Late Night Meltdown: The Battle for "The Tonight Show"

[MADfan2004]

That was debunked earlier.

That said, it's really hard to tell what the hell is going on. Some sources have said Conan will be leaving next Friday, others say it's still not official.

The thing that gets me is, Conan's ratings have now shot up to double what Letterman is getting, so I'm wondering why NBC isn't trying to bargain with him more. This could be his Hugh Grant moment.

[tvmanismadformad]

Well were only less than a month into the year, and I think we already have enough marit to award the assholes award, not only for the year, but for the decade. The winner: All the Assholes and NBC. They will be sharing the award with Jay "Big Jaw" Leno.

In a statement from the President of NBC's sports department, Dick Ebersol said that Conan was An Astounding Failure. I am so pissed that Conan is going through this. They gave a great guy his dream job, just to set him up to fail.

I am so mad at NBC right now, that I may just consider boycotting the network all together. If I need to watch my favourite shows like The Office, or I need to watch SNL, I'll either watch it on the simulcast in Canada, or I'll pirate it so NBC doesn't get the ad revenue. I am digusted by NBC. Conan should go to Fox (that's right, I am so mad at NBC, that I would be willing to let Conan break MAD as the only real success on late night Fox), and if he's forced not to, he should do it from the internet then. They cannot force conebone into a corner.

[blackwind]

Jimmy Kimmel as Jay Leno Jokes About Avatar

Jimmy Kimmel on Jay Leno's 10 @ 10

LOL. Suddenly, I find myself with a tiny shred of respect for Kimmel.

[tvmanismadformad]

How could you not have respect for Kimmel already. He's hilarious! But that 10 @ 10 thing was probably the best of all the late night maddness, and Jimmy is actually a friend of Leno's. They even appeared on each others shows during the strike. To see Jimmy say this to Leno was hilarious, and if you look at Leno's face, you can tell that he's a little pissed off. I think it's because I don't think he saw it coming. I think he thought that being a friend, Jimmy would just give the pre said answers to his questions. I don't think he was expecting Jimmy, a friend of his to do that to him

I don't think I have had as much fun watching television in my whole life. What Conan is saying about NBC is stuff that's really apart of the unwritten entertainment rule of "Don't make too much fun of the people that give you your paycheck" but for Conan, he has the right to do it. I love it tonight when he and Andy laughed about how NBC has already lost 200 million dollers on the games.

I think when the games are here I'm going to go to NBC's pavilion and mock them about that, and bug them about how horrible they are for doing that thing to Conan. I never thought about that, I can get them right where they are living. They are probably going to have a pavilion or something there. Oh that is going to be awesome!

[NemesisDesign]

Yeah that'll show em.

[King of Kings]

NBC doesn't care, they feed on your pain and anguish.

[NemesisDesign]

They're going to be feeding on food stamps if they don't get their head and their ass wired together.

[tvmanismadformad]

Originally Posted by King of Kings

NBC doesn't care, they feed on your pain and anguish.

That may be right, but I'm still going to try. Maybe I can screw up their broadcast or something by having a really bad sign in the background of one of their shows if there's a way to do that. I need to do this for the common television fan, which is everyone, who is disgusted by what this network is doing, which is a list to long to mention.

[King of Kings]

In reality, this whole thing will probably be forgotten in a few months. Leno might even be back to number 1 again.

One good thing that could result from this s candle is that NBC is going to be forced to keep Chuck and Community, and give Chuck a full season. They might also be forced to bring back Friday Night Lights and Southland.

[tvmanismadformad]

Well, looks like someone has been reading tvbythenumbers.

I don't believe it will be forgotten. I think Leno has taken such a character beating that it will never recover, and whenever anyone mentions his ratings being lower than before they will always associate it with this debocal.

I must say though, I should thank NBC for giving me some of the most entertaining television I have seen in a long time, or maybe even ever. Despite the fact it was for evil purposes. And it still might not be over, if Conan choses to continue his NBC bashing.

However, he might not, seeing as he has now removed himself from his contract. They might have told him to stop now that they have paid him, and are allowing him to go to another network as early as September, and I guess if he's not pissed off anymore, he'll obey. They might not have asked him however, since the Tonight Show is getting such great ratings due to it.

