I stumbled across a news story about Leno vs. O'Brien and it made me sit up and take notice of the times these 'late show' style programmes are on.

My question is, do folks in the US actually stay up until 2AM to watch these shows? By contrast in the UK the only thing on at that time of night is either a show of limited appeal, a repeat of a prime time show with in vision signing for the deaf or possibly a film. From reading the news item, it seems the shows are really popular. Do people in the US need less sleep? Or do you simply record it and watch it the day after. I'd never be able to get up for work if I was watching TV until 2AM.

What show is on at 2:00 am ? Isn't Conan on at 11:00 PM ?

The 2AM stuff is the less valued programming by the network to be sure. There are a lot of people in the US with varying work schedules, so it's completely up in the air in terms of who's watching. At least if you're not the folks at Neilson.

The most valuable post-prime time "talk show" window is 11:30pm to 12:30am. These programs are on after the local news which goes from 11-11:30 or 11:35.

Viewership is probably pretty high but obviously not as high as during the 8pm-11pm prime time block. That's why the programs are talk shows which are comparatively cheap to produce versus sitcoms and 1-hour scripted shows. They're filmed in the afternoons, so the hosts, guests and live-audiences don't actually need to stay up.

This whole cock-up is because NBC have been managed by sub-human cretins for years who obviously don't know much about selecting, showing and keeping ratings-winning programming.

Well, there's a first and second tier (my terminology) of late-night shows. Letterman's show (The Late Show) and The Tonight Show, currently being fought over by Leno and O'Brien, are the first-tier shows. They start at 11:35PM (on the East and West coasts) and last until 12:30AM. Then there's a second-tier of shows that start at 12:30AM and run until 1:30AM. These tend to be geared at people who are likely to be up late: namely, college students. They tend to be more offbeat and subversive in comparison to the more conservative 11:35 shows. NBC actually has a third program that runs from 1:30 to 2:30.

It's notable that Letterman's show was the 12:30-1:30AM show after The Tonight Show when Johnny Carson was the host there. When he got passed over by NBC for the hosting duties, he defected to CBS in direct competition with his former lead-in show. Conan was then hired by NBC to run Letterman's old show. Leno did not have a late, late, show; he was the regular "guest host" during the end of Carson's stint on The Tonight Show. Carson had entered into a phase of pre-retirement and had Leno do one show a week.

Have you seen how much coffee they drink?

Peter

The news article mentioned Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and Last Call with Carson Daly as being on after Conan. Wikipedia tells me that Last Call starts at 1:36AM Eastern.

Bitt, you're thinking of SNL which is 1 hour and 30 minutes long.

Yeah, I went back and fixed my times.

I believe the posting population of this BBS is likely greater than the viewership of the Carson Daly show and perhaps 80% of the Jimmy Fallon show.

Fallon routinely has as guest some dude from the Engadget site. Does that sound like programming for a wide audience? They're basically filler, and likely just showing a movie would probably be a wiser idea.

This whole mess with NBC wanting to bump shows, as Bitt mentions, juxtaposes beautifully with their passing over of Letterman for the Tonight Show back in 1992. Putting Leno on every night at 10pm was the rough equivalent of just shutting down their broadcast from 10-11. Even Fox affiliates with syndicated programming (Seinfeld, etc..) probably had higher viewership.

Didn't they have Conan on the tonight show because Leno wanted to retire ? He must have got board fast.

I'll stick with The Golden Girls and skip them all.

It's unclear to me whether Leno wanted to "retire" or if NBC asked him to. There's some indication that NBC asked him to, in order to hang onto Conan by promising him The Tonight Show in five years' time, and they now want Leno back because Leno's primetime show is performing poorly and Conan is performing poorly in comparison to when Leno was on.

I fear that this may be the end of a fifty-five year dynasty. I can't imagine any viewer being pleased with any outcome at this point.

Axing Leno's show and not giving him a new one would set everything straight again. Simple.

If Leno had wanted to retire, why would NBC give him a new show with a 10pm time slot? Every night of the week. I don't buy the retirement angle. How could any exec with even a pea-sized brain go for that idea? 4 bloody hours of talk-show bullshit a night? What were they smoking? I mean, they'd do better with Homeless Fight Club or Nanny Paratroopers or something.

Leno is just unfunny. Maybe funny to look at for a second, but I don't think it matters who writes for him, it's just boring. Damn, Ellen is more entertaining.

