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Conan vs Leno: NBC Does It Again!

Jan 14th, 2010
by Zac.
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For those who haven’t really thought this one through… here’s my break-down of the Conan / Leno, Tonight Show scandal.

Here’s how the ratings game works for late night shows: You book a listing of shows in your time-slots every night of the week, and that schedule hinges around a strong showing in the prime-time slots in order push your audience to continue watching the local news and subsequently the late shows.

Four things drive ratings for any given show:

  1. Scheduling
  2. Advertising
  3. Brand Loyalty (Legacy)
  4. Fans

Let’s discuss each of these areas individually.

1) Scheduling:

This is a game that has been going on since the time of RADIO broadcasting.  The majority of ratings are based on time slot and lead-in programming.  NBC did something absolutely retarded by cancelling ALL their prime-time shows and moving a SINGLE show to run every night of the week during prime-time as the lead-in for the local news and the Tonight Show.

That show (The Jay Leno Show) had moderately decent numbers, but compared to the actual dramas that used to be slotted in NBC prime-time, the Jay Leno show was a complete and total failure.  On any given night the Leno show was down from previous years as much as 10 million viewers in his time-slot.  It failed to keep NBC’s ratings in prime-time competitive to the other networks.  Thus, the lead-in that both the local news and The Tonight Show had enjoyed thanks to good prime-time programming was gone–thereby resulting in a significant drop in ratings based on the show programming schedule alone.  Whose fault is that? NBC Executives and Leno for not walking away.

Leno HAD that buffer.  Conan did not.  Conan had LENO as his buffer, and Leno’s ratings were lower than LIPSTICK JUNGLE’s rating last season.  Lipstick Jungle… a show NO ONE watched… and he’s doing WORSE.

2) Advertising:

Because Jay decided he didn’t want to leave the air, and was moved into the prime time slot, NBC had to promote Jay’s prime-time show significantly harder than the Tonight Show with Conan.  NBC was competing against ACTUAL SHOWS that people watch EVERY NIGHT with the same shit, from the same guy every night.  They were hoping Jay would be enough to compete with the right advertising, and he wasn’t.  So not only did Conan not have the same schedule strength as his predecessor, they weren’t advertising for his take-over of TTS with the same market penetration they would have if they hadn’t had to invest so many ad dollars in Leno’s show.  Essentially all this accomplished was Leno muddying the water for Conan and Jimmy Fallon’s take-over of Conan’s old time-slot.

Here’s some note worthy statistics for you: Leno taking over prime-time slots on NBC resulted in 500+ people losing their jobs to accommodate for Jay’s desire to stay on a show.  5 nights a week, times 5 shows with approximately 100 people working the show including cast and crew = 500+ people out of work because of Leno and the stupidity of NBC Executives.

3) Brand Loyalty:

When Jay Leno took over TTS, he was bolstered by the fact that his predecessor was the most successful late night talk show host in the HISTORY OF THE GENRE.  Leno didn’t even have any real competition in the time-slot for more than a YEAR while Letterman was working with CBS to get on the air.  It took Letterman YEARS to compete with the legacy of the Tonight Show and draw viewership away.

Conan O’Brien was going to have a fight on his hands for ratings even if he had come into a time-slot that was scheduled along-side big ratings shows in prime-time.  Letterman has an established fan-base and a lot of loyalty in his time-slot.  Attrition was bound to happen due to the gamble NBC was taking by having Conan helm TTS, which has historically been a bigger draw for an older market.

I think NBC made a smart gamble on Conan.  In a normal year, ( when prime-time ratings hadn’t completely tanked due to the Leno show), Conan might have had a better chance at drawing a new, perhaps younger,  audience to TTS.  Realistically the older audience members would flock to Letterman because he offered something they understood.  This strategy is actually a really good way to get the NEXT generation of late night viewers USED to watch TTS with Conan so that as THEY age, Conan remains their staple over the long haul, and eventually NBC get’s TODAY’s young viewers and TOMORROW’s old viewers.  Eventually this would result in NBC drawing ratings over time back from CBS.  It’s a logical plan.

