Tuned In

Conan Back to Late-Night—on TBS?

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In a surprise move—as in, I actually mentally checked that it was not April 1—Conan O’Brien announced today that he will launch a new talk show in the fall, not on Fox but on TBS. Yes, that TBS, the basic-cable channel. The new show will be at 11 p.m. E.T., likely starting in November, four nights a week. “In three months I’ve gone from network television to Twitter to performing live in theaters, and now I’m headed to basic cable,” he said in a statement. “My plan is working perfectly.” (See also his Twitter declaration.)

TBS had been suggested as a possible landing spot for O’Brien before, but always as a bit of a dark horse. But the network has been in the late-night game for months now, having given George Lopez a show, which will now move back to midnight. (My first thought was that Conan was doing unto Lopez as NBC tried to do unto him; but the official story, anyway, is that Lopez reached out to O’Brien to do the deal.)

So who (possibly) wins and loses, and what does it all mean? A few guesses:

Seinfeld reruns win! It was an open secret that Fox’s affiliates were, shall we say, skeptical about giving up time that they used to air lucrative reruns in order for the mothership to launch a late-night show. I don’t know if their resistance was enough to doom Conan on Fox or if the deal came together for other reasons—which I’m sure will be a focus of the Hollywood-biz reporting—but either way their cash cow emerges unscathed. Given that problem…

There’s only so much room at the inn. If Conan was not to go to Fox, the options were, theoretically, endless. And, practically, very limited. Comedy Central would be a perfect fit. But Comedy Central has very successful late-night hosts in Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. (Conan wasn’t about to go to midnight on cable after refusing a poison-pill offer of midnight on NBC.) USA has a lot of viewers, but it would be entering late-night from scratch (and who thinks Conan wants to make money for an NBC Universal network?). TBS, on the other hand, was in the late-night game, if at least marginally, with Lopez. But…

He’ll get fewer viewers. This may well be a big boost for TBS’ profile in the long term (disclosure: TBS, like TIME, is a Time Warner brand), and for basic cable’s in general. The network, I assume, will beef up its programming both to give Conan a better lead-in and to benefit from the free publicity. (There will be massive coverage in the press, and Conan is just about to start his nationwide stage tour.) But short-term, lead-ins still matter, and My Boys is not American Idol. George Lopez was pulling respectably north of a million viewers, but that’s not close to the 3.5 to 4.5 million CBS and NBC are pulling at 11:35. Then again…

On the bright side, he’ll get fewer viewers! If Conan went to Fox, the story would immediately become: can he get revenge on Jay? Can he beat Dave? Which he can’t. Team Coco’s passion aside, Conan was not likely to start up a talk-show franchise and knock Jay and Dave into second and third place. Now he doesn’t have to. Speaking of which…

Is this good news… for Letterman? I may be alone among TV observers in holding this cockamamie theory, but I have always wondered whether NBC didn’t secretly hope Conan would go to Fox. Reason? Conan fans are not Jay fans. (See Bill Carter’s New York Times story on the sudden re-aging of the Tonight Show audience to get a since of how little the twain meet.) But to the extent that anyone under 50 watches late-night broadcast talk-shows anymore, a new Conan riding a wave of publicity might well have cut into Dave. He may still, of course, but as much as we all know how to use the remote, there remains a difference between cable and broadcast audiences. Which may mean…

Conan’s new competition is Jon and Stephen. And I am making no bets on who might win. There used to be a natural flow among young viewers of a certain comedic stripe, from the Daily Show to Colbert to a half-hour of Kimmel or Letterman to Conan’s Late Night. Now they’ll have to choose, barring the intercession of technology. Which means, finally…

The big winners: the makers of dual-tuner DVRs. Get ready to set up your recordings.