or so for Jay to be ready to leave, because longevity is what that show is about. It is a late night institution, and I’m sure even Conan realized that when he got the show, it was possibly a bit early…he was pretty young to assume such a role when you get right down to it.
So, when this story first broke, I was a little bit unhappy with Jay Leno because I thought it was pretty classless of him not to just step aside and say, “hell no, you can’t push the start time of the Tonight Show into the next day after 60 years of it airing in the same time slot.” I 100% agreed with Conan’s “People of Earth” letter in which he said that he would not be a wiling party to the destruction of a television institution. Now I understood NBC’s desire to keep their cash cow, I expect businesses to make business decisions and I know that’s not always what is fair. And if you have Leno who wants to go back to his old time slot, and you have nowhere else to put him, in light of his past tenure and how much money he made for NBC, I’m sure they were very reluctant to let him go. But like many business decisions, I think it came from a place of weakness and did not show them to be at all forward thinking.
Sure, if you looked at Conan’s Tonight Show numbers, they weren’t great. But they WERE better than Jay Leno’s 10pm show’s numbers. The local affiliates essentially said that NBC had to go back to the type of programming people WANT to see at 10pm, because this was not it, and it was killing their local news ratings. And with late night television, it has ALWAYS been a matter of inertia. A good share, perhaps even a majority of late night TV viewers will watch the news on whatever channel they were watching when it came on, and will watch whatever late night program is on after the newscast they watch. If they’re not watching Jay Leno at 10pm because that’s when they want to see dramatic programming or reality TV and NBC isn’t offering it, people don’t switch to the NBC affiliate to watch the news, they stay on whatever channel they were watching, and then after the news, they watch whatever late night program is on that channel. This isn’t everyone, but it’s a significant percentage of the number of viewers for ANY late night program.
Jay Leno had the benefit during all 17 of his years of having strong dramatic lead ins to the local news…if Conan had the same benefit, he would have done a LOT better…he may not have matched Jay’s numbers for some time, but he would have done a hell of a lot better and probably would have beaten Dave at least some of the time. But the biggest problem is, Conan’s Tonight Show was a work in development. He was still discovering what worked and what didn’t, he was still innovating and trying new things. He was still in search of his core audience, beyond the die hards who proved they’d support him no matter what. And this situation forced NBC’s hand…they chose to not give him the chance he needed to build the show.
So as I said, I feel that going back to what you used to do because it’s what worked before is backwards thinking. Yes, trying to hang onto your cash cow is a good idea in the short term, but what about long term? NBC, so desperate being the 4th place network, which is losing hundreds of millions of dollars on the Olympics due to buying the rights when ad rates were much higher, seems to have panicked. It seems to me they said, we need to do something to recover from this debacle, and so desperate were they to put Jay back where he could make them the kind of money he used to, they were willing to basically destroy a 60 year television institution by moving the Tonight Show so that it wouldn’t start until the next day! That’s a desperate act.
Now, were they forward thinking, they wouldn’t have just looked at the top line ratings for Conan’s show. They wouldn’t have just said that Dave consistently beats him and even Nightline beat him for a few weeks. They would have said, “well, why is that?” And had they done that they’d have realized that for one thing, Michael Jackson died right about the time Conan first took the show, and of COURSE people were watching Nightline…Dave’s ratings suffered during that time as well. AND they would have said that there were some circumstances, such as piqued public interest when it came out that Dave was having affairs, that made people who chose between the shows choose Letterman.. And of course they would have realized that not having a dramatic lead in to the news was killing Conan’s ratings. Then they would have said, OK, what can we DO to fix this? And the obvious answer would have been to change their 10pm programming to reality shows and dramas, and then to allow Conan some time to hit his stride, and hoped something interesting would happen in his life to make some of the people who like both him AND Dave to switch back. But they didn’t do that.
However, had they looked at demographics, they’d see, the oldest demographics are the ones who like Leno, many of them just stopped watching late night TV when Leno left, and THAT is the one major gain of having Leno back on at 11:35…they get a demographic that is essentially dying off, one that may give them money now, but one which won’t last forever. The next demographic was probably torn between Jay and Dave, but probably wouldn’t give Conan a shot, Jay is going to have a hard time recouping some of these viewers, he’ll get some, but again, this is a shrinking demographic. Then there are people who would probably be torn between Dave and Conan, and many of them were watching Dave, again a lot had to do with Dave’s greater experience, and quite a bit of it had to do with his personal life becoming a human interest story. Not to mention, the whole war of words with Sarah Palin that erupted when Dave made a joke about her daughter…that was really the first turning point where people who had a hard time deciding between Dave and Conan went to Dave in droves. This is a fairly young demographic, and they have too many choices, they look for something to make their decision easier. Just because Dave had the upper hand THIS year, didn’t mean that would always be the case. And these viewers by and large aren’t going to be Jay fans, so by losing Conan, NBC effectively loses most of these viewers.
Then the youngest Demographic, the one with the most years left to find a late night program to become part of the fabric of their lives, they are pretty much Conan all the way, but may be at points in their lives where there’s just too much going to watch Conan. They never liked Jay, but loved Conan’s late night show a few years back and if they return to late night TV viewing, Conan would be their first stop.
