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Originally Posted by Barefootsies
It took Leno YEARS to take over after Carson handed the show over. I want to say for 2.5 to 3 years the show was floundering before it finally started to take off and gain traction. Back then people bitched about Leno for not a few months,... YEARS.
Frankly, while I do not care for any of them, however that said, they need to refer to the history after Carson when Leno took over and how long it took for people to accept him.
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To me the difference is that Carson chose to retire. He wanted to stop doing the show so they needed to find someone new to take over. Yes, it did take Leno a long time to get the ratings he had. He was losing every night to Letterman until the night he had Huge Grant on after Grant had been caught with a hooker. He was number one that night and ever since.
Leno didn't want to leave. Conan's contract was up and he was being made offers from other networks. NBC didn't want to lose him so they promised he would get the Tonight show within 5 years and re-signed him. They also signed Jimmy Fallon to a big contract (I read in the area of 10-15 million) just to put him on hold so he wouldn't do another show and could take over for Conan. I think they assumed Leno would either retire or be down in the ratings five years from when they re-signed Conan. Of course Leno was still number one and still wanted to do the show.
So they took the number one guy and fired him, basically, then realized they fucked up and gave him a prime time show only to see the affiliates unhappy with the prime time show and Conan not getting the same ratings as Leno did. Had Leno just retired and left the biz, they may very well have had more patience with Conan and let him try to develop an audience, but I think they felt they could just switch it all back and everything would be the same. There is no guarantee that Leno will go back to being number one. If he doesn't go back to number one pretty quickly I wonder how patient NBC will be with him. Especially if Conan ends up at Fox or somewhere else in a competing time slot.
The only real late night show I watch is Kimmel unless either of the others has someone I really want to see on. I don't really care who hosts the tonight show and who doesn't. I'm just interested in the debacle. You would think someone who has become the head of a network would have been able to see that this would have happened. I think it goes to show when you start to just take the audience for granted you find out that they are still able to operate the remote and change the channel and if you don't give them what they want, they will find it somewhere else. That could be a good lesson for any business, not just TV.