Back in this deathless posting, I said, of the Late Night Wars, "It's not that easy to say how right or wrong NBC was to oust Conan O'Brien from The Tonight Show and reinstall Jay Leno. You have to theorize as to where Conan's ratings would be if he still had that gig." Jonathan Andrew Sheen takes issue with me…
I think that leaves something out. You also have to think about what would have happened with NBC, Jay, and the 10:00 ratings. The relationship with Leno was clearly important to NBC, and his 10:00 show was clearly not performing up to standards NBC could live with. ("Tanking" seems far to mild a word. What Leno was doing was to a Tank what the S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier is to a Tank, IIRC.) I've always seen that particular dance as having as much to do with saving 10:00 PM as with boosting the ratings of Tonight.
And now, I'll take issue with Jonathan Andrew Sheen: I don't think that's quite it. That is, I think too much was made of how the failure of Leno's 10 PM show impacted Conan's 11:35 numbers.
Keep in mind, foist of all, that the Conan O'Brien Tonight Show went on the air June 1, 2009. NBC was probably unhappy with the ratings by the end of the second week and that wasn't because of Leno's 10 PM show. It didn't even debut until September 14. Yeah, Leno's failure at ten didn't help but it's not like Conan was doing great before Jay came on and then plunged.
The thing to remember here is that NBC has long had a severe 10 PM problem. When Jay was hosting The Tonight Show, he had lousy lead-ins. He has lousy lead-ins now. He will probably have lousy lead-ins next season, as well. It comes with the job. One of the main reasons NBC even offered Jay the 10 PM time slot is that they knew they didn't have anything else to put there that was going to knock off the competition. The idea with The Jay Leno Show was basically, "Hey, if we're going to flop at 10, let's flop with cheaper programming." In that context, Leno's show made a little more sense.
It actually performed close to expectations insofar as the network was concerned. The problem was that no one had anticipated the dire impact it would have on the newscasts that followed, thereby costing the affiliates a key portion of their incomes. A friend of mine in programming (not at NBC) said to me, "If Jay had done well and Conan had done poorly, it would have been bad but not a total catastrophe. Same if Conan had done well and Jay had bombed. It was having both fail at once that created an intolerable situation for the affiliates." They were used to losing at 10 PM. They weren't used to losing at 11:35.
My friend went on, "They didn't know how to fix 10 PM. They still don't. In some ways, it's worse than ever there. But they thought they knew how to fix 11:35…reinstate the guy who used to routinely win the time slot." Leno's not winning as clearly as he did before but he is winning…usually. The last week or two, he was #1 in total viewers and he tied Conan's numbers for the same week in 2009 with the 18-49 demographic. That ain't bad. I am less and less a fan of what Leno does on The Tonight Show but he is doing the job of pulling in the numbers…even, some nights, with lead-ins as weak as or weaker than The Jay Leno Show.