Poor, poor, Conan O'brien

   I deliberately chose not to blog about the late night hosts wars that were raging months ago because what would have been the fun in doing so when everyone was giving their take and taking sides. With tempers cooled, due mostly to the new news circles, I have the latitude to give my take, and perhaps, from a different perspective. What I saw and heard from the many voices… including one of the principals involved, was how Jay Leno was being selfish and that he reneged on his promise to walk away and turn over the hosting to the new guard, Conan O’brien. I even saw Conan bitching on the program “Sixty Minutes” about how he was dealt a raw deal; poor Conan had to walk away from NBC with some 40 million dollars for his troubles.

    No one mentioned that, here we had two white guys (and a third, Letterman, taking sides) arguing over literal millions and griping about how terrible the situation was. With all due respect to Conan, this is a business driven by ratings…and are you telling me that NBC, out of much love for Leno and hatred for Conan, chose the former, absent the cold calculus of ratings…and moreover, giving Conan 40 million to walk away? What is it that I am missing? Why throw Conan under the bus when he is much younger than Jay Leno, and supposedly, can draw the very demos that the advertisers are coveting. The logical truth must be that Jay Leno was tracking better ratings, even among the coveted demos than Conan… resulting in the unceremoniously ending of the Conan O’brien show.

    All three late night hosts are funny in their own way, but their vocations underscore the lack of diversity in that genre. It is always funny to hear these Hollywood denizens opined on the popular issues…save for, of course, equality in the lucrative real estate of entertainment. It is true that one cannot legislate matters of the people’s choice for entertainment, but the interest of “fairness” became an issue among the three white late night hosts… when it really had to do with business. I mean that is what they tell most of the minorities who are seeking work in Hollywood. We feel your pain but the audience is just not there to develop a show around you or that theme, etc. But a late night host can walk away with some forty million and the sky was falling for him-what a life….

    You may want to know why is it that I left George Lopez (a minority) out of the mix - I did so because his show is but a suckling… of course, the grating irony is that this same poor Conan O’brien is now the lead in show for Lopez’s. This is what it must be like to become accustomed to heaven - incidentally, does anyone know the whereabouts of Arsenio Hall? 

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