Yeah, as a Conan fan, I'm pretty pissed about all this. I don't care if Leno was pressured to move on, he should have been, and it was clear to everyone with a brain that his 10pm show would be a ratings disaster. I think his highest ratings were for that show he had Kanye on right after the whole Taylor Swift thing where Leno asked him if his dead mother would have been proud of him. Nice. Conan had a super hot show, and was getting lots of offers to do other things, but he, like most hosts, coveted the Tonight Show. Now I sort of wish he could have done something more interesting, because he hasn't been given a chance to make the Tonight Show his, as much as he's been made to fit the mold of the Tonight Show.

Our comedy tastes meet when it comes to Leno, Bruno. I've never once found him funny. I do find it interesting, though, that I've heard several comics give their take on the situation, and they all talk about how funny Leno used to be in the 80's.

The whole situation is certainly the fault of the execs at NBC (as Letterman has had so much fun pointing out this week, as he has a bit of an axe to grind with them). They've given Conan almost zero time to let him find his audience, and now they're cowtowing to Leno and moving the entire schedule around for him. I don't know if anyone mentioned it yet, but what NBC wanted to do was to give Leno an 11:35-midnight show, then have the Tonight Show come on at midnight and run to 1am, pushing everyone back a half hour. Conan pointed out, of course, that this would mean that the Tonight Show was actually airing...tomorrow. This seemed to be the last straw, and he released this excellent statement on the situation, which everyone seems to be considering his resignation from the show.

I want to defend the Fallon show for a moment, though. I was skeptical he could pull it off at first, but I must say that his show is actually quite good. He has some funny bits, like where he plays various ridiculous songs as Neil Young. And his band, the Roots, is the most interesting in late night. And yeah, I'm super excited that he frequently has Josh Topolsky, editor of Engadget, on the show. He's essentially the Jack Hannah of gadgets.

Lastly, nobody, thank God, watches Carson Daly. Nobody.

Yeah, true. I meant things that are going to happen, though. I feel pretty certain that all of this is being driven by NBC brass, and if they haven't given up by now with all the backlash, they aren't going to.


I'd argue that Leno in the context of The Tonight Show is unfunny. He really was a great standup back in the 80s. Part of the problem is that he insisted on having a very small writing staff on the show, and he very much geared his performance at the show's older audience, which frequently made him come off as very reactionary. When he's being Jay, as opposed to being the host of The Tonight Show, he becomes much funnier. Honestly, I never felt like he settled into the show. It always felt like he was guest-hosting for Carson for 17 years. I think he had a concept of what the show was, and it was never him.

That said, and I know I'm a dork for saying this, I think the Headlines segment is hilarious.

I agree with the past few posts. I even like Jimmy Fallon in other things, I just don't see much of a point to his show. But again, I'm not a fan of this show format anyway. I used to watch Letterman back on his original show and then again when he moved to CBS, but it's been a long time since I've watched any of these from start to end.

If I'm staying up until 1am it's going to be doing something else. If it's watching TV it's catching something from the PVR recorded earlier or a movie.

Maybe NBC can try a Heroes spin-off 5 nights per week at 10pm. Something originally made for the web. Groan.

Like I said in my post, that's what all the comics have been saying, though I wasn't really watching standup at my age back then


That's what I was worried about with Conan, and it became somewhat true. All of a sudden all his jokes just seemed toothless and less irreverent/zany. Someone watered down my Conan, and I didn't like it! Plus, he had to leave the masturbating bear behind

[qoute]That said, and I know I'm a dork for saying this, I think the Headlines segment is hilarious.[/quote]
Though I'm sure you know that that segment could be done by anyone and had nothing to do with his humor.

That's the thing for me. We record Conan and have the Tivo keep the 5 most recent episodes (for when someone says "did you see that thing on Conan?"), but I rarely watch it. Hell, you can see the list of TV I have to watch in the other thread. I don't have time to watch talk shows!

I was always solidly on the Letterman side of the old wars, though I found there was only so much of him I could take.

Still, I can't help but be amazed that there is so much comedy on between 11 and 1 every single night. Between Letterman, Conan, Stewart, and Colbert, you always have something. I usually take that for granted!

Of course everything should be evaluated in context. For instance, I think Andy Richter is one funny mofo, but you wouldn't necessarily know that from watching some random 5 minute clip of the new Tonight Show.

Here's a better formatting of my comment - "Leno is unfunny at what he does." The show is also low-budget crap that couldn't be saved regardless of who was hosting.

Two talk shows per network per night maximum. Someone quickly get that through Congress. And George Lopez shouldn't be allowed to host anything but a Tijuana-only broadcast of a variety show co-starring Charo. Seriously, who gave that guy a talk show?

