That's the rumor and according to this and TMZ, it's happening right after the Olympics.

http://www.nj.com/entertainment/tv/index.ssf/2010/01/is_nbc_moving_jay_leno_back_to.html

TMZ Drop

http://www.tmz.com/2010/01/07/jay-leno-nbc-conan-obrien-tonight-show/

Edited January 8, 201015 yr by JaneAusten

The "attention span of a hummingbird" seemed like a putdown to me.

I don't think that people fleeing late night talk shows is the problem. I actually think viewers have been relatively patient, considering some of the poor quality of that genre over the past 15 years.

I have no skin in the Leno/Conan game although I think Conan is being screwed(I've always preferred Letterman more in the early days on NBC) but this is a classic. I give Letterman props for this. NBC is looking to launch another L&O aren't they?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msC3uu4KZbg

Edited January 13, 201015 yr by JaneAusten

so the question i have is this... morning tv is dying. daytime is dying. evening is dying. primetime is dying. late night is dying? or, is it just network tv that is dying?

It's "free" (advertiser-supported) TV that relies on HUGE numbers of eyeballs to make it profitable without subscriber fees and access to spinoff revenues (e.g., if you buy the show--don't own the show).

This'll all be fixed when (as Fox began to claw with Time-Warner over the holidays) the networks begin to lose the affiliates (the most retrogressive, outdated, horrible distribution system known to man...every affiliate gets a "voice" that detracts from the relationship between the audience and the network), and become (like TBS and USANetwork, etc.) a subscriber-subsidized service that also runs ads. When that happens, the tyranny of the "largest number of eyeballs" goes away...voters vote with their cable/satellite subscriptions, rather than their (often poorly sampled) "ratings".

There is still jeopardy. The big cable networks do fine, but the majority seem to struggle for viewers (hence, the constant shifts in brand identity--Cartoon Network not showing cartoons, TVLand not showing classic TV, Soapnet not showing soaps)...so it remains essential to stay one of the "big few" that show premium content.

They also need to figure out how to plug the hole of online streaming, bittorrenting, etc. Maybe said better: Find a way to effectively monetize them while not cannibalizing the mothership.

They also need to figure out how to plug the hole of online streaming, bittorrenting, etc. Maybe said better: Find a way to effectively monetize them while not cannibalizing the mothership.

I don't know if they "cannibalize" the mothership. The networks and the showrunners do that. Tim Kring has done more to "cannibalize" Heroes than fans ever could.

My guess is they are a very small fraction of viewers. I would also guess many of them watch online because they can't watch the TV version, for one reason or another. And I think some of these people, at least the ones who watch the online streaming on the official websites, and some of those who watch through torrents, might still buy DVDs and things like that. If they are cut off that way, they are less likely to buy anything related to the show.

I think these types of viewers are just a scapegoat for the real lack of quality and the desperate need to cater to viewers who aren't interested in watching a lot of TV. Ratings for shows can go up, and often do, when the show makes an effort to improve, as long as it's done in time. Or ratings for a new, quality show can be good, at least some of the time.

There is still jeopardy. The big cable networks do fine, but the majority seem to struggle for viewers (hence, the constant shifts in brand identity--Cartoon Network not showing cartoons, TVLand not showing classic TV, Soapnet not showing soaps)...so it remains essential to stay one of the "big few" that show premium content.

These networks struggle in part because they are so generic. Lifetime lost most of what people wanted to see on their network and thus they are falling fast. Soapnet still struggles to break even because all they can come up with is D-list knockoffs of reality shows that don't even get a million viewers. Yet this is seen as great because it does better than soap reruns from decades ago. They're also half-assed. If they had guts and just changed their network names, like TNN did when it became Spike, they would be better off in the long run.

Edited January 13, 201015 yr by CarlD2

I have no skin in the Leno/Conan game although I think Conan is being screwed(I've always preferred Letterman more in the early days on NBC) but this is a classic. I give Letterman props for this. NBC is looking to launch another L&O aren't they?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msC3uu4KZbg

Oh this was great, Jane! Great!

And Jay Leno's quip about Letterman was so tacky and unnecessary. But typical, considering he's such a greedy, arrogant pig.

The "attention span of a hummingbird" seemed like a putdown to me.

No. They didn't say Carl D., you're a stupid id!ot with the attention span of a hummingbird. They said people are flooded with TV-viewing choices, tonnes of job-related issues and problems in real life. All that considered, people today don't really have patience for a lot of stuff on TV. Especially when it's bad.

Oh this was great, Jane! Great!

And Jay Leno's quip about Letterman was so tacky and unnecessary. But typical, considering he's such a greedy, arrogant pig.

LOL at that clip! But...

I really wonder what will happen with Letterman's ratings if Jay Leno gets The Tonight Show back.

