Debate Rages Over Leno Move

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»

...two years, he says casually

(NEWSER) - What will David Letterman be doing in two years? No one knows, but one thing he apparently won't be doing: hosting the Late Show. He let that little tidbit slip casually while interviewing Howard Stern last night. The clip in the gallery ends, of course, just before the comment, but Splitsider reports that later in the interview Letterman tells Stern he'll only do the Late Show for two more years. (You might not hear the announcement in this clip, but you will hear a lot of Leno-bashing from Stern .) 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.”

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 .

Unless, of course, he wants to appear as the musical guest...

(NEWSER) - Conan O’Brien’s new show debuts Monday, and there’s one person you should never expect to see as a guest: Jay Leno. “No, there are certain things I will not do, regardless of the price,” O’Brien tells Playboy , although he adds that Leno “can come as the musical guest, because that I want to see.” O’Brien adds that his goal for his new show is “eight months on the air. All I want to do is break my Tonight Show record.” More»