A couple of folks have e-mailed me lately expressing their utter confusion at all the current press about O'Brien, Leno and Letterman. A lot of that is due to reporters who are trying to gin up a horse race where there really isn't one. Conan is competing with those other two guys in some ways but not in others. In terms of ratings, his competition is more like Jon and Stephen than Jay and Dave…but really, the true competition for Conan is whether when his show settles down to its ongoing ratings level, it seems to be cost-effective for TBS. At the moment, all indications are that he's succeeding well in that area. No one seems to know how much his series costs but it is delivering a significant increase in viewers (most notably younger viewers) and that will still be the case even if his ratings drop by half. TBS is also probably considering the value of Mr. O'Brien to their channel in other ways, attracting viewers to its other programming and helping rebrand the station as one that does more than air old King of Queens reruns. Hiring Conan is looking more and more like one of the smartest things they could have done.
Dave and Jay are neck-and-neck. Jay won last week. Dave won the week before…but neither win is huge or that meaningful despite what headline hype might have you believe. The difference may be no more than a couple of better guest bookings. Next week, Jay has George W. Bush on and that will probably get him some serious tune-in for that. I suspect both shows are going to have to start avoiding the kind of star who makes the tour of all the guest chairs, or perhaps pressuring them to be more selective. Dave had Russell Crowe on last Wednesday and on Thursday, Crowe was on with Regis and Kelly Ripa. Next week, Crowe does Leno on Monday and both Craig Ferguson and Ellen on Wednesday. Harrison Ford is hitting darn near every show over about a three-week period and so are Denzel Washington, Cher and Billy Bob Thornton. Wanna know one reason ratings are down for all these programs? There it is, folks. The same guests all the time. If you miss 'em one show, you can catch them on another…and if you miss 'em on all the shows, you can watch excerpts online.
Back in the late sixties, there was a brief period when there were four late talk shows — Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin, Dick Cavett and David Frost — all emanating from New York. It is said that because of staggered tape times, there was one night when Jerry Lewis appeared on all four. I can't swear that's true and I suspect it's not…but there were certainly times when it seemed like that kind of thing was happening. Doesn't it seem that way these days?
In any case, Leno and Letterman are in a dead heat. You could interpret that as a failure of Leno's since he used to beat Dave regularly by wide margins. Or you could interpret it as Jay making a respectable bounce-back from his 10 PM disaster and the drubbing his reputation took when he was being blamed for Conan's ouster. As I said here a couple times, I thought that characterization was unfair and the new book by Bill Carter bears that out. In interviews, Carter is saying that friends suggested he call his new book The Late Shaft but he didn't because he didn't think either guy, Jay or Conan, really got the shaft.
I do not think that either host, Letterman or Leno, is going anywhere for the foreseeable future. Somewhere in the corridors of their respective networks, someone is probably fantasizing about shoving the old guy at 11:35 aside and bringing in some hot, young star who will revolutionize late night and make it once again an exciting and more lucrative arena. But the hot, young star who seems so bankable in that position that you'd dump what you currently have…that replacement does not exist. He or she would have to be pretty damn hot to warrant the gamble.
If I were in charge at CBS or NBC now, I would try to get my 11:35 guy to agree to guest hosts one night a week. Letterman is already running either a rerun on Friday night or a show he's taped the previous Monday that might as well be a rerun. As long as he felt confident that he wasn't allowing the on-air audition of the person who'd knock him off the other four days, he might go for it. Leno is famous for never wanting to take a day off. He once proposed to NBC that they assemble an alternate crew to work his show so he could give the regular staff its time off but still come in himself and do a show every night with no reruns. Still, in the Carter book, he claims to be open to the idea of guest hosts at some point. Right now, I think these shows don't need guest hosts so much to scout for new desk jockeys but because Dave and Jay are just plain overexposed and have lost the capacity to surprise us. That was one of the reasons Mr. Carson didn't work a five-a-night week and why he forced NBC to discontinue its weekend Tonight Show reruns. Johnny wasn't concerned about giving a tryout to potential replacements. He just thought audiences would get sick of him if he was on every night and that he'd burn out too rapidly. Someone needs to remind the current hosts about this…though I'm skeptical either would agree. And heck, even if they said yes, what we'd probably wind up with is guest hosts interviewing Russell Crowe, Harrison Ford, Cher and Denzel Washington.