Conan Out of Hospital, Returns to Show Monday

Looks like late-night host is no major windfall for TBS

(NEWSER) - George Lopez's late-night talk show got booted to midnight to make room for Conan O'Brien. Sacrifices have to be made in the quest for fortune, right? Eh, maybe. Turns out Conan is barely more popular than Lopez Tonight was. The redhead's TBS show officially turned one this week, and the first-year stats are nothing to write home about. Yahoo reports that he averaged 952,000 viewers a night, to Lopez's 911,000, per Nielsen. That's a serious drop from Conan's 4 million-viewer debut. More»

O'Brien's TV viewership has plunged 60% since show debut

(NEWSER) - Conan O'Brien is bombing on late-night TV and it's hitting TBS hard in the pocketbook. Viewership of his program has plunged some 60% since its debut last fall. TBS forked out a $12 million annual salary for the funnyman and boasted that Conan was going to be the "building block" of a network revival, reports the Wall Street Journal . But the Time Warner-owned channel isn't throwing in the towel yet, and is instead investing more bucks on program production and lead-in shows to woo viewers. Officials say they're committed to the show at least through next year. More»

Unless you're the dissenting Washington Post critic

(NEWSER) - Conan’s back —but how’d he do? Most critics were happy with his TBS debut:

• “The first lines of this new chapter were promising, if not quite the fulfillment of his last wild nights at NBC, when caution was thrown to the wind ,” writes Robert Lloyd in the Los Angeles Times . “The shift from broadcast to basic cable … neither inhibited nor liberated him,” his new smaller set suits him, and he still has Andy Richter—“the person who brings out the best in O'Brien.”
• “Looking for all the world like a free man just sprung from maximum security, he actually seemed joyful to be creating his own show,” writes Lloyd Grove on the Daily Beast . “He didn’t lean on desperate gimmicks or overwrought pyrotechnics.” He “just was funny—or ‘Very Funny,’ as the TBS slogan would have it.”

Firing jokes abound in TBS debut

(NEWSER) - Conan O'Brien returned to late-night TV last night and, to nobody's surprise, the firing jokes flew fast and furious. "Welcome to my second first show. I know what you’re thinking—it’s that guy from Twitter,” O’Brien told the TBS audience in his series-opening monologue. "People asked me why I named the show Conan. I did it so I'd be harder to replace," the host quipped. More»

Questions loom as O'Brien debuts on TBS

(NEWSER) - As Conan O'Brien returns to TV tonight on TBS, 10 months after the fiasco at NBC that ended his tenure as the Tonight Show host, questions abound:

• Perhaps the biggest of those questions is whether or not Conan can take his phenomenal success on Twitter and translate it back into TV ratings, the Los Angeles Times notes.
• Conan isn't directly competing with rival Jay Leno, but his 11pm cable slot pits him against two much more challenging opponents: Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, both riding high from their hugely popular Washington rallies, reports the New York Times .