4) Fans:

This is simply a continuation of Brand Loyalty, but it represents something that is less specific to any given show.  Fans represent a significant portion of the base-line ratings for any show.  Fans are the people who will follow a specific performer to any time slot and show regardless of time or content.  In all likelihood the ratings numbers that Conan was winning for TTS were probably based around the viewership he had from his fans of his show prior to TTS.

The problem was that NBC compromised Conan’s chances for success by not offering him a good lead-in line up.  They muddied the water by advertising too much for Jay, and diluted the buzz that should have drawn big numbers to TTS when Conan premiered.  Conan was working an up-hill battle because the Tonight Show brand wasn’t nearly as strong under Leno as it had been under Johnny and thus resulted in a more head-on battle for ratings with an established program in the same time-slot, (Letterman).  NBC also didn’t consider the possibility that their older viewers might simply decide to tune into Jay in prime time then go to sleep, thereby negating their older viewship by offering them an earlier bedtime with Jay’s new show.  The irony of it all is kind of hysterical.

Even though the fans came out to support Conan, and stuck around after some of the initial allure wore off, it wasn’t enough to counter-act all the measures that NBC had taken to set up Conan O’Brien for failure on The Tonight Show by sabotaging their line-up.

Who’s to blame?

  1. NBC and the executives responsible for screwing up the contract negotiations for the stars of their late night line-up.  NBC made bad business decisions, and allowed this problem to perpetuate itself into the media frenzy that it has become.
  2. Jay Leno has to take a portion of the responsibility for this mess.  He had the right to renegotiate his contract with an extension to hold onto The Tonight Show until he was ready to leave, but he didn’t do it.  Instead he pushed the network into letting him into prime-time.
  3. NBC Executives for listening to Jay Leno, and not simply showing him the door.

I place more of the blame on Jay Leno than anyone else for this entire mess.  If he had simply negotiated a contract extension, and requested that Conan wait a few more years until he was ready to walk away for good this mess never would have happened.  Johnny Carson took his final bows and exited stage right PERMANANTLY.  Jay Leno waffled so much on the matter that it resulted in NBC having to make special concessions for him in order to please one of the networks biggest stars.

I don’t know what happened behind closed doors, if this was a force out on Leno then I think there is significantly less blame to be placed on his shoulders.  But the fact that NBC gave him a prime-time show suggests to me that his involvement was pretty key to the shit storm NBC is living through right now.  Conan on the other hand is a victim of this entire mess.  Conan moved across the country to take of a job he’s wanted his whole life.  (For that matter so did the majority of his cast and crew.)  Conan didn’t force out Leno.  He doesn’t have the clout.

Suggesting that Conan is responsible for screwing up the legacy of the Tonight Show is not only short-sighted, but just wrong.  I keep coming back to the old saying, “You made your bed, now you’ve got to sleep in it.”  NBC made their proverbial bed… then they lit it on fire, and now they’re surprised by all the smoke?  I don’t envy Jeff Zucker right now.

Posted in: Entertainment News.
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"The Year of Magical Thinking", by Joan Didion

Sep 26th, 2009
by Zac.
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Year of Magical Thinking - Playbill Earlier this summer, during the weekend of July 4th, I went to see the play “The Year of Magical Thinking” by Joan Didion.  I neglected to write up a response to this show for a long time because I wasn’t entirely sure what would constitute an appropriate response.  It’s a play about loss.  It’s a play about enduring love and managing grief during the most difficult time in one’s life.

Joan Didion wrote a book, and then a play, about her experience over the course of a two year period when she lost her husband and daughter.  It is a heart wrenching and passionately told story about one women surviving terrible loss.  It was sad.  It was moving.  It was real, honest, and unapologetic.  I liked it, while at the same time felt I was being talked down to by the author.  It was a difficult juxtaposition of emotions, that ultimately left me feeling a bit unsatisfied walking out of the theatre.  It took me a few months to come to the decision that my dissatisfaction had little to do with the play, so much as a handful of lines that open the show.

After the curtain rises on Didion, the only character in this one woman show, she posits to the audience that they could not possibly understand her grief.  That the audience could not appreciate the magnitude of her loss, or comprehend what it meant to lose a loved one.  That’s a fairly bold statement… and it was delivered by the actress with absolute and unflinching certainty… and it made me want to stand up and walk out of the theater.

