When Conan O'Brien took to the spangled-blue stage of The Tonight Show back in June 2009, media analysts speculated how successful he would be on America's most popular evening talk show.
Many were concerned that the acidic, Harvard-cultivated humor with which the sharp-tongued comedian had propelled Late Night would not carry over to fans of Leno's middle America-friendly platform. Trademark liberal Conan shticks - like the foul-mouthed Triumph the Insult Comic Dog and loud sidekick Andy Richter - were deemed too esoteric for the apolitical, folksier Leno crowd. Many critics voiced the opinion that if Conan did not try to reorient his style, his reign on The Tonight Show was sure to fail.
When the ratings starting coming in for Conan's early Tonight episodes, it seemed like the skeptics were right. Nielsen ratings for The Tonight Show dropped considerably after Conan's June 1 inception. CBS's The Late Show with David Letterman, which had been ranked second to Leno's Tonight Show for years, picked up a significant amount of steam due to the host change, propelling the perpetually sarcastic Letterman to first place among late night entertainment.
The Tonight Show ratings drop was so severe that even Letterman re-runs ended up beating out new Conan episodes. By November, The Tonight Show had lost more than half of its viewership since the previous year, and it seemed as though Letterman - until recently an underdog - was the new King of Late Night.
On top of The Tonight Show debacle, NBC's overall ratings were beginning to seriously decline due to a significant change in their late-night lineup. Afraid that taking Leno off The Tonight Show would allow another network to swoop in and steal their star, NBC decided to give Leno his own one-hour primetime variety show, which was to run five nights a week starting at 10 p.m. The Jay Leno Show, which began Sept. 14, created a bit of a predicament for NBC, as it forced the network to accommodate for a lost primetime hour.
Struggling yet critically acclaimed shows like Southland, a cop drama starring Kevin Alejandro and Regina King, were moved to Friday night "death slots" and eventually cancelled. Ratings for The Jay Leno Show, while not exactly atrocious, did not exceed the rather low expectations of any analysts and caused some serious problems for NBC affiliates' local late-night news shows that had relied on the popularity of the previous 10 p.m. primetime shows.
Rumors circulated for months that Leno's new show was nothing less than an epic failure, both economically and ratings-wise, for the network. NBC head Jeff Zucker continually maintained that The Jay Leno Show was doing just fine and that the network had no intention of cancelling it. However, in late December, Zucker announced that NBC was pulling the plug on Leno's short stint in primetime - and that was when the drama began.
Instead of out and out canceling The Jay Leno Show, Zucker proposed moving Leno to 11:35 p.m. and cutting his show to 30 minutes. This would shift The Tonight Show back to 12:05 a.m. and would push Late Night with Jimmy Fallon back even further.
Unsurprisingly, Conan did not take NBC's announcement about the new late night lineup too well. Shortly after the new Leno plan was revealed, Conan released a statement addressing the proposed new start time for The Tonight Show. "I sincerely believe that delaying The Tonight Show into the next day to accommodate another comedy program will seriously damage what I consider to be the greatest franchise in the history of broadcasting," he wrote. "I cannot participate in what I honestly believe is [The Tonight Show]'s destruction."
Conan's statement sent the rumor mills on fire. Gossip sites like www.perezhilton.com and TMZ speculated that Conan had offers from other cable networks, especially NBC competitor FOX. Many tried to predict the payoff Conan would receive from NBC in light of what looked like a violation of his contract. Some voiced outrage at the fact that hundreds of members of Conan's staff had uprooted their lives and families from New York and moved to Los Angeles in June, only to be put out of a job.
Conan's fans became particularly vocal about the new lineup, creating the slogan "I'm With Coco" and using a Barack Obama-esque Conan insignia to show their support for the comic. Protestors lined up in front of the NBC studio with signs and banners, promoting "Team Coco" and calling for reconsideration of the new Leno time slot.
Conan's ratings shot up in light of the controversy, outdoing Letterman for the first time in months. While his negotiations with NBC prohibited him from bad-mouthing the network, Conan found other ways to skewer executives like Zucker, such as calling the network "morons" in Spanish and poking fun at them in musical monologues.
Other late-night hosts joined in on the NBC bashing, with Letterman offering a particularly humorous take on the network's unwavering devotion to Jay "Big Jaw" Leno, recalling Letterman's own bitterness at losing The Tonight Show host slot to Leno after previous host Johnny Carson stepped down in 1992.
Just recently, NBC announced that negotiations with Conan had come to a conclusion, and that the redhead would officially step down from his Tonight Show hosting duties on Jan. 22. In return, Conan and his staff received a $45 million payout, and the comedian was promised he could return to television on another network as early as in the fall of 2010. Conan's last show ran this past Friday, with Tom Hanks, Steve Carell and Will Ferrell as guests.
While fans of Leno are glad to see him return to late night after the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in February, it is hard not to view him in a more negative light after the recent controversy. True, Conan could have put more effort into directing his comedic style towards the old Leno fans, but many people who shied away from Conan early on began to give him a second try in recent days and it seems that most of them found his slightly harsher style more appealing.
More importantly, NBC's poor scheduling in order to accommodate The Jay Leno Show is a clear indicator that they cared more about pandering to their old star than they did about providing viewers with more varied, appropriate primetime entertainment.
Shows that were kicked out of primetime spots earlier in the season lost valuable viewers as a result, and some of them ended up being canceled. While NBC was the shining star in entertainment back in the '90s, featuring big hits like Friends and Will & Grace, the network's heyday has been over for a while and it is unfortunate that the Leno-Conan debacle has done nothing more than add more fuel to the fire.
