Quote:
Originally Posted by icecube
Did they chose Jay at 10pm though? I thought his ratings were in the toilet which is what caused this whole fiasco in the first place.
|
His ratings were higher at 10 than they were at 11:35, and I'd assume that most of those viewers were people who had previously watched the Tonight Show. It's just that what passes for good ratings at 11:35 doesn't cut it at 10. Also, people who watch shows like Law & Order are going to watch the entire show and still have NBC on when the local news starts, but a lot of the people who watched Leno at 10 would turn it off after the monologue or after the guests that they were interested in (just like people do with the Tonight Show), and they'd be long gone by the time the local news started. That's why the affiliates complained, and Leno at 10 had to go. It would have been interesting to see what would have happened if they'd cancelled Leno at 10 then given Conan another 6 months or so to see if he could bring those viewers back, but he never got the chance. Apparently a big reason for that was that Leno's contract was much better than Conan's, and the payout for cancelling him outright would have been more than double what it cost to buy out Conan.