[King of Kings]

Dude, people forget national scandals, wars, and natural disasters in less than a year. If you ask people about Kosovo, Iraq, the Indian Ocean earthquake, and Hurricane Katrina, you'll get some really dumbass answers. If people can forget about important stuff like that, they're not going to remember this whole late night "crisis."

[tvmanismadformad]

People remember those events. What the Hell are you talking about? But I agree that the average television may not remember, but the big television fans, they'll remember. Many people still remember the Letterman thing, and hated Jay for it before all this. So if people still that years later, they'll remember this too.

[MeltedBerries]

I pretty much have no opinion on this because my bedtime is at 9. Pretty sad, actually. But I guess that I think Leno is funny from the times that I've stayed up before mom caught me? Reading this thread just makes me think that NBC are idiots. Even though I don't quite understand what's going on here.

[King of Kings]

Did anyone else see Leno's take on the whole thing? He is so full of crap. He said that he wanted to leave the Tonight Show after he falls to number two, which is completely different than what he was saying during the Tonight Show when he said that he wanted to leave while he was still on top.

[NemesisDesign]

God why won't he just get the fuck off already. TV executives are the most tasteless individuals on the planet. They have no concept of going out on top.

[tvmanismadformad]

I read a transcript of it. It is a load of crap. How could they have been planning this for 5 years, but yet had him leave before his contract would have expired in December 2009, and it would have taken him until November 2010 before he could go anywhere else.

Here is just a quote from his speech that I find is so stupid.

Okay, but I’m leaving before my contract is out. About six to eight months early. So before I could go anywhere else, I would be at least a year or 18 months before I could go and do a show somewhere else. I said to NBC, ‘would you release me from my contract.’ They said, ‘we want to keep you here.’ Okay. What are your ideas? They said, ‘how about primetime?’ I said, ‘that will never work.’ No, no, we want to put you on at 10:00. We have done focus groups. People will love you at 10:00. Look at these studies showing Jay’s chin at 10:00. People will go crazy. Didn’t seem like a good idea at the time. I said, ‘alright, can I keep my staff?’ There are 175 people that work here. I said, ‘can I keep my staff?’ Yes, you can. Let’s try it. We guarantee you two years on the air, guaranteed. Now for the first four or five months against original shows like “CSI” you’ll get killed, but in the spring and summer when the reruns come, that’s when you’ll pick up. Okay, great. I agree to that.

"We've done focus groups, people will love you at 10:00"?! "Look at these studies showing Jay’s chin at 10:00"?!. "People will go crazy"?!. Either Zucker (I assume it's Zucker) has brain problems, or he is truly the stupidest man alive.

But now, here's the part that really pisses me off.

Conan has a story in the paper saying he doesn’t want to do that. They come back to me and they say if he decides to walk and doesn’t want to do it, do you want the show back? I go, ‘yeah, I’ll take the show back. If that’s what he wants to do. This way, we keep our people working, fine.

So he'll screw over Conan's people, some of which had moved out to LA after living in New York for all their lives, only to move out here for this show, just to save his own people who would have a lot less to lose seeing as the Tonight Show is filmed in Los Angeles. Very nice Jay.

Conan O’Brien has been a gentleman. He’s a good guy. I have no animosity towards him. This is all business. If you don’t get the ratings, they take you off the air. I think you know this town, you can do almost anything. You get ratings they keep you. I don’t get ratings, he wants. That was NBC’s solution. It didn’t work so we might have an answer for you tomorrow. So, we’ll see. That’s basically where it is.

This is complete bullshit! Jay is lying through his big jawed mouth to try and cover for what he really did. What he really did was take the 10:00 spot even though he knew it was going to fail, in order to undermine Conan so that he would fail giving himself the chance to usurp the thrown again. If there is any humanity in the world, no one will watch Jay when he comes back, because for what he did, and for what he has done, he deserves to be kicked off TV forever.

I haven't seen all the late night stuff, as I fell asleep a little early tonight, but I'm definitely going to look for all the stuff I missed, because this just proves that even a weekend off can't stop this meltdown.

[Planned Disaster]

Originally Posted by tvmanismadformad

This is complete bullshit! Jay is lying through his big jawed mouth to try and cover for what he really did. What he really did was take the 10:00 spot even though he knew it was going to fail, in order to undermine Conan so that he would fail giving himself the chance to usurp the thrown again. If there is any humanity in the world, no one will watch Jay when he comes back, because for what he did, and for what he has done, he deserves to be kicked off TV forever.

