Hello, all! I’ve come back out of the darkness. Now, in light of recent events in Haiti, it seems trivial for me to talk about matters of little importance like media and television but, this is a media studies blog, and I have nothing in particular to say about the media’s coverage of the earthquake in Haiti. All I can say about the situation is that I encourage you to donate and help out as much as you can. I donated at http://www.yele.org, you can also, naturally, go to http://www.redcross.org. Do all you can, please. Now, while I cannot help the current crisis situation, I can lighten the mood by talking about something funny today: the amazing mismanagement of a major broadcast network.
Now, since I intend for this blog to be an academic blog, I always try to keep somewhat of an academic distance in my writing. Whether I succeed or fail in that regard is up to debate. However, in this entry, I find myself struggling to maintain my impartiality. What I am talking about, of course, is NBC’s astounding mismanagement of both The Jay Leno Show and the subsequent Jay Leno/Conan O’Brien controversy.
As NBC planned to move the failing Jay Leno Show to Leno’s old 11:30 PM timeslot, Internet fan support for Conan O’Brien, who has said he will not do a Tonight Show at 12:05 AM, became so strong it prompted a New York Times article.1 The article estimates fan support of Conan on Twitter beating out fan support for Leno by more than a 50-to-1 ratio. With support of Conan getting so much media attention, NBC obviously has to be aware that fans are favoring O’Brien. Yet, in a stunningly odd PR move yesterday, Dick Ebersol chose to ignore fan support for Conan and publicly blame Conan O’Brien for the entire fiasco.2 According to him, O’Brien failed to take Ebersol’s advice on how to broaden the appeal of the show. How, exactly, this accounts for the low ratings of The Jay Leno Show, or how, exactly, advice from Dick Ebersol, who caused ratings for Saturday Night Live to drop when he took over that late night comedy show in 19813, was never explained in the article.
As I have been writing this article, I have now found sources online reporting that Jay Leno will officially be taking back The Tonight Show, with Conan exiting NBC with a 30 million dollar severance package. Obviously, as witnessed by the Ebersol interview, NBC and Conan are not parting ways on good terms. If one were to place blame for the entire debacle, I would say that the blame rests on the shoulders of the network themselves, as the situation comes about as a result of several strikingly poor decisions on the part of the network. While the network tried to pride themselves on being able to take risks, the series of that led to the creation and ultimate failure of The Jay Leno Show can be better described as reckless.
The network first announced in September 2004 that they would be replacing Jay Leno with Conan O’Brien starting in 2009. The network’s decision seemed strange since Leno had been winning his time slot. The best explanation for the decision, as posed by Leno himself, is that, perhaps, NBC predicted a decline in the ratings within five years. At the time, Leno agreed to the change without any fuss, and the plan to transition to the new host in 2009 was put in place. The problem is that five years is a long time to think over a decision, and during that time, Leno started to regret his agreement to step down from the show and started entertaining offers from competing networks. Worried that Jay Leno, who had been consistently beating his late night competitor David Letterman for many years, would become Conan’s new competition in the 11:30 timeslot, NBC offered him a show in the 10 PM weekday timeslot five nights a week.4
No network had aired the same show in prime time five nights of the week since the Dumont network aired Captain Video and His Video Rangers from 1949 to 1955. While it seems like a risky move to do something as radical as putting the same show on in prime time five nights a week, the economic logic behind the show was pretty sound. While cable and premium cable are becoming more and more popular, broadcast networks consistently beat out cable networks in prime time ratings. While we now live in a five network era, the two younger networks, Fox and The CW, do not have any programming on in the 10-11 PM time slot. Therefore, NBC is pretty much guaranteed to finish at least third in the ratings every day in that time slot. Thus, they can easily aim for a modest ratings success in the 10-11 timeslot rather than trying to win their timeslot and simply make a less expensive show, like a talk show, to increase their profit margin.
While this is a sound strategy on a national level, NBC failed to take into account the effect this would have on a local level. The majority of the revenue for a local affiliate station comes from that ever important timeslot between the end of prime time and the beginning of late night at 11:00 to 11:30 (or earlier for a Fox or CW station) where stations air the local news. While a third place finish of a cheap show may be acceptable to NBC on a national level, it just was not okay as a lead in for local affiliates who saw their local news numbers tank due to a low-rated lead in.5 The affiliates even had a name for this problem: “The Leno Effect.”
It would be unfair to claim that NBC had no way of predicting that this would happen as they did get an early indicator from my own local NBC affiliate, WHDH 7 in Boston. The Boston affiliate originally claimed that they would not show The Jay Leno Show when it aired because they were afraid that it would kill the ratings for their local news. They planned to, instead, push their local news to the 10:00 timeslot. The affiliate only backed down when NBC threatened to pull all programming from WHDH.6 Still, this was not where NBC made their biggest mistake. Their biggest mistake was in the fact that, while trying to change the face of prime time television, they failed to give themselves an out if anything went wrong.
Whether it was because they thought their plan for the show was so economically sound or because they wanted to appease Leno, NBC made a strange move when they gave Leno his own primetime show, promising to keep the show on for at least one year regardless of ratings.7 Despite NBC’s claim that the Jay Leno Show was like launching 5 new shows in prime time, this contract hardly seems like the contract for a new show. A new show would almost never be guaranteed a full season run regardless of ratings, and most new shows in prime time are not running through the summer either. Leno was guaranteed a full year of episodes, five nights a week, which further shows that the network was thinking nationally and not locally. While the network could always afford to take the hit of finishing in third every night as long as the budget for the show itself was pretty cheap, local affiliates certainly could not handle that kind of ratings bust for a year straight.
Thus, Conan’s fate was sealed. Despite the support for O’Brien, NBC had no choice but to move Leno somewhere else in their schedule, or else force their affiliates into bankruptcy. The 30 million dollar severance package to Conan O’Brien was, in essence, the cheapest option that NBC had available to them under the circumstances. What becomes the biggest shame of all this, though, is that O’Brien, who worked for years behind Leno with the promise of being given the prestigious title of Tonight Show host, and uprooted his entire family and moved them to Los Angeles, is being forced to let go of one of his life’s dreams because NBC backed themselves into a corner. As O’Brien said on what will now be one of his last few episodes of The Tonight Show: “I just want to say to the kids out there watching: You can do anything you want in life. Unless Jay Leno wants to do it, too.”