From Nikki Finke:

I've learned about a meeting that began at 1:45 PM at NBC Universal about The Conan War: On one side of the room -- NBCU bigwigs Jeff Gaspin and Marc Graboff. On the other -- O'Brien's reps: manager Gavin Palone, WME agent and board member Rick Rosen, and the newest member of Team O'Brien, Hollywood litigator Patty Glaser, who was hired on Sunday and is WME's legal shark of choice. I wouldn't want to be Gaspin or Graboff right now: Gavin can be as mean as a rabid dog, Rick's agency reps 60% of the TV talent, and Glaser is a pitbull. This is bloodsport. I've learned both NBCU chief Jeff Zucker as well as Gaspin were told that, before it went out, Conan was publicly making that statement (see below). My insiders say O'Brien's reps didn't want him to do it. "They were not thrilled. They told him it would undercut his negotiating leverage," one source revealed to me. "But Conan wouldn't listen to them. He wanted to make it." When Conan read the statement to the staff, "he broke up. He began to cry," one of my insiders reveals. "Because for 17 years he was working towards The Tonight Show, and now he says he's prepared to walk away from it. That's an amazing thing. An amazing thing. But he takes very seriously the fact that The Tonight Show baton was passed to him."

Meanwhile, Hollywood creatives are already starting to show support for Conan against NBC. At the Television Critics Association confab, near the end of the session with ABC TV showrunners, TV showrunners Steve Levitan (Modern Family) and Bill Lawrence (Cougar Town) said almost in unison: "Hey, did you guys read Conan's letter?" Lawrence added: "I love it. Man, it was just ballsy. It's just the way I hoped it would be."

IMO this and NBC actions with LateNight over the past so many years has now damaged the Tonight Show franchise/brand almost beyond repair. Can they get it back? It's been such a clusterfeck. I'm not sure how much that brand even meant anymore with Carson gone.

What was impressive about Conan's statement was he really didn't make it about him. He showed respect maybe not to NBC(they don't deserve it) but to the legacy Carson left with the Tonight Show. That's something not one person at NBC or Leno have mentioned at all. I wonder if anyone at NBC or Leno even get it or even care. It exemplifies almost an era gone past.

Edited January 13, 201015 yr by JaneAusten

http://www.observer.com/2010/media/bright-spot-leno-debacle-failure-nbcs-cynical-strategy

Speaking from experience, General Electric is a terrible company to work for. This all sounds like a Jack Welch business practice.

LOL at that clip! But...

I really wonder what will happen with Letterman's ratings if Jay Leno gets The Tonight Show back.

If the negative publicity continues, David Letterman will continue to beat The Tonight Show.

Conan Tonight(per TWoP and other sources): "Hosting “The Tonight Show” has been the fulfillment of a lifelong dream for me – and I just want to say to the kids out there watching: You can do anything you want in life. Unless Jay Leno wants to do it too."

I was reading a Reuters article and it seems like we're already getting the media spin about how this will all turn out to be a success for NBC.

No matter what happens with the ratings, it was all so pointless and so ugly playing out in the public eye.

The Brits are reporting about this too, of course.

<p><span style="font-size:19.5pt;"><font face="Verdana">The Conan O'Brien and Jay Leno disaster</font></span>

<span style="font-size:10.5pt;"><b><font face="Verdana">Chris Ayres assesses how it all went wrong in the US clash of late-night TV titans</font></b></span>

<span style="font-size:9pt;"><span style="line-height:90%;"<span style="text-align:justify;"><font face="Verdana">In the realm of workplace humiliations, not much comes close to the current predicament of Conan O'Brien, the former Simpsons writer turned late-night talk-show host. The agony is all the greater given that only a few weeks ago, O'Brien was at the very pinnacle of American network television — a place so regal, so universally coveted that only four men in the history of the medium have been deemed worthy of it. He was, of course, the permanent host of NBC's The Tonight Show — an institution that dates back to the very birth of the television age in 1954. He had inherited the job from Jay Leno, who in turn got it from Johnny Carson, who held the job for 30 years. The status of the position is such that O'Brien's salary is a reported $40 million.

It's a curious quirk of American television, the 11.35pm late-night show — and one that has never really been successfully replicated in Britain (which perhaps explains why Jonathan Ross is so keen to cross the Atlantic). But its importance should not be underestimated. The format is straightforward enough: every night, the host performs a topical comic monologue in front of a live audience, introduces a few taped skits, then later (after half the audience goes to bed) interviews a couple of celebrities with movies or books to plug.

Typically, there's also a Top of the Pops-style interlude. The trick is to make the kind of jokes that your own network's news division can replay during the following day's cycle, and/or to invite guests who will embarrass themselves on air, thus creating news of your very own.

Although The Tonight Show is without question the daddy of all the late-night shows, NBC's two main rivals have their own well-known franchises: CBS has The Late Show with David Letterman (Letterman joined CBS after being infamously denied the Tonight Show job, in spite of a reported promise from Johnny Carson); and ABC has Jimmy Kimmel Live!, which was launched in 2003.

It would be fair to say that every comic in America wants to host one of these shows. The networks are well aware of this, of course, so they frequently hire late-late -night comics, who appear after midnight, and promise them that, one day, the before-midnight slot could be theirs. For 16 long years until May last year, Conan O'Brien was one of these pretenders. And then — at last! — the throne was his.

