Yeah, but he has to deal with that orange hair.

I feel bad for Andy Richter. I think that whole group is probably going to want to get out of L.A. and forget the whole thing as a terrible nightmare.

Wonder how he'd vote on 66 67.

And best of all, he'll probably be at home watching The Tonight Show when Jay Leno follows through on Bill Hicks's prophecy, puts a nine-millimeter in his mouth, and blows his Doritos-shilling head right off his shoulders. I wonder if the guest really will be Patrick Duffy...

I just don't get the 45 million payout. Nobody is worth that much for working, let alone for not working! I just don't understand the entertainment industry - including sports entertainment - in this country.

Big buy-offs seem to be the norm in big business of any kind. Probably the result of overly generous contracts that one or the other party wants out of. When you bet big, you take the chance of losing big. This only annoys me when the public ends up paying (like in the Dorothy English debacle).

About $15 mil of the $45 mil is going to his crew...about 200 people.

Good riddance.

Talentless is O'Brien's middle name.

Conan wrote for some of the best early 90's SNL skits, as well as the golden age of the Simpsons. I have been watching his show on and off since it started. I hope he goes back to writing, maybe working for FOX he could re energize the Simpsons. He's a talent, just not for everyone. Leno on the other hand shined the most in Doritos commercials. What a set up. I don't think its wise for Conan to antagonize the network like he is doing however.

I think that in a couple years when Sarah Palin is president and maybe the goofy cosmo model is her vice president we may look back and realize how significant Conan's departure from NBC really was. I always felt like his arrival at the Tonight Show coincided with the next 8 years of Obama and a real positive youth movement towards the future. That has all but dissolved and I think we are now looking at a very different future.

Leno and Letterman have maybe five good years left at most. By then Conan will be much stronger, and he'll have a better vehicle for his brand of comedy -- one that he's now going to get to create, rather than inherit from Dave or Jay.

I think 300 minutes a week is too long for any comedy show. If you had a half hour each of Conan, Ferguson, Fallon, and Kimmel every weeknight, that would be plenty -- and it would be better. If Stewart and Colbert each had to go an hour a night, half of it would stink. Saturday Night Live is also way too long at 90 minutes. As Johnny figured out a long time ago, cutting that one to an hour would make for a much better show.

I'm glad to see that Letterman is apparently going to get to coast to retirement now, whereas Leno is slightly damaged goods and will need a flawless rehab period. If you live by the network weasels' decisions, you die by them.

One thing is for sure: Nobody has ever seen anything like these last 2 weeks in the history of television. Punchlines were seized upon and featured like breaking news on the Internet before they even aired. Before a monologue had played here in Portland it was already a video clip on news sites.
It was possible for a West Coast writer to bang out a line at 10:30 in the morning and have it be prominently placed on the New York Times site hours before airing in Portland.
What a trip.
Half of the equation ended tonight, but Primetime chugs on for 3 more weeks, 'til the Winter Olympics settle on everything like a coat of new snow. That's when this season of craziness finally ends.
What we just witnessed with the Leno at 10 experiment is already being described as the greatest blunder in TV history. Nobody is even close to disputing that.

The stupidest move was announcing the most important lineup change on the network years in advance. Then when the day came to implement the change, they had painted themselves into a corner and had no choice but to try something that was highly suspect. Plus, Leno at 10 looked short-term cheap, and Lord knows, the bean counters of corporate America know the value of short-term cheap. Except when it comes to their own salaries, of course.

How Jeff Zucker keeps his job after this one is baffling. Is he somebody's nephew?

Jeff Zucker is just the latest symbol of a generational rush to reward failure. Look at the career of Bill Kristol. He was wrong about everything heading into the Iraq War, so after all the depleted-uranium dust had settled, they gave him his own column in the New York Times. Of course, he immediately screwed that up as well.
Jeff Zucker is every little kid who runs up to the soccer ball, trips, and falls down, only to hear his parents say, "Terrific job, Jeffy" and then take him to some fast food restaurant and cram him full of toxic waste.
Jeff doesn't even know he's not brilliant. Why should he? Society has rewarded him all along the line. He just signed a new contract to run NBC Universal after the Comcast deal.
He is now much richer and many times more famous than when this all started.
These days, outrageous failure can be a terrific career move.

It sure looked that way on Conan tonight. He had a killer lineup -- guys like Beck jamming in the band without even an introduction. Coco's a lot bigger than he was a month ago.

Glad to see him go. Never found Conan to be particularly funny or entertaining. Just weird and strange. And until this past week his ratings were dreadful.

I tried to watch him. How many times has he walked off the stage in fake disgust or whatever. His comedic timing sure isn't on the level of Carson. In his interviews he always seemed disengaged and thinking of his next question without appreciating the present conversation. I just couldn't ever appreciate his kind of slapstick, but I like Mr. Bean. Explain that.