LENO NBC Primetime - 10:00pm MON-FRI (Part 2)

Here's the Kimmel video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujo9FRh8nf0

 

At the peak of it's popularity "Late Night With Conan O'Brien" was pulling in viewers in the range of 2.25 and 2.5 viewers. By the end of its run (just prior to Conan's debut on "the Tonight Show" its viewing numbers had slipped to an (approximate) average of 1.75 - 1.9 million daily. Leno's daily "Tonight Show" audience of 4.75 to 5.25 million did not take the summer off. IIRC, Conan's opening week had audiences in the range of 7 million +. By the middle of the second week those figures began to erode steadily until Letterman overtook him by the end of the August. So, Conan could not (all on his own without the influence of Leno as a viewing choice) hold on to almost 5 million people who were willing to give his "Tonight Show" a chance.

 

Letterman did a once over on Bill Hicks. Tried to make nice 15 years later. Fully acknowledge letting his standup appearance getting axed from the show.

 

Conan's opening NIGHT did a 7.1, but his ratings declined immediately, with scores of 7.1, 5.0, 4.3, 3.8, 3.5, 3.1 and 2.9 for his first seven shows. Conan and Dave were neck-and-neck throughout the summer, with Dave pulling ahead for good after Jay's September debut, but with Conan still eking out a tiny victory in the 18-35 demo for the fourth quarter.

Some of those early curiosity seekers were undoubtedly Leno fans, but they had the comfort all along of knowing that their preferred host was coming back soon. It was certainly going to take time for Conan to re-build his "Tonight" audience to Leno-like levels -- just as it had taken Jay 2 years to put together Carson-like numbers and overtake Dave's "Late Show."

We can massage these numbers all day long, but the bottom line is that Conan deserved more than 7 months to build his "Tonight Show." He did an outstanding job for his bosses at NBC for 17 years, he finally got the promotion they asked him to wait five years for, and then he's not given the same adjustment period that his predecessor was granted.

 

Great!

 

Conan never should have been given The Tonight Show in the first place. His on-air persona and brand of quirky comedy simply isn't mainstream enough for NBC at 11:30. That he didn't get Leno's ratings shouldn't have surprised anyone. He will be a much better fit on Fox at 11.

 

Dave really regretted that. He probably wouldn't have waited so long if Bill hadn't died so soon after his non-appearance.

 

Completely agree. NBC's biggest fault was deciding they wanted to keep both Leno AND O'Brien, and really only having one show to put them in.

NBC should have cut bait with one or the other of them during the original contract negotiations - either (1) promise Conan the TS, and give it to him, and let Leno walk away from the network and let O'Brien develop his audience over the years, or (2) tell Conan thanks but we're sticking with Leno, and appreciate all that you did for us.

I see NBC as being the biggest at-fault party in all of this, but Leno being a weasel for not completely walking away when his TS run was over, and agreeing to do the earlier show, and then agreeing to come back to the TS, despite Conan being there.

I don't see Conan being at fault for anything - he was true to his humor all along, and I think that the audience for his TS would have grown just as Leno's did, given the same time opportunity that Leno got.

 

Once upon a time people said David Letterman was too quirky and not mainstream enough for 11:30, but he's done just fine for 16 years. Conan would have adjusted, he just needed time. I wasn't surprised that his ratings were lower than Jay's, but I wonder if his actual viewership was really that low. The ratings count butts in the couch watching at 11:30, but large portions Conan's audience are more likely to DVR the show, or catch it on Hulu, or watch highlights on YouTube or a blog.

When NBC decided to go with O'Brien at 11:30, I assumed they were planning for the long-term, allowing for an adjustment period so that he could have a long, successful tenure. Conan was a very slow burn at 12:30, but once he got his footing, he not only maintained the "Late Night" franchise that Letterman started, he arguably made it his own. So if NBC thought he was going to blow out of the gate on June 1st and keep Leno's winning streak unbroken, well, that's just one more thing that they were really wrong about.

 

You're suggesting Leno and Conan had completely different audiences when they were both on late night, which seems very unlikely. Presumably there was a lot of overlap between the 5 million people who watched Leno's Tonight and the 2.5 who watched Conan's Late Night.

Leno's audience didn't take the summer off. It's likely that the vast majority of the 2.5 million people watching Conan in the summer had been Leno watchers. It's likely that all of the 1 million viewers Dave gained in the summer were former Leno watchers. In total viewers, Conan and Dave were not neck and neck in the summer. By July, Dave was leading 4 million viewers to Conan's 2.5.

I think your theory that Leno's Show somehow hurt Conan's ratings before it was even on the air is highly implausible. I do however agree with your ultimate conclusion that 7 months is not long enough to gauge Conan's chances for success.

