The GirlAlive Blog

Without Leno, Conan had good ratings

March 17, 2010 on 2:13 pm | In Current Events, Movies and TV and Stuff | 1 Comment

I’m just making a small aside here for a minute to apply some numbers and facts to the statement that Leno made about Conan having poor ratings back when he did his Oprah interview. I bring this up because some people actually believed him that Conan was failing. Let me show you an interesting chart.

Conan consistently beat Letterman in the ratings, and he was in fact gaining more of an audience in early September. Then The Jay Leno Show premiered on the 14th of September. Conan’s ratings continued upward for about a week, while people checked out Leno’s new show. Then the ratings plummetted downward when everyone stopped watching Leno. The truth is that Conan was on a trend of beating Letterman soundly until his lead-in changed and it was only after the Jay Leno Show started running at 10 that Letterman ever beat him in the ratings.

Don’t forget, the Jay Leno Show was cancelled because the affiliates complained that no one was watching the local news anymore. As Andy Richter pointed out on Regis and Kelly, the local news didn’t suddenly get bad. The primetime lead in was crap. Most people weren’t watching, and the few that were turned off their tvs and went to bed before the news. And yet Leno tried to say that Conan damaged the Tonight Show with poor ratings, even though it is fairly obvious that the poor ratings are directly due to Leno.

I still think that Leno is not entirely the bad guy in this. He’s selfish, and he’s a liar, and his word means nothing. But let’s not forget that the real villain behind this is Jeff Zucker. He has no background in scripted entertainment and he doesn’t belong at the head of NBC. He singlehandedly drove the former number 1 network down to number 4, where it has been since 2005. He is an incompetent moron. He should not be wearing a suit and giving orders from a big corner office. He should be wearing a paper hat and operating a deep fryer.