NBC’s veteran The Tonight Show with Jay Leno rose to 6.5 million viewers for the week of Jan. 15 (its biggest audience in 13 months), with a 2.0/ 8 among adults 18-49. Comparably, that outdelivered CBS’ The Late Show with David Letterman (Viewers: 4.1 million; A18-49: 1.3/ 6) by 2.1 million viewers and 54 percent among adults 18-49.
This is impressive considering that NBC is weak in primetime compared to CBS. NBC has quite the dilemma on its hands - will they really push out Leno in 2009 and replace him with the less-broadly-appealing Conan O'Brien? "Tonight" is a big cash cow for NBC, and its ratings would almost certainly take a hit if it were hosted by O'Brien, who might not have the same middle-America appeal as Leno. And there's lots of speculation that Leno will replace "Nightline" on ABC if NBC goes through with its succession plan.
Ultimately, NBC needs to decide whether it wants to compete with Leno or Conan on another network; whether or not they want to pay Conan a significant penalty if he doesn't get "Tonight"; and how badly the network would look if they went back on their promise to Conan. You just know NBC is hoping that Leno will walk away quietly and retire from the late-night wars.
I don't think Jay will just walk away. He is much more popular than Conan. With Conan, NBC is getting another Letterman, who appeals to a lot less people. Personally, I'd let Conan go to CBS or wherever and find a person who can attract a much larger crowd. Maybe that hilarious Craig Ferguson on CBS or possibly Jon Stewart (although he might be a bit annoying to some as well).
Personally, I enjoy Conan immensely more than Leno, but I still watch Leno almost every night. Conan certainly appeals to the younger audience more so than Leno, but who knows how well he will appeal to the older audiences. Is NBC actually forcing Leno out, though? I had thought that Leno had wanted to retire, thus making the sensible move and bringing Conan to 11:30. Interesting.
I think NBC should be more worried about who's going to replace Conan rather than worrying about Leno's replacement. Carson Daly just plain sucks IMO, and would likely fail miserably. Someone that would be an interesting choice to replace Conan is Tom Green. I watched a webisode of his daily online talk show and I was moderately entertained. If he actually got some good guests on there and an actual budget I think he could do decent enough.
Conan's humor certainly isn't for everyone (and that isn't a bad thing at all). I enjoy the goofier humor that he does over the more straightforward stuff that Leno seems to partake in. Leno is good (well, better than anyone else in the time slot), but I just enjoy Conan's goofier style and overall pretty weird sense of humor.
You'd get a much more interesting and entertaining interview from Conan than with Jay. Jay is probably the worst interviewer in the talk show business, who just happened to have ripped off aspects of the Howard Stern show. I mean, he has Stuttering John as an announcer - c'mon!
One time, years ago, Penelope Cruz was a guest on Leno. I know her English is terrible (can't believe she's an Oscar nominee - one of the worst actresses in Hollywood) but she didn't even say a gosh darn thing - she seemed very intimidated. Why bother going on a show if you know nothing will come out of it? Certainly didn't help with Leno's boring extreme softball questions plus his comment to her that the "interview" was great because she got through it!
I was surprised to hear that CBS had renewed David Letterman's contract with the network recently. Considering that the gulf between Letterman and Leno continues to grow, CBS should really be looking to finding Letterman's successor instead of locking him into a contract extension.
A Leno defection to ABC would certainly create an upheavel in late-night not seen since Carson's retirement. Leno on ABC would likely put that network into the late-night game, similar to how Letterman lifted CBS. However, a Leno series would force ABC into either moving Jimmy Kimmel back to 12:30 or canceling his program entirely.
I would not be surprised to see ABC cancel "Nightline", regarless of a possible Leno move. The newsmagazine has been in danger of cancellation for years - even before Ted Koppel's retirement. The network openly flirted with dumping it in favor of Letterman a couple years back, after all.
I agree that ratings for the "Tonight Show" will likely decline if Conan O'Brien succeeds Leno as host. O'Brien will probably alienate the older audience, possibly sending them to CBS and Letterman.
Finally, this is off topic, but if/when CBS decides to retire Letterman, perhaps they should look at Spike Feresten. His Fox late-night Saturday "Talk Show" is very Letterman-esque.