 

Well, just as you're presuming there WAS a lot of overlap, I'm presuming there was SOME, but not a lot. We'll never know without a lot of very expensive polling data, so we'll just have to be content with informed speculation.

Why is it "likely" that the vast majority of Conan's 2.5 million viewers were JAY'S audience? I'd think it was much more likely that the vast majority were drawn from the 2 million people who watched Conan at 12:30. That's his fan base, no? I agree that Dave gained some Leno viewers.

If I got that wrong, I apologize. I don't dispute that Dave pulled ahead of Conan very quickly -- like, within a week or so. I thought the total numbers were closer for longer, but I was probably thinking of the 18-35 demo numbers.

Fair enough.

 

Dead-on:

http://newsroom.mtv.com/2010/01/29/jay-leno-oprah/

 

That's pretty much how I see the numbers. My father who is 83 years old has been watching the Tonight Show for decades. After Johnny was forced to retire thanks to Helen and Jay, my Dad fell in to watching Leno. When Leno moved to the 10pm slot, that where my Dad was. He wasn't watching Conan or Dave. He finds them too edgy.

 

"Darned kids----get off of my TV show!"

Evan

 

If there was not a lot of overlap between Leno's Tonight Show viewers and Conan's Late Night viewers, wouldn't that mean the concept of the lead-in is invalid, which goes against conventional wisdom? You're suggesting that most Leno viewers watched Tonight and then shut off the TV, while most Conan viewers were watching something else and then switched over to Conan at 12:35? Based on what we know about lead-ins, that doesn't seem likely. It seems far more likely to me that a substantial amount of Leno's 5 million left their TVs on the same channel and watched Conan afterwards. I'm sure there were some Conan viewers who didn't watch Leno, but my guess is they were a small minority.

I think it's likely that a significant amount of Conan's Tonight Show viewers were former Leno watchers, because the alternative is that millions of viewers just stopped watching TV for the three summer months, and that seems pretty implausible to me. We know that Dave gained a million viewers... it seems reasonable to conclude pretty much all of them were former Leno watchers. So if Leno's and Conan's Tonight audiences were mutually exclusive, that would mean the other 4 million of Leno's audience either stopped watching TV or completely dispersed among all the other viewing options during the summer months. I think it's far more likely that a good chunk of them continued watching Tonight with Conan. It seems implausible that all of Jay's audience would reject Conan. It seems more likely that about half of them would, and the other half would stick around.

One more thing about your theory of diminishing returns... if that was the case, then one would expect Conan's and Letterman's total viewerships to have declined in September when Leno premiered, which was not the case. If nothing else, one would at minimum expect the million former Leno viewers Dave gained to leave him since Leno was back. But that didn't happen. Presumably this means there were a million people watching Leno who then also watched Letterman. If it was true that Leno was diminishing the audience for late-night talk shows, why wasn't there an across-the-board late-night viewership decline when his show premiered?

 

Again, we'll never know without a team of social scientists and extensive polling data, but it seems plausible to me (if not likely) that if Conan's viewers watched ANY late-night show before his, it would be Letterman's. I just don't see a lot of cross-over going on between Jay's audience and Conan's. I'm sure there was SOME, but I honestly have no idea how much. Maybe it's just me, but I have a hard time imagining a large group of people thinking that both Jay AND Conan are funny.

I'm inclined to agree with the logic of what you're saying, but if HALF of Jay's audience stuck with Conan's "Tonight Show," that would mean that NONE of Conan's "Late Night" audience watched him at all! That seems pretty unlikely to me. Since we're ALL guessing at this, I'll refine my guess: Of Jay's 5 million viewers, I'll say that 1 million went to Dave (a number we can be fairly confident in), 1 million stayed with Conan, 500,000 switched to "Nightline" (no numbers on this, but "Nightline" has been doing well), 2 million turned off their TVs in protest and waited for Jay to come back, and 500,000 died of old age or forgot where the remote was. (I'm kidding -- KIDDING!!) Of Conan's "Late Night" viewers, I'll guess that 1-1.5 million stuck with him, and the rest were either already committed to Stewart/Colbert or they checked it out online.

Well, if you don't want to accept that Leno's and Conan's audiences were mutually exclusive, than you can't posit that Jay's 10:00 and 11:30 audiences were identical. I've been calling them a "block" audience for convenience because the numbers were so similar, but if you want to get all nuanced about it, we have to admit that probably only SOME of Jay's "Tonight" audience watched "The Jay Leno Show," with the rest of the 4-5 million being made up of new converts -- perhaps nursing home residents who were accustomed to the game room's TVs being turned off at 11 pm. (Again, I KID!) But anyway, the million people who started watching Dave COULD have been people who watched Jay at 11:30 but did NOT watch him at 10:00.

