• by Wayne Friedman , June 2, 2009

The premiere of "The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien" grabbed big numbers -- as expected.

Scoring a large Nielsen preliminary 7.1 rating/17 share among households, the show was at its highest viewer levels on a Monday night in four years -- and the seventh-highest Monday since Jay Leno took over as host on May 25, 1992.

"O'Brien" was the beneficiary of a major marketing campaign by NBC over the last several weeks.

The new O'Brien show beat the show's second-quarter average by 82%, up from a 3.9 rating among households. It also had the highest ratings of all prime-time shows for the night.

This is a significant improvement by O'Brien overall. It more than doubled the numbers from the last show of "Late Night with Conan O'Brien," which earned a 2.6/8 on February 20.

As expected, the show overwhelmed other late-night efforts: It beat CBS' "Late Show with David Letterman" -- 7.1/17 versus 2.8/7 -- and was higher than the combined results in that hour of "Late Show," ABC's "Nightline" at 2.7/6 and "Jimmy Kimmel Live," which ran a rerun that earned a 1.2/4.