As I sat there in the front row, listening to this handful of lines being delivered by the wonderfully talented actress playing Didion, I felt a growing sense of disdain, frustration, and contempt brewing inside me.  To be blunt, the exact words that flitted through my mind were, “Honey, you don’t jack shit about me… or what I’ve been through…. what I’ve survived.  Don’t tell me what I don’t know, or what I can’t understand… in fact… Fuck you!”

When you write lines like those, as a playwright, you know that you’re going to piss off someone in the audience. There is always going to being someone sitting in the audience who contradicts a simple generalization that applies for 99% of the population in attendance… it just so happens that I fell into the 1% chasm of no return.

The good news is that I am a playwright.  I understood the gamble that Didion chose to take, and I respect her for it.  You have to be prepared to make people uncomfortable, to make them cringe in their seats.  Those five or six lines were meaningless to the vast majority of the audience. They were not meaningless to me.

I had to struggle to keep an open mind, and ultimately what got me back on track with the show was one of the lessons I’ve learned from my experience with death:  No matter who you are, when death takes a loved one, you will remember that loss as the most difficult and painful experience you’ve ever had to endure.  Through the lens of Joan Didion’s life experience, the death of her husband and daughter marked an unparalleled level of pain and grief.  It has taken me a while to appreciate the truth of her statements, but perhaps not in the way she intended them… Just as Didion could never truly understand or appreciate the magnitude of MY experience, neither could I fully understand or appreciate HER loss.  It took me a while to get past the opening lines of her play, but I decided to return to this production, and spend a few moments ruminating on it, because I’ve now read the book.  After reading the book, I’ve decided that Didion’s play is worth further consideration.

One of the most intriguing devices used in this play resides in the title of the show.  The notion of “Magical Thinking” is a device Didion employs to describe a mental state of denial following the death of her husband.  Denial is one of the most difficult and horrendous steps in the grieving process that can manifest itself in a variety of ways.  Didion’s version of denial involved the belief that if she didn’t get rid of her husbands belongings, or talk about him as though her were actually dead, or “move on” in any measurable way—eventually he would come back to her, come home, appear in their living room where he belonged.

It should be stated that the human experience, though vast and varied, is also limited.  For many people the grieving process is very similar.  (That is why counseling psychologists make good money helping people cope with loss in group therapy.)  But it’s also true that each of us manifests our grief, our denial, our pain in very personal ways that relate to the person whom we have lost.

Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking” looks at her process of coming to terms with the reality that her husband died of a heart attack one evening in their living room.  Being a person who has been through the process of a dramatic and terrible loss in my life, numerous times now, it was interesting for me to sit in the audience and watch Didion describe her personal experience with loss.  It wasn’t particularly revelatory for me, I’ve been there… but I was reminded of a quote from Lord Byron that goes:

“O Time! the beautifier of the dead,
Adorner of the ruin, comforter
And only healer when the heart hath bled!”

- Childe Harold (canto IV, st. 130)

Byron’s lines sound much more romantic than, “Time heals all wounds.”  The thing that worked for this show wasn’t the passage of time, but the active description of the events as they took place.  Present tense description of emotions, actions, and events all swirling in a turbulent vortex of pain and loss that enveloped Didion’s character.  At times this play felt like we in the audience were simply standing in the eye of the storm with Didion, watching a tornado of horrible events sweep by us in a crush of devastation.  The show had fleeting moments of joy and remembrance that were welcome among all the grief. Though it became clear upon closer inspection that these moments were the pieces of Didion’s memory causing the break down, tearing her apart because they are in the past… they are lost.  Didion’s present, active life in this play is a gem with facets of happiness and joy that is slowing shattering and falling apart.  Beautiful in its destruction and deconstruction.

Year of Magical Thinking - Ticket In terms of the acting, I felt that Helen Hedman did a very solid job of capturing the audience, and delivering a heart felt performance.  There were moments that were shaky, when she lost her timing, but her delivery was very commendable.  (Especially for a long solo performance where you have no supporting actors to back you up.)  The directing of this play was well thought out, but calculated almost to a fault.  As a one woman show there was a need for some strict blocking to put the actress “in the scene” and convey the action to the audience without additional set pieces or actors.  This is a challenge that the directing team of Serge Seiden and Joy Zinoman tackled admirably, but I felt that some of the movement and settings were stilted, and hard to follow.