As reigns go, however, O'Brien's has been a short and bloody one. The first problem was the rapidly approaching obsolescence of network television itself, as evidenced by abject declines in ratings across the board as viewers flee to their computers, or wi-fi enabled smart phones, or Wii games consoles.

For proof, consider Oprah Winfrey's recent decision to end her daily talk show after 25 years. NBC, like all media organisations, knew that it must to do something in an attempt to halt this trend, or at least come up with a profitable enough gimmick to make up for its smaller audience. So Jeff Zucker, the company's president and chief operating officer, hatched a radical plan: let's take our biggest, most reliable star — Jay Leno, who will celebrate his 60th birthday this spring — and move him from the hallowed Tonight Show to an earlier time of 10pm!

Never mind that the 10pm slot is widely known within the broadcast industry as a "deathscape", a terrain so inhospitable, so utterly unfavourable to all forms of ratings life that only the most cockroach-like of formats, the procedural crime drama (Law & Order, CSI: Miami, etc.), can hope to survive it.

Nevertheless, Leno was moved, and O'Brien, a pale, freckled 46-year-old — whose quiff is brushed up at such an angle that it looks like a kind of advancing ginger tsunami — got the job that had reportedly been promised to him in 2004.

It must have taken all of, oh, a couple of weeks before Zucker realised that he had made a mistake of truly collossal proportions. O'Brien wasn't just crushed. He was turned to vapour. And then, to the horror of both O'Brien and NBC, the David Letterman scandal broke.

Normally, of course, the misfortune of a rival network host would be seen as cause for private celebration. But the on-air confession by Letterman that he had been playing footsie with members of his own staff (resulting in a blackmail attempt by an ex-boyfriend of one of them) turned every episode of The Late Show into a cliffhanger. For weeks, Letterman's ratings exploded. Conan disappeared. As for Leno, it was as though the man had left the country.

In less troubled times, NBC might have attempted to tough it out. Change is always hard, after all, but audiences usually come around, eventually, as they did a few years after Katie Couric was appointed anchor of the CBS Evening News. And O'Brien had some moments of inspired genius, such as hiring William Shatner (of Star Trek fame)to read out passages from Sarah Palin's memoir in the style of a beat poet. He even managed to convince Palin to make a surprise visit to the studio and get her own back by reading out sections of Shatner's equally awkward memoir in a similar style.

There were other reasons to be patient, chief among them being that NBC had just paid an astronomical sum of money to relocate O'Brien and his family from New York to Los Angeles, where the set of The Tonight Show was moved from a rather drab street in the desert suburb of Burbank to the glittering theme park of Universal Studios.

But no matter how much cash had been thrown at the Leno/O'Brien experiment, it was nothing compared with the $30 billion deal struck last month by Comcast, a cable company, to take control of the entire NBC empire (known as NBC Universal) from its former parent company, General Electric.

NBC's new owners were in no mood for a ratings experiment. While Leno's viewership at 10pm was deemed to be within an acceptable range by NBC — and his show was reportedly making money — the network's local affiliates across the country were complaining bitterly.

Leno's ratings were so bad, they said, that no one was tuning into their post-10pm news broadcasts, which meant that they were bleeding advertising revenues in addition to the money they'd already lost to the recession.

There was nothing for it: Leno had to go back to his 11.35pm slot, tail between legs. And O'Brien? He just got the greatest job in the world, only to lose it less than a year later. He has, of course, joked about it. "This weekend no one was seriously hurt, but a 6.5 earthquake hit California," he said. "The earthquake was so powerful that it knocked Jay Leno's show from ten o'clock to 11.35." But the jokes soon ended when NBC made it clear that its decision was final. Its only concession to O'Brien was that he could keep The Tonight Show name: it would simply go on air after Leno's new show. No biggie.

By all accounts, O'Brien is beyond furious. And he is refusing to budge. "I cannot express in words how much I enjoy hosting this programme and what an enormous personal disappointment it is for me to consider losing it," he said in a statement. "My staff and I have worked unbelievably hard and we are very proud of our contribution to the legacy of The Tonight Show. But I cannot participate in what I honestly believe is its destruction. For 60 years The Tonight Show has aired immediately after the late local news. I sincerely believe that delaying [it] into the next day to accommodate another comedy programme will seriously damage what I consider to be the greatest franchise in the history of broadcasting. The Tonight Show at 12.05am simply isn't The Tonight Show."

It's a dangerous gambit for O'Brien. There are rumours of a rival offer from Fox, which doesn't have a strong late night franchise, but the unfortunate facts remain that Leno is the more popular comic, and that O'Brien earns vastly more money than most Americans can hope to dream of, and so risks looking spoilt and petulant by objecting too much.

Neither is it clear that his contract was ever conditional on appearing in a certain time slot. There's no doubt about it: he was, as one late-night television show writer puts it, "shafted". If Jonathan Ross thinks he got a hard time at the BBC, he hasn't seen anything yet.</font></span></span></span>

<span style="font-size:7.5pt;"><b><font face="Tahoma">http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/tv_and_radio/article6986886.ece</font></b></span></p>

Edited January 14, 201015 yr by Sylph