My guess is that someone in legal convinced them that it wasn't a question of asking O'Brien as much as telling him he's going to 12:05. I don't think NBC was far-sighted enough to imagine what this has turned out to be. And I'd also guess that there was a group of affiliates who were ready to announce their preemption plans which further forced NBC's hand.
It's imperative that every time someone says anything about O'Brien and his ratings, they be immediately reminded that this was not because of O'Brien's ratings. It was because the affiliates were on the verge of an outright revolt against Jay Leno's ratings. It's a framing issue: as long as someone can distract from the Leno fact, his group (and NBC) look more and more innocent. It's because Leno's ratings were unacceptable and the affiliates were about to do something en masse that this happened. As for Barnhart's tune-change, I'll offer this partially in his defense as well as everyone else who thought this wasn't a completely bad idea at the time: Remember that every time someone brought up the question as to whether The Jay Leno Show was going to just be The Tonight Show at 10:00 pm ET, NBC et al swore up and down that it was not. This was going to be something different. At that point, there wasn't a real reason to doubt them, because the logical thought was "Of course they're not going to just duplicate The Tonight Show." Of course, we now know that logic has a personal protection order against NBC, and that they discovered, as PGage has noted repeatedly, that it's very hard to come up with five hours of pure comedy each week, and it's much easier to do The Tonight Show Redux each night. On Tue, Jan 19, 2010 at 1:13 PM, David Bruggeman <bru...@yahoo.com> wrote: > Another one is why didn't Leno say what he said Monday night sometime last > week? While the Chief would still be acting like Leno peed in his milk > (when did he turn the corner, exactly), saying something nice about Conan > earlier in the process would have diminished the bile, if just a little. > > David > > ________________________________ > From: Steve Rhodes <srho...@gmail.com> > > One question is why didn't NBC ask Conan if he would move to midnight > before announcing it. > I realize the leak made them make an announcement before they planned to > (though they would > have gotten a lot of questions at TCA even if it hadn't), but they could > have delayed a day and asked Conan. > > I haven't had time to watch the interview with Zucker to see if Charlie > Rose asked any > that or any other critical questions > http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10824 > > -- > Steve Rhodes > > -- > TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups "TV or Not TV" group. > To post to this group, send email to tvornottv@googlegroups.com > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > tvornottv-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en
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