The lighting, costumes, and sound all came together to compliment the show very nicely.  I had no real complaints on these components of the show.  The work was professional and well executed.

Ultimately I was moved by this show.  It had moments of brilliance that were, at times, tempered by mediocre blocking and so-so line delivery.  I can’t say that I enjoyed the show, (because you can’t really enjoy 90 minutes of grief and suffering), but I did endure it and came out the other side the better for it.  I also re-learned a valuable lesson from Didion’s play: Never be afraid to challenge your audience.

Posted in: Production Response.
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You’ve Got To *Mean It*

Jul 6th, 2009
by Zac.
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Earlier today I posted the following three notes on twitter regarding my experience this afternoon at the theater:

“Saw Joan Didion’s play, “The Year Of Magical Thinking” this afternoon. It was a very interesting show that demonstrated a wealth of love.”

“Love and loss are so intrinsically linked as to be inseparable–one defines the other. Didion’s play looks at the result of that relationship.”

“I am bothered by the play’s conceit that the audience can not know what it means to grieve, or the nature of loss. It’s a bit presumptuous.”

My twitter account populates every social networking site on the planet, and thus one of my friends on Facebook responded with the following:

I’m not sure I agree with that, I’ve felt love and loss without the other being involved.”

I thought my response was worth sharing in this forum as it captures my feeling on the matter of love and loss.  I think it also effectively addresses my friend’s sentiment without treating him with any disrespect.  I honestly believe in the connection between these two experiences, and I hope the following demonstrates my perspective on the matter.

There are so many responses I could offer to that sentiment, but I’ll try to limit myself to only four.

  1. Rational Response: To truly love a thing, no matter how small, you can rest assured that at some time in your life you will lose that thing. The list of possibilities is endless but I’ll use alliteration to express it most poetically: departure, disappearance, death.
  2. Emotional Response: Love is a subjective thing that each of us defines every morning as the sun crests the horizon, but in the simplest of terms love can be reduced to the emotional response one experiences in the absence of a thing.To feel the loss of a person, pet, or favorite comic book is to understand the true meaning of love. Without that emotion, that connection, the loss would not be felt–it would lack meaning. Love might be a swooning rhapsody playing to a couple kissing on the deck of a sinking ship… but it is also the emotional response to the presence or absence of a thing.
  3. Pissy Response: I’m an artist and I demand to be granted a certain amount of poetic license! But seriously, I’m not talking about losing your keys. In truth I’m talking about death. But to be fair to your sentiment, the loss of something even as simple as one’s keys or wallet may evoke frustration, fear, or even hysteria—but the fact remains that when you go select a new wallet from the store you will be reminded of the one you lost. Your memory of that loss lends itself to my point, even a simple thing has meaning when it’s gone. The same can be true of a set of keys. Love does not have to be confined by traditional norms; love is more than a feeling.And to close my pissy rant: when you “lose” something you truly care nothing about, it’s not really lost to you.
  4. Cryptic Dramatic Response: One day… you WILL understand.

If you don’t feel the loss of something, then I truly believe it’s not lost to you.  I know that by restating this I’m being repetitious, but hopefully I’m also driving home my point: The connection between love and loss relies on the notion that the person who experiences either emotion must actually mean it. If you really care about losing something, then the connection is clear.  If you really love something, you will eventually lose it and, again, the connection is clear.  The interdependency of these two experiences are so intertwined they become difficult to distinguish.

I should also point out that sweeping generalizations gets me no-where fast with literal and logical thinkers, especially when it comes to highly emotional topics.  Of course there are going to be contradictory experiences to this line of thinking… but that doesn’t make it any less true.

The human experience is vast and varied.  We may all walk the same well trodden path in life, but no two people will experience that journey in exactly the same way. Some experiences are universal… I believe that the above is true for most people.

Posted in: Surviving.
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The "Man in the Mirror."

Jun 27th, 2009
by Zac.
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mj_lunchbox A friend recently asked me, “Michael Jackson was closer to your generation than mine. Are you grieving the way I grieved for John Lennon? And what of Cobain? Has his music survived?”

The following is my response:

Any one who grew up in the era of Thriller, red nylon  jackets, and remembers Michael Jackson once being black is looking on Michael Jackson’s death with mixed emotions.