In other words, Jay had the actual numbers in today’s world, but Conan had more potential, he is the one I would want if I were positioning my network to take on Dave over the long haul until Dave retires (and beyond). I’d be FAR more comfortable taking lower profit today for what I’m sure will be a far more lucrative decision a decade down the road. They took the bird in the hand approach, but unfortunately, any benefit they may get from retaining their cash cow comes at a very steep price, one which Jay’s popularity might not have the longevity to make up for. I mean, $45 million paid out to Conan and his staff right off the bat, and they spent $50M making that set for him, which they’ll have to dismantle and spend a similar amount rebuilding Jay’s set. Then there’s the PR hit, a LOT of Conan fans whill be going out of their way to not watch NBC anymore than they already do, they certainly aren’t going to go to Jay Leno, and they’ll be less likely to give these new 10pm dramas a fair shake. The network comes off as weak and incompetent, and it really didn’t help matters when the execs started to blame the victim and pissed all over Conan with their disparaging comments. One of the things that I recall being a HUGE deal with Dave’s fans when he first moved to CBS was how shabbily NBC treated him, he had a lot to say about it, and his fans ate it up, just like we’re seeing with Conan. They pulled the same stuff, gag orders, retaining his bits as their intellectual property, and it made them seem petty and like they were kicking the guy who they screwed over. It is a bitter irony that the whole reason they supposedly made this decision 6 years ago was to avoid having what happened with Dave happen with Conan. Yet, they created a situation where Conan would have had to have been a man of very little integrity to just roll over and take it, they had to have known that their proposed solution was going to come as a slap in the face to Conan and if they didn’t, they are stupid. They had to have known that their proposal to push back the Tonight Show had more than a 50/50 chance of causing Conan to leave the network, and where they could have mitigated the PR problems by not kicking him once he made his decision, they let history repeat itself.
So, all in all, Conan got screwed out of his dream, just like Dave did 17 years ago. NBC made a backwards looking decision that is a penny wise but a pound foolish. NBC shot itself in the foot in the PR department and succeeded in tarnishing the image of the very cash cow they tripped over themselves to keep. And Conan and his staff will walk away with a very good severance package, and ultimately, Conan will probably end up getting his own show like Dave did, one which will lose to Jay and Dave at first, but where he will be giving all the creative control he wants, where the network he goes with will be committed to sticking with him in thick and thin and where he will probably surpass both Jay and Dave given a few years on the air. And then NBC will look every bit as foolish in regards to this decision as they still do in regards to not giving Dave the Tonight Show.
So, overall I’m sad that this happened, I have lost a ton of respect for NBC and think some network heads should roll, namely Jeff Zucker and Dick Ebersol for starters (remember how badly Ebersol screwed up SNL when he took that over from Lorne Michaels in the 80?). It just shows that the network doesn’t have any vision under its current leadership. And it shows in a lot of their recent programming decisions. Get the Olympics whatever you have to pay because hey, it’s the Olympics….vision would have said, “is this practical to bid this much when we don’t know what the climate will be like in 2010?” Or when they cut My Name is Earl, a show that wasn’t that far behind their other Thursday night shows in terms of ratings, and replaced it with a Chevy Chase vehicle…that’s looking to what worked in the past. Even now, with their new 10pm shows, they’ve hired producers that have created other hit series on other networks to create new series for them…that’s again looking to what worked before and expecting it to solve your future problems. NBC was #1 in the 80s and 90s because they put on shows people wanted to watch, they took risks by airing things like Cheers, the Cosby Show, and later Seinfeld and Friends…these shows broke the mold, they featured new talent in acting and writing, they took chances which paid off. Now they only seem to be wiling to look at tried and true. Well, the world is changing too quickly for tried and true, and as long as they pursue this kind of strategy, they will remain in 4th place.
So, all in all, NBC gets what it deserves, and Conan is better off. And if you saw his last show tonight, you saw at the end where he said that tonight was the last night he was able to say whatever he wanted about NBC, and rather than launching into a tirade about how much they screwed him over, he very graciously thanked them for giving him a chance, first as a writer on SNL, then with his late night show. He said that he didn’t want the viewers to allow cynicism to win out, and that he would be fine. It was a beautiful, elegant, heart felt speech which made me feel like NBC has made its own bed, Conan is the one who is going out with grace and dignity, and he will ultimately have the last laugh, so all in all, as bad as I feel that he had his dream crushed, he knows how lucky he was to have the Tonight Show for even 7 months, and given the impossible circumstances he was dealth, he made the only decision he could make.
I’m excited to see what he comes up with in September and I’m very excited to think that he will probably be the future of late night comedy, just like Dave was in ‘92. And though I don’t like Jay’s humor, I don’t begrudge him, nor do I begrudge NBC, I think they will learn their lesson the hard way, or they will keep repeating the same mistakes. And unless they hire leaders with vision, I suspect they will keep repeating the same mistakes, which is their loss. If they put something on I want to watch, I’ll watch it, I’ll just expect that just like over the past 10 years, each year will provide less and less for me to want to watch.
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