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Four Reasons Why Leno Got His Audience Back So Fast
by Joel Keller, posted Apr 9th 2010 5:02PM
We at TV Squad have been accused of having an bias against Jay Leno. That might be true; after all, our writers are free to post their opinions on any and all news stories, and my guess is that most of our staff are not big Leno fans (in fact, Bob has said many, many, many times how much he dislikes Jay).But, one thing we've never denied is that the man can get an audience at 11:35. And, if anyone was fretting that Leno's audience wouldn't follow him back to 'The Tonight Show,' you needn't have worried.
According to Media Life Magazine (via TVWeek), Leno averaged 4.2 million viewers per night last week. Yes, that's one million viewers less than he had a year ago, but it's still a million more than Letterman, whose 'Late Show' has lost about 900,000 viewers since Leno came back. And Leno's pulling almost 1.5 million more viewers than Conan did.
So, why did most of the viewers come back so soon? Four reasons come to mind:
1. Leno is late-night comfort food. Even as a big Conan fan who finds Jay a snore, I can acknowledge how strangely odd and comforting it was to flip around the dial and see Jay sitting at his desk. My late-night routine is to flip between Jay, Dave, and Jimmy Kimmel after 'The Colbert Report' ends, to see who each of them are talking to (or in the case of Jimmy, what he's talking about in his monologue).
Since Jay came back, seeing him zone out at his desk while talking to whatever celeb is plugging his or her latest project just felt right to me. Believe me, I'm not proud of that feeling.
2. Letterman is a turn-off for a lot of people. Let's face it: After 28 years, Letterman has his audience and it's never going to change much. Many people, like me, think he's one of the last great broadcasters on television. But just as many people think he's a bitter, humorless crank who has now been revealed as a cheater and womanizer.
So, people who may have sampled Letterman while Conan was away, and were turned off by either his persona or the whole blackmail fiasco, decided to run back to Leno when he came back.
3. Conan's show just wasn't 'The Tonight Show.' As much as seeing Jay at the 'Tonight' desk was a comfort, seeing Conan at the same desk felt equally uncomfortable. The Conan interregnum just didn't feel like 'The Tonight Show' to me, and I was never able to shake that feeling.
I don't know if it was because Conan wasn't a good fit for the everyman comic persona that's needed on that show, or that the show felt too much like Conan's old 'Late Night' for me to associate him with 'Tonight.' Either way, whenever I tuned in to Conan's 'Tonight,' it felt like he was trying too hard to put on a big show.
Letterman's cynical style works on CBS, because he was able to define the 'Late Show' brand. But, even with Conan's edges shaved down (there was no masturbating bear until he got canned, for instance), absurdist bits like "Wax Fonzie and Tom Cruise get shot out of a cannon" probably made most of the people who sampled him just scratch their heads.
Would that have worked itself out if Conan got the time he deserved? Sure. But it would have taken a few years.
4. People really didn't give a rat's patoot about the Second Late Night War. As much as it was juicy fodder for TV nerds like us -- and a new source of profit for Bill Carter -- most of America just didn't care. They didn't give a second thought to whether Jay didn't give Conan a chance, or whether Conan was treated poorly by NBC or not. So most people embraced Leno with open arms when he came back.
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