But you raise a good point about my "diminishing returns" theory and its effect on DAVE'S show. I'm inclined to believe that the theory only affects shows on the SAME network -- in other words, I don't think Craig Ferguson's ratings are diminished by being on later than "Tonight" on another network; I think they are diminished by being on after DAVE on CBS. I don't know if that holds water, though; I honestly haven't studied the science behind the Law of Diminishing Returns much further than looking it up on Wikipedia to confirm what it meant.

Regardless, this brings me back to another favorite pinata of mine: Regardless of how we play with the numbers, the fact remains that there were essentially TWO "Tonight" shows on NBC every day from September through December. Isn't it plainly obvious that this would split the potential "Tonight" audience, rather than unite it? This happens with successful dramas, when the creators milk a successful show by spinning off new ones, while fretting about "diluting" the strength of the original show. Is it a coincidence that "Law & Order" grew weaker as they spun off more versions of it? And even then, NBC was never stupid enough to put TWO "L&O" shows on the same night! (Or maybe they were -- I don't watch "L&O"...) Putting Jay's show on at 10 -- essentially unchanged from his "Tonight" show -- diluted the brand and splintered the audience. I don't need demo breakdowns or polling data to believe THAT.

 

Well, it's official. You guys have now analysed the Tonight Show Wars more than the NBC programming executives ever did!

 

And all for FREE too...

 

Well, only if one accepts your premise that their audiences were mutually exclusive, which I don't. If I were going to guess, I'd guess that at least 75% of Conan's Late Night audience was also watching Leno's Tonight Show. I know it's hard to imagine anyone liking both Leno's and Conan's approaches to comedy, but I personally know at least one person who does. So there's your anecdotal evidence. If she's out there, there could be millions of others like her. Given what we know about lead-ins, it just seems implausible that two back-to-back shows on the same channel could have mutually exclusive audiences.

Not necessarily. I still think that if that were true, then Conan should have seen a significant drop-off in total viewership when Leno premiered, and he did not. Why didn't Leno's show dramatically decrease Conan's viewership when it premiered?

 

How much lower than "crappy" can you get? Conan's ratings were already unprecedentedly low; the damage was done when NBC announced that Jay was coming back at 10:00.

Incidentally, Jason, I'm enjoying this, but you're frustrating to debate with. I give you these long, thought-out responses to ALL your points, and you pick one or two little things you think you can knock back at me and ignore the rest. How 'bout giving me a little, man??

 

Nothing could be more obvious than the conclusion that the presence of a de facto Tonight Show at 10:00 cannibalized the ratings for the actual Tonight Show at 11:30. Once Mr. & Mrs. Middle America have watched Jay at 10:00, does anyone really expect them to stay up and watch Conan at 11:30?

I'm sure the TV junkies in this thread often watch multiple late-night monologues, but the average person who has watched Jay's monologue almost certainly isn't going to stay up an extra hour-and-half to watch a second monologue, which, by the very nature of the format, is inevitably going to deal with the same topical news items.

 

So people that used to fall asleep around midnight and now falling asleep around 11?

A million of them migrated to Dave. Are the other million or two watching the news, cable, tv on DVD or something else taped on their Tivo?

 

The bottom line here is literally the financial bottom line.. Conan didn't pull in the numbers. Is that Jay Leno's fault? Not really. Maybe it was a stupid programming move on the part of NBC but Leno didn't tell them to put him on at 10:00 every night. That was a network decision. What is Jay supposed to do, be a nice guy and refuse? When is the last time you refused to do what your boss told you to do because you felt sorry for a co-worker?

Conan underperformed. If Conan's TS ratings were off 10% - 20% after seven months it may have been a different story but he was off much more than that. It sucks for Conan's fans but I think everyone gets that this was an NBC f**k-up, at least they should..

 

I think a lot of people are falling asleep around 11, actually. Speaking only for myself, I often fall asleep around 9 or 10 on the nights I don't have to work. When I was in college, it was no big thing to stay up to catch Letterman at 12:30 - I would routinely be up until 2 or 3 a.m. anyway. Now that I'm an adult with multiple jobs, yeah, I fall asleep earlier.

And, yes, many of the millions of people who are still awake after 11 are watching Sportscenter, Stephen Colbert, a DVD, TiVo, surfing the net, etc. This is obviously a separate factor in the decline of the ratings for the late-night talk shows above and beyond the internecine warfare between Jay and Conan on NBC.

When I was a kid, you had two options - watch Johnny or read a book.