I hardly think that was Jay's plan. What happened is that Jay got screwed by NBC who wanted Conan to host the Tonight Show because he appealed to a younger demographic. And younger viewers means more advertisers will want to advertise in that time slot.

However, Jay still wanted to host a talk show after he had already agreed to retire from Tonight, but NBC was realy worried that he'd go to another network, becasue even though Jay doesnt bring in the younger viewers, he still had very good ratings- NBC didnt want to compete against that- especially if Jay wnet to FOX and had the same time slot as Conan and took away Conan's ratings- which is something he most likely wouldnt want to do anyway, but NBC wouldn't take that chance. So the best NBC could do was to offer him the 10 pm slot, in order to keep him on their network. And NBC probably offered Jay a lot of money to stay on their network, its an offer he couldnt refuse.

But the problem NBC didn't forsee, was that Jay would actually bring down the ratings of the late local news that followed his show. Which prompted the local affiliates to threaten to not broadcoast Jay's show on their stations. Plus Jay didnt help boost Conan's ratings, as they thought he would.

This isnt really Jay's fault, its NBC's poor decision making skills, I mean can you blame a guy for wanting to keep his job. Thats all Jay wanted.

[tvmanismadformad]

Originally Posted by Planned Disaster

However, Jay still wanted to host a talk show after he had already agreed to retire from Tonight

This isnt really Jay's fault, its NBC's poor decision making skills, I mean can you blame a guy for wanting to keep his job. Thats all Jay wanted.

Actually you can blame both for this, and here's why. Jay does about 160 stand up jobs a year (He was in Vancouver 2 Saturdays ago when this was all breaking out), he has no children to take care of (like Jimmy Kimmel said just cars), and has more money then he is ever going to touch. He should have had the common decency for Conan to just retire from the talk show circuit and focus on the stand up if he wanted to do something, but instead he decided to take this deal, which he, and NBC should have known would have undermined Conan's Tonight Show.

Also, this isn't the first time that Jay has done this. He did it back in 1992 when he was first given the Tonight Show. When Johnny Carson left, it was assumed that David Letterman, host of the Late Show on NBC would take over, but because Jay had been the fill in guy, NBC though it would be a better transition. David and Jay were friends, so he thought that Jay would have the common decency (see, I'm saying this again) to give it to Dave, but instead he didn't and it ruined there friendship.

Jay is guilty here because he did not have the common decency to just leave and let thing happen. That is why he is guilty.

But let's not forget here, the man who is as or more guilty than Jay, Jeff Zucker. Jeff was recently on the PBS Charlie Rose show, and tried to explain his decisions, and well, he makes himself look worse in my opinion. Watch it here. He tries to say how while Fox has shows like American Idol, and 24, ABC has Dancing with the Stars, and Lost, and CBS has really their whole lineup, NBC has The Office the only show that actually gets ratings, 30 Rock which proved this last week that it takes a huge ratings dip without the Office propping it up, and Saturday Night Live which though it gets bigger ratings due to the absence of MADtv (you will see a thread on this soon) hasn't been good in quality in years (I know what site I'm on, but we all know this to be true). He then tries to use Haiti as a scapegoat, uses DVR as an excuse for the problems with the Jay Leno show, says he thought Conan would except the 12:05 deal before he talked to him. He also says he's been getting death threats, which I think he just him taking that out of context to seem like "Hey, this is a problem, but I don't deserve death threats", or making them seem more serious than it is. Either way, this interview, and seeing everything that happened last night despite the weekend off is just making this whole thing one of the worst, and funniest TV events of all time. I guess if I can give Zucker credit for anything, it's that.

[MADfan2004]

Yeah, fuck him for not having the common decency to pass over a job he wanted (in 1992 that is, not now).

Jesus Christ, if you don't like Leno, that's fine, but this getting to the point of sycophancy.

That being said, yes, Jeff Zucker is a dumbass.

[tvmanismadformad]

Originally Posted by MADfan2004

Yeah, fuck him for not having the common decency to pass over a job he wanted (in 1992 that is, not now).

Glad to see we agree.