Preach it! That man is flat out hilarious. Andy Richter Controls the Universe was brilliant, and I even liked Andy Barker P.I. Did anyone see Quintuplets? How was that?

And yeah, George Lopez is awful. I wonder, does he ever tell a single joke that isn't based in some racial stereotyping?

Interesting video. That really makes it seem like it wasn't Leno's decision. It doesn't change my mind about the current situation, though.

Even this far down the thread, I'm still having trouble reading the name "Conan" and it not being a big bloke with a sword.

Peter

And you're a hell of a lot closer to Ireland than we are.

Random thoughts, in no particular order:

The late night segment in the U.S. used to be very simple: Johnny Carson followed by David Letterman. When I was in junior high and high school, I taped Letterman and watched him the next day after school.

Also, keep in mind that the U.S. is four timezones. In US-Central, we see shows the same time as US-Eastern, which is to say, a show scheduled at 11:30pm Eastern shows at 10:30pm Central. Seems much more civilized. They then tape delay things for US-Mountain and US-Pacific.

The modern proliferation of cable TV has really messed things up. I watch Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert (10pm-11pm US-Central). There's only one Comedy Central, nationwide, so west coast people could watch Stewart at 8pm their time. Stewart and Colbert are repeated again three hours later, or something like that, so west coast people can also watch them in the evening timeslot. Yes it's confusing.

Speaking of proliferation, we now also have Jimmy Kimmel on ABC. As such, the evening talk-show slot has become quite crowded. I'd say it's very much up in the air how this is all going to shake out. If NBC buys out Conan and he ends up on Fox, we'll then have five major evening talk shows duking it out (the four networks plus Comedy Central). It's deeply unclear the market is big enough to support all of that. My money says that Conan doesn't go late night but instead ends up somewhere completely different.

Who knows, maybe he decides to build a SNL (or Python)-esque sketch comedy show.

There has been a surfeit of late-night talk shows in the past, too. Carson went up against Joan Rivers, Arsenio Hall, Merv Griffin, Dick Cavett, Joey Bishop, David Brenner, Jimmy Breslin, Pat Sajak, Ron Reagan, Dennis Miller, etc. Letterman, Arsenio, and Griffin are the only ones that made any sort of headway.

Um, wow. I can only assume that that was made by the same folks who did the Tiger Woods one.

Actually, that was a pretty good rendition of Jeff Zucker. I couldn't tell by sight, though, if they were depicting Conan or Letterman. Maybe they were confused.

Wow indeed. That was insane. I wasn't aware that Captain America's power included blinding people with the top of his head. That has to be the same people as the Tiger Woods one.

That was definitely Conan, you can see Letterman briefly at the end taking sides with him.

My question is who is the last guy who takes part in the super hero battle? Is it Jimmy Fallon? Because it looks nothing like him. It also looks like he's throwing his feces.

It looks like I'm not the only person in the UK keen to understand the popularity of late night TV in the US.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8450575.stm

It was curious to see that the article mentioned that the hours of 6 to 8pm were considered part of UK prime time. "Prime Time" in the US and Canada doesn't start until 8pm. 6pm is normally local or national news. 7pm you may find some game shows on (traditionally) and now also quite a number of entertainment industry / tabloid shows, such as Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood, etc.

I'm speaking of course about the broadcast channels. So-called "cable" channels, that are also available of course on other for-pay formats such as Satellite, have entirely different programming formats and may not have any differentiation of "Prime Time," airing the same types of shows at any point during the day. However, the ones that have big-name original drama/comedy programming will usually first-air those shows during a prime-time slot.

I've only experienced a little bit of UK format television while watching UK satellite in Portugal. And of course what I've read on the net since then and watching various UK series. I can't say I'm a fan of the format, including the fact that shows aren't necessarily arranged into a neat grid of 30 minute slots. But mostly I'm really disappointed that most UK series run only 6 episodes. That's because there are so many UK series I simply adore and I'd love to see a lot more of them. At least 12 episodes per series would be a good start.

Translation when I say "series" above I'm talking about a US "season"

In the US, primetime shows start for pacific and eastern (-5 and -8 GMT) timezones at 8pm, and one hour earlier for mountain and central (-7 and -6 GMT). Alaska and Hawaii (-9 and -10 GMT) also have their primetime starts at 7pm.

Makes me wonder how they handle the time zone difference in Russia, since they have 11 to deal with, compared to the 6 the US has.