Conan
O'Brien has his work cut out on TBS -- especially when looking at the network's current late-night time slot performance.
For TBS' "Lopez Tonight," which has been running from 11 p.m. to 12
midnight since last fall, the show has slipped dramatically -- starting from a high of a Nielsen 1.4 million total viewers to a low of around 750,000.
The show's best performance came during
its first month of operation -- November -- where its key 18-49 ratings were at a Nielsen 0.76 live-plus-same-day rating (about 870,000 18-49 viewers).
These stats would favorably compare with
"The Tonight Show with Jay Leno" -- which sits at around a 1.0 to 1.0 rating among 18-49 viewers -- and "Late Show with David Letterman," around a 0.9 rating.
But the most recent 18-49 numbers
for "Lopez" for the month of July are almost half its initial ratings -- at a 0.39, around 450,000 18-49 viewers. By way of comparison, "The Tonight Show" averaged approximately 1.3 million 18-49
viewers for a week in July; "Late Show" was at 1.0 million.
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Media buyers say TBS has been promising around a 1.0 rating among 18-49 viewers, similar to broadcast network guarantees. For a cable
network, this rating level would be very aggressive, they say.
The 1.0 rating for 18-49 viewers is about the number O'Brien got while hosting "The Tonight Show" on NBC. But analysts say cable
numbers are typically different. Other late-night cable talkfests -- such as "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" and "The Colbert Report" -- score much lower numbers.
Before the entire
Leno-O'Brien, "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno" was averaging around a 1.5 to 1.6 rating among 18-49 viewers.
Brad Adgate, senior vice president and corporate research director for Horizon Media,
says O'Brien will have the added problem of some wildly different lead-ins to his show at 11 p.m. His rivals include everything from young male-centric "Family Guy" reruns to older-skewing "The
Office" repeats to ethnic-targeted sitcoms, such as "Tyler Perry's Meet the Browns."
O'Brien's new TBS show is set to start this November, with "Lopez Tonight" following it at midnight.