This is the first showdown, Wild West – highnoon style, of this new decade. The fight of the late night titans. Jay Leno vs Conan O’Brien.
It all started with NBC’s decision to bring Jay Leno back into the prime time slot and hence move Conan and the Tonight show to 12:05AM. And as always when titans fight the smaller ones like in this case Carson Daily get crushed under their feet.
But besides some very funny videos and a big wave of support for Coco there is (as always) something to learn, right?
NBC seems to have underestimated the power of the interwebs and the power of a loyal tribe. After Conan wrote a statement to the People of the Earth hashtags around Conan were trending on Twitter, an artist created the support logo you can see above and he also founded a vital growing Facebook group.
What does this all show? Shift and transition. Shift because people at my age are most likely fans of Conan O’Brien, like many folks say in the Facebook group “He is our Johnny Carson.”. We know how to use the Social Media universe and as 2009 already showed movements are very quickly initiated and can spread like wildfires.
Does this mean that Jay Leno has no fans? Au contraire. Like Mashable points out, they might just not be on Twitter, Facebook and so on. They are the classic TV audience. The two groups of Jay and Conan are totally different and I don’t think that they share them. There might be convergence of the audience between Jay and David Letterman, of course.
We are in a transition phase from old media to new media and Conan is right now in the middle, on the zenith of his “power”. Jay is “doomed to die out” with his aging audience plus Conan might get the younger ones of Jay’s audience. Conan has his own strong base amongst the 30 year olds and might even attract some viewers from Jimmy Kimmel or Jimmy Fallon, the ones that will one day take the power from him.
Big question is: in an age that is rapidly moving towards internet shows and video on demand, what is this all about? I think you can compare it to the fights when empires collapse. TV is going down and setting their hope on Jay shows that NBC wants to milk the cow as long as possible. If they had chosen Conan it would have meant to prepare for change. Now, he will likely get a contract with another network on the same slot Jay will be hosting on NBC.
Anyway, just my two cents on this. I watch those shows on HULU anyway when I have the time to. What about you?
Related Posts:
