Conan O'Brien releases statement on Late Night shakeup

I agree with that, except the problem wasn't a comedy show, but doing the same old boring talk show format. It may have been more interesting if they went back to the Tonight Show when Steve Allen was there and it was really loose (and, no, I'm not that old and remember the show first hand, from what I've read and seen in clips).

He could have just said "no".

It was on at 9:00 PM here, and the local news aired at 10:00 PM. All depends on where you live.

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Thought some of you might get a kick out of this.

NBC Confirms Conan O'Brien's Late Night Exit

According to Reuters, NBC has reached a deal with The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien host Conan O'Brien to leave the show with Jay Leno to resume hosting duties on March 1.

While NBC wouldn't reveal details on the deal, but two sources close to the deal said that O'Brien would receive $32.5 million and his staff would receive $12 million. O'Brien will end his run on Friday and will be "free to pursue other opportunities after September 1."

The deal brings to an end the turmoil between the network, O'Brien and Leno that started when the network announced it was ending its primetime experiment of The Jay Leno Show after affiliates were reporting significant decreases in local news programs.

Here are the official statements from the network and Conan O'Brien.

NBC's statement on Jay Leno's return to :

Source: Movieweb

Now they don't have anyone to be heir apparent. Not a big O'Brien fan, or Leno, but he was the logical successor at some point, but it would have made more sense if they shared The Tonight Show slot, with Leno taking three days to O'Brien's two. Leno is only there four days anyway, and O'Brien could have three days in the summer. This way O'Brien could have had more time to get settled at the slot and could attract and hold on to a larger audience when the time came.

Switching hosts in the middle of every week? That's crazy talk. Aside from the weird rivalry it would spark (and resentment from whoever gets only two of the five days), it would be downright bizarre to have the show's tone shift so significantly so often. I also doubt all the band members and various people working behind the scenes would take a correlative pay cut. Neither comedian would get a fair chance to establish any kind of devoted audience, either, and it's pretty evident that when it comes to late night, people's devotion is primarily to the core personality of the host.

There's also the obvious fact that neither Leno nor Conan would ever, ever agree to anything like that. Nobody of their stature is going to accept half-a-show.

Monday through Wednesday for Leno, Thursday and Friday for O'Brien. Wouldn't have been much different when Leno was regularly doing one day a week to Carson's three or four first run shows. Carson didn't rerun shows that much and had a lot of guest hosts until Leno became the regular one. Carson took a lot of time off, unlike Leno and Letterman, and it didn't hurt the ratings.

That was a stop gap, not the status quo. Guest hosting is a completely different animal; it's the same staff and the same set, and it's not something they had to do, not something they would have ever chosen. There's no way Conan and Leno would ever share a set, or a staff, and there's no chance of convincing everyone who works for them to work part-time all of a sudden, either.

And this is all assuming that the two of them would have gone for it, and there's just no way they would have.

What you say is true, but I was thinking of them co-operating and sharing one set and staff up to a point (obviously different writers), but if Leno's attitude was I'm not going anywhere when I hit 65, it wouldn't have worked. If the proposal was on the table, they might have worked something out and makes more sense than that half hour for Leno.

Interesting updates:

• Bill Carter's writing a book about the situation
• Conan talking to Fox, but it sounds like the execution and economics are iffy
• And, perhaps most interesting: there's a report that Conan's deal did include a timeslot in that it referenced a previous agreement where the time was specified

There's also word that Conan was invited to participate in the Leno/Letterman/Oprah ad, as well, but "politely [declined]."

Interesting stuff. Sounds like the chances of Conan winding up on Fox are a coin-flip at best, which is troublesome, because I can't think of too many other plausible options that Conan would likely find acceptable. Here's hoping that, if he has to, he takes a step down in terms of budget and audience size to keep going, though I doubt he will.

I think he would be better off at Comedy Central, but not a talk show.

I dunno. The thinking behind a move to Comedy Central is that he could be "edgier," or something of the sort (I'll leave aside my general disagreement with people who think he was heavily toning things down before all this happened). But the tradeoff would be a much smaller staff and budget, too.

Anyway, I don't see him abandoning the talk show format, and I don't really want him to. He was good at exactly what he was doing, and I hope he finds a place that will let him continue to do it in more or less the same way.

"Si, Conando!"

Wow. Apparently Conan's signed on with TBS; the new show starts in November. A lot of people weren't sure if he was willing to abandon the larger broadcast audiences, but apparently, he is. All reports were that Fox was a great fit in some ways, but not in others, and that the whole thing was quite a chore to try to get done with affiliates and the like.

Even more surprising than the move to cable: apparently he's getting the same budget he had on the NBC show. I'm surprised the numbers work there, though I wonder if maybe he's getting less salary as a result. No idea, but for a cable show, that's certainly unexpected.

Obviously, I'm quite glad. Audience aside, I just want to see his show. And though I still don't think he was ever really toning it down much, any fear about that should be eradicated now that he's on cable. Still, he leaves a lot of intellectual property at NBC. Whether or not he starts fresh or works around the issue with technicalities is hard to say; I hope it's the latter.

Anyway, great news, and probably not too bad for the big man himself. Though broadcast still commands more eyeballs, it commands less of them pretty much every day, and the kinds of people who still differentiate significantly between broadcast and cable probably aren't the kind of people that would enjoy Conan, anyway. With more options comes more specialization, and more fragmented audiences, so this kind of thing is going to happen more and more, anyway.

Yup. The currently untitled one-hour show will debut at 11/10c after the World Series, and will air Monday through Thursday. It will be followed by "George Lopez's Lopez Tonight". You can read the full report here.

I 'm no big fan, but I'm sure he'll do well over there. It sounds like a good fit. Leno is not the nice guy he pretends to be. If these two had a better relationship, I think they could have worked something out. By the way, I think O'Brien is marginally better than Leno, but trying to take over a time slot when the network is in the toilet was a no-win proposition. I've been looking lately at Carson clips on youtube and he really makes all the late night show hosts on now look like little leaguers.