RyoHazuki

The fact that he got $45 million for leaving a job makes me not care in the slightest if Conan's feelings were hurt. Wasn't he eventually getting beat by Letterman reruns anyways during his stint on the Tonight Show?

Mike86

This has been discussed over and over. Conan's ratings started off strong in the summer and for a while he was actually beating Letterman (someone posted a chart in here somewhere showing the ratings numbers). It wasn't until after The Jay Leno Show started up that things went to crap, and this whole mess snowballed from there. Besides that now NBC can't say much better about Leno either since there was a report a week or so ago that his ratings were lower than Conan's were and he too is losing out to reruns of Letterman now.

As for the 60 Minutes interview, I thought it was pretty good. I didn't expect it to be a total NBC/Leno bash-fest since he can't really say anything too bad and he doesn't seem like the kind of person to do that anyways. He comes off very classy and not bitter about the situation like he could be so that's cool to see. Can't wait to see him in 16 days!!

Rypro 525

Also (discussed ad nausium) that Letterman had the sex scandal happen too, so people wanted/had to tune in to see what he would say

RyoHazuki

Looks like Leno is still beating Letterman every week.

Mike86

http://www.examiner.com/x-15166-Come...-great-job-NBC

This begs to differ..

dx23

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RyoHazuki

They say "But now Leno's losing to repeats of Letterman" but I can't find any numbers in their article to support it. They say Leno's got a 1.0 rating and Letterman is getting .8.

Deftones

Good interview. You could tell he wanted to say more about a few things, but either held back b/c of the agreement w/ NBC or they cut a some stuff out.

calhoun07

He threatened to leave, not threatened the employer. How can you manage to not even properly read one sentence?

Achtung

I'd be interested to hear more about the "Tonight Show was losing money" bit after Conan denied it fairly vehemently. It was the one part of the interview where he seemed genuinely annoyed.

He didn't say anything too denigrating about Leno or Zucker, but from his tone you can tell he has no respect for either one at this point either.

Achtung

So in your sentence which I apparently misread, who is the one being "threatened"? I'm pretty sure it's a transitive verb there and requires an object, but then my illiteracy might be getting in the way.

Unless of course you used an unnecessarily strong word there to make Conan look like the antagonist in all of this.

Double_Oh_7

So? You expect him to do Late Night forever??

JuryDuty

Here's a deleted scene from tonight's interview:

http://tv.gawker.com/5529354/conan-o...92-ford-taurus

dolphinboy

I can only imagine what this interview would have been like if Leno had been ousted. He would have whined his ass of about being "screwed." Hell, he's still whining about it after taking back the show he handed off to Conan.

OscarBluth

How do you know he didn't read one sentence properly? Source?

dolphinboy

Because Conan took the high road and there weren't many questions that could have put Conan in a position to possibly have to react more or be a little bit more open about his feelings, it did feel kind of like a let down. I mean, I know Conan's filthy rich and life will go on...I don't need 60 Minutes to help me realize that.

But we're interested in the story regardless of how much money he walked away with. As a society we always seem interested in our celebrities more than we probably should.

Personally, if I knew how little Conan would talk about what Jay did, merely by hanging around at 10pm, which wasn't even mentioned in the piece and which is one of things Letterman genuinely found galling about Leno, I would have preferred 15 minutes of his hot wife talking instead.

Boba Fett

I loved Conan's reaction to Leno saying he got screwed too.

dx23

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Nefarious

Details in here about Letterman's Superbowl commercial. More rips on Jay, too.

http://tv.gawker.com/5528130/letterm...n-regis--kelly

kefrank

There is a big difference between saying to your employer:
"Give me this promotion or I'm going to take a position with your direct competitor."
and saying:
"My dream job is right here at this company and I'm willing to stick it out here if I can have some guarantee of that position in the future. If not, it doesn't really make sense for my career to stick around and wait when I have some nice offers elsewhere. Let me know what you guys want to do."

The first is a "demand" accompanied by a "threat" to use your terms. The second is an honest negotiation that lays out the situation without any underhanded manipulation. What sort of inside information do you have showing that Conan's negotiation tactics were the former and not the latter?

The big difference between Leno and Conan in this whole debacle is that nothing Conan has stated publicly has been contradicted by other public information. Meanwhile, Leno made public statements (which are still readily available) that public information shows he clearly reneged on. It's a matter of integrity.

wm lopez

That's what people do when they are for one side. Like years ago when FOXNEWS was starting to beat CNN you would get all this FOXNEWS bashing from print media and comedians. It's a mind trick to make you not watch something because it's not cool and of course the people telling you this are the cool ones. Many of us can remember these kind of tactics from our playground days.

wm lopez

NBC went to Leno while #1 in the ratings and Leno said I'm giving the show to Conan and then Leno wanted his show back. Poor Conan was left without a show. You need to watch 60 MINTUES again. They did a good job with questions to Conan.
Another way to look at this would be if the producers of the movie SPEED RACER after poor box-office opening whined that the studio pulled the movie and didn't give it a chance. After watching the Conan segment on 60 MINUTES I find more respect for Barry Bonds, Pete Rose, Bill Clinton than for Conan.

Super X

So essentially you're saying that if now about 4-5 months down the line, Leno's ratings haven't improved from where they are now, NBC should pull him and give the show to someone else. Because he should be doing better considering he has a better lead-in with the current crop of 10pm shows.

Jay G.

Why would print media and comedians care what cable news network is most popular?

The bashing at FOX News is based either on ideology, or rightfully pointing out that network's hypocrisy (claiming to be "fair and balanced," while clearly having a right-wing bias).

Leno was always more popular, but the Leno bashing didn't start until his hypocrisy did.

shaun3000

-notrolls-