On the one hand our generation has lost one of the greatest entertainers of all time. A man so prolific that his face made it on to lunch pails carried to school by my classmates in the 80’s, and whose music was at its pinnacle during our formative years.

On the other hand you have Michael post all the controversy, trials, plastic surgery, and slipping further and further into his own celebrity fueled craziness.

For those of us who still feel a kinship toward the "Man in the Mirror", we are a bit relieved that he can’t sink any lower. In truth, no one can really glory in the death of such a talented man.  His is a bitter sweet release, that came neither too early or too late.  People will be weighing the scales of his celebrity against his talent for quite a long time to come.

Kurt Cobain was a drugged fueled, grunge rock, suicide tragedy.  Talented for certain, but I don’t think he had nearly the universal appeal of Michael Jackson.  He is certainly remembered through his music, but I don’t think either of these two men will be remembered with the same reverence as John Lennon.

Kurt Cobain’s passing was tragic, but I am less inclined to be sympathetic of someone who took their own life while at the apex of their career.  I must admit that I have a personal distaste for suicide, but that doesn’t change the fact that such a death leaves a hollowness that can’t be filled with any amount of good music.  Suicide always leaves a vacuum in the place that was once occupied by the deceased. Kurt Cobain’s departure created a hole that, as time passed, was simply filled in by his contemporaries.

Unlike Cobain, Michael Jackson has developed such an enormous persona that I don’t believe that he can ever truly be replaced.  In that way he is very similar to John Lennon.  But the nature of each man’s death also shapes our cultural memory.  It’s hard to separate Michael Jackson’s death from his personal eccentricity.  One might argue that this character flaw has been guiding him down a path towards death at the hands of a medical practitioner for a good long while.  Can we really be surprised by the fact that his fascination with physical perfection ultimately lead him to another kind of completeness–one found in death.

After I heard of Jackson’s death I went back to my CD collection and listened to Michael’s anthology, released in 2001.  On the second disk in the “Greatest Hits: HIStory” the song “Childhood Theme” caught my attention with lyrics that spoke to the topic of his colorful life:

Have you seen my Childhood?
I’m searching for the world that I come from
‘Cause I’ve been looking around
In the lost and found of my heart…
No one understands me
They view it as such strange eccentricities…
‘Cause I keep kidding around
Like a child, but pardon me…

People say I’m not okay
‘Cause I love such elementary things…
It’s been my fate to compensate,
for the Childhood
I’ve never known…

Have you seen my Childhood?
I’m searching for that wonder in my youth
Like pirates in adventurous dreams,
Of conquest and kings on the throne…

Before you judge me, try hard to love me,
Look within your heart then ask,
Have you seen my Childhood?

People say I’m strange that way
‘Cause I love such elementary things,
It’s been my fate to compensate,
for the Childhood (Childhood) I’ve never known…

Have you seen my Childhood?
I’m searching for that wonder in my youth
Like fantastical stories to share
But the dreams I would dare, watch me fly…

Before you judge me, try hard to love me.
The painful youth I’ve had

Have you seen my Childhood….

~ Michael Jackson, “Childhood Theme”

young-michael-jackson

Listening to this song, I couldn’t help but think of a young Michael Jackson prior to all the celebrity and thirty years of medical mishaps.  I may choose to remember Michael Jackson as that talented young boy with a lot of potential. Perhaps that’s what Michael always wanted… to reclaim a youth that was colored by a success that the rest of us could never truly understand.  I would rather remember the boy, than the shattered and socially disturbed man he later became.

I don’t know that one could compare Michael Jackson to John Lennon, but his death will certainly resonate with people of my generation.

Posted in: Entertainment News.
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Wordpress… You sexy little minx.

Jun 23rd, 2009
by Zac.
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Tonight I finished development of a new website that I’ve been working on for about a month. Feels pretty damn good to finally be finishing that project. Some days I’m torn between my writing and nerdery and, often, playing in nerd-land wins because it is harder and takes more focus than writing. Generally speaking writing comes much easier to me.

In the coming weeks there will new content here for my 10 regular visitors. I will also be announcing the launch of a new website, (mentioned above).

More good news coming soon!

Posted in: Nerd News.
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