The country is anxiously awaiting Conan O'Brien's triumphant return to the airwaves this evening, but one group of network executives is awaiting the evening's ratings with troubled hearts-- and it ain't NBC. Though many have been primed to see Conan do battle with his former Tonight Show rival, Jay Leno, it would appear that Conan's far likelier to do battle with another, far more similar comedy series in that same timeslot: Comedy Central's The Daily Show. Read on for the details, my gentle Examiner readers...
Team Coco is thrilled to death that Conan O'Brien is headed back to television as of tonight (in just two short hours, as of the time of this writing), and one of the most highly anticipated aspects of Coco's return revolves around just how badly he'll beat former (former) Tonight Show host Jay Leno in the ratings: will Conan wipe the floor with him, or simply come out slightly on top? Could the unthinkable happen, with Leno winning the largest ratings-share? We'll have to stay tuned to find out.
What's more interesting, though, is the fact that Conan's biggest late-night rival isn't Jay Leno at all. Fans of Conan O'Brien aren't the same people that have been watching Leno since NBC served Conan with his walking papers earlier this year, so it's unlikely that Leno's ratings will suffer that much when Conan returns to the late-night landscape this week. Far likelier is the battle for viewers that will result from another show with a similar demographic: The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
"'Conan' absolutely presents a threat for Stewart," Brad Adgate, senior vice president of research at Horizon Media, told TheWrap. "Until now, 'The Daily Show' has had to compete with local news and syndicated sitcoms."
Recently, it was revealed that The Daily Show was the ratings winner amongst the coveted 18-49 demographic in its time slot, with ratings that rival anything that Leno or Letterman have been putting up lately (Leno, in particular, has seen his ratings take a massive nosedive since his epic "Indian Give" of The Tonight Show earlier this year). Furthermore, The Daily Show-- like The Colbert Report-- is currently basking in the buzz that resulted from Stewart and Colbert's "Rally to Restore Sanity", a gathering that drew nearly double the attendees that a similar event held by Glenn Beck raked in over the summer.
No one-- not on Team Coco, not on Team Stewart-- wants to see Conan effecting the ratings of The Daily Show (or vice versa), but that seems like the most obvious outcome in this situation. The battle royale that most viewers have been hoping for-- which would, of course, find Conan doing battle with Leno on a nightly basis in an attempt to further rub NBC's nose in their bad decision during January's "Late Night Wars"-- may occur, but in the end it would seem that this won't be the issue that executives at Comedy Central and TBS are paying the most attention to.
Stay tuned for more Conan-centric news in the near future, folks. We've got all manner of Conan-related goodness headed your way over the next few days, so be sure to hit the "Subscribe" button up top if you're worried about missing any of our future updates here at Comedy Examiner HQ. While you're waiting on the next one to arrive, take a peek at one of these other recent Comedy Examiner articles:
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