Who Will Take The Fall for Conan's Bad Ratings?

The Los Angeles Times' Joe Flint has an interesting—not to mention topical—take on Conan O'Brien's bumpy transition from hosting Late Night to The Tonight Show: It's a replay of the 1981 retirement of Walter Cronkite as anchor of the CBS Evening News and the succession of Dan Rather.

"Like [Jay] Leno, Cronkite vacated his chair in first place and earlier than anticipated," writes Flint. "Like O'Brien, Rather inherited the chair because the network was afraid of losing him to a rival."

As we noted last week, the Tonight Show's ratings have dipped since O'Brien has taken over—only 2.8 million homes tuned in to watch O'Brien, while 3.68 million watched his main rival, David Letterman, on CBS—and now it's time for the finger-pointing. Who'll take the fall for O'Brien's ratings slide?

Scapegoat 1: Ben Silverman

Silverman, NBC and NBC Universal Television Studio's co-chairman of Entertainment, is an easy target, both for his string of flops (Kath & Kim, Knight Rider) and for the various peccadilloes gleefully captured by Esquire and chronicled near-hourly by Nikki Finke on Deadline Hollywood Daily. In a column on The Daily Beast, Kim Masters writes,"According to sources, he just returned after being absent for four weeks, and is widely perceived to be lining up his next gig. Perhaps he’ll wait, as one associate speculates, for Jay Leno to make his prime-time debut in September, assuming that early ratings will be good enough—as viewers sample the show—to allow NBC to declare victory, providing for a somewhat graceful exit." If Silverman leaves NBC (this rumor has floated since at least June), expect him to take some of the O'Brien blame with him.

Scapegoat 2: Jeff Zucker

In her LA Weekly column, Finke writes that, Conan's ratings decline "has to worry NBC Universal Jeff Zucker, whose decision it was to rotate out Leno and rotate in Conan. Especially since these are probably the last weeks that late-night addicts are sampling O’Brien before settling into a viewing routine." Zucker, the president and CEO of NBC Universal, is less flamboyant than Silverman, but also gets little love from the press, who seem to delight in pointing out that NBC's profits are in decline. Just this week, NBC-Universal's second quarter earnings report revealed a 41 percent drop to $539 million. Zucker's probably not going anywhere anytime soon, but his critics can bundled the O'Brien "debacle" into the larger narrative of Zucker's supposed reign of error at NBC-Universal.

Scapegoat 3: Conan O'Brien

Maybe the Harvard-educated host just isn't as good at 11:30 PM as he was at 12:30 AM. Alan Sepinwall, the New Jersey Star-Ledger's influential TV critic, wondered "if any Jay fans who were on the fence about giving this freakishly tall replacement a shot may have hopped off the fence after last night to wait for their man to return in primetime in September." The Boston Globe's Joanna Weiss was largely favorable, but wrote, "O'Brien seemed to want to tamp down expectations, too, and to prove that the pedigreed job isn't getting to his head." If fans truly abandon O'Brien, it may be time for him to bring back the goofy, anarchic elements of his old show (Triumph, come home!) to woo them back.

Scapegoat 4: The 18-49-year-old Demographic

In CBS's press release about Letterman's ratings victory, the 18-49 demographic figures prominently, as the network crows: "'Late Show with David Letterman'… Places First in Adults 25-54 (Tie) and Narrows the Adult 18-49 Gap to Just -0.3 of a Rating Point." As a 2005 segment on CBS Sunday Morning (a show no one would ever claim pandered to the youth demo) reported, "it's long been the reality for those who make and sell commercials, based on the belief that the 18 to 49 year old population, some 120 million Americans, is where the money is." Those fickle youngsters (if a spread stretching up to nearly fifty can be called "young") have betrayed O'Brien, one of their own, and are flocking to Letterman and—gasp!—ABC's Nightline. If O'Brien's youth and energy can't keep "the kids" tuned in, maybe it's time for ad buyers to grow up and stop listening to these whippersnappers.