NBC reportedly agrees to pay Conan $30M

MSNBC ^ | 01/15/2010 | Sharon Waxman

[SWAMPSNIPER]

It’s worth that to get rid of the idiot but a hit man would probably do it for less!

[newfreep]

That’s the first photo of Nikki Finke I’ve ever seen - was expecting a much older woman.

[newfreep]

Is that like Krusty’s airplane, “I’m-on-a-rolla-Gay” used to fake Krusty’s suicide?

[America2012]

NBC and Leno are definitely to blame here. This is the second time Leno has pulled some sort of shyster BS to steal something that wasn’t supposed to be his. I hope Leno loses fans for life and NBC pays a fortune for breaching their contract with Conan.

He's lost this fan for life. I liked both Jay and Conan but this is beyond the pale the way both Jay and NBC's President Jeff Zucker screwed over Conan.

[Borges]

O’Brien has no talent? He was a highly regarded writer before doing the talk show thing.

[dandiegirl]

That’s what I would do.

[dandiegirl]

I don’t think he’s funny at all.

[peteram]

The Network - Comcast just arranged to buy them last month.

[Borges]

He wrote some really funny Simpsons episodes.

[RayChuang88]

And this time around people are much more aware of it, due to the Internet and social media.

Interesting you mention this because anyone with a CompuServe account back in the early 1990's knew full well the fight to decide whether NBC wanted Leno or Letterman to host The Tonight Show. A lot of "industry insiders" had CompuServe accounts back then and many of them posted a lot of information in that infamous feud. Mind you, that process played out over two years, while the Leno versus O'Brien feud played out in the space of only a few weeks.

[AnotherUnixGeek]

Interesting you mention this because anyone with a CompuServe account back in the early 1990's knew full well the fight to decide whether NBC wanted Leno or Letterman to host The Tonight Show. A lot of "industry insiders" had CompuServe accounts back then and many of them posted a lot of information in that infamous feud.

Unfortunately, it was mostly confined to industry insiders and others inside CompuServe's "walled garden". I was in college back then with access to the Usenet and I never really heard the details until "The Late Shift" came out.

I suspect that the current negative publicity on social media is going to cost Leno whatever younger demographic he used to have and skew his audience even older, with no viable successor anywhere in sight. He's also probably lost his carefully cultivated nice-guy image with a lot of viewers who didn't want to deal with Letterman's surliness. It's hard to see how NBC could have screwed this up any worse.

[bIlluminati]

“Conan O’Brien is close to signing a nearly $40 million deal to walk away from his job hosting NBC’s The Tonight Show,” in a new move that will also award severance pay to his employees, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.”

In unrelated news, Pres__ent Barrack Hussein Obama, Jr. turned down a $40 million dollar offer from the American public to step down, leaving the job to his predecessor, George W. Bush. Asked for comment, his reply was “that’s ($40 million) above my pay grade.”