I normally don't care much for late night TV, but I had to catch this one. I like Leno, I like Conan, so I wanted to see how the hand-off was.
Leno's series ended on a great note: He had some good lines making fun of Conan, and seemed very greatful and humbled by the crowd reaction. Conan was the only guest on the show (outside of James Taylor for a musical number), and they spoke at length about the change over.
There was some fun flashbacks, and it was really cool seeing Conan and Leno back seventeen years ago. What would have been COOLER would have been a David Letterman cameo (though I doubt CBS would have allowed it)...or perhaps a longer episode.
Total buzzkill was Fallon afterward. Sorry, I've caught five of his episodes, and he sucks. I bet Ferguson is kicking his ass in the ratings; he has more personality than fifteen hundred Fallons.
According to sources, here were the late night ratings for Monday-Thursday of this week (Friday's won't be available until Monday, I think this is household numbers):
Show
MON
TUE
WED
THU
Leno
4.1
4.6
4.9
5.2
Letterman
2.1
2.4
2.2
2.5
Nightline
2.4
2.3
2.5
2.3
Ferguson
1.2
1.3
1.3
1.4
Kimmel
1.1
1.0
1.1
1.2
Fallon
1.7
1.8
2.2
2.1
Daly
0.9
1.0
N/A
1.1
But it's possible that people tuning in for Leno's final week stay watching for Fallon when they normally wouldn't have.
EDIT: Discovered that Letterman, Ferguson, and Kimmel were in reruns this week, which means that they were lower (and their competition higher) than normal.
I'd like to see Fallon's numbers for other weeks. I'm not foolish enough to think that whoever I like is who the rest of America likes, but I absolutely do not understand the hate I see directed at Fallon on this board. Personally I'm not surprised to see that he's pretty handily beating Craig Ferguson. The lead-in from Leno obviously helps, but he's also had decent guests, and his show is very quickly turning into a catalog of fantastic must-see live hip-hop musical performances. The Roots are untouchable. Everything they touch seems to turn to gold. The jokes in his monologue often fall flat, but everything after that is usually pretty entertaining. Slow Jam The News is my favorite monologue bit EVER.
I don't talk to anyone else about him so I don't know how other people/friends feel about him. What I DO know is he's one of the like top 10 most followed people on twitter (over a million followers last I checked). So there are at least a few people out there that don't hate him as much as people on here.
My dislike of Fallon comes from the fact that he sounds winded not even three jokes into his monologue - it often sounds like he's gasping for air. He hardly enunciates his words, but all in all, a lot of his stuff just isn't funny.
Oh, man, are these ratings hard to find. The only way you find out about late night ratings are if a network does a press release about it, and they only do that if there's something good to say.
But I did find information from the May sweeps this year (April 23rd to May 20th).
The first number is a rating (percentage of the audience), the rest are simply viewers in each category (in millions).
So we'll call Fallon and Ferguson a tie for now. Obviously will be interesting to see how Fallon's numbers look next week with Conan as his new lead-in.
Originally posted by OliverMy dislike of Fallon comes from the fact that he sounds winded not even three jokes into his monologue - it often sounds like he's gasping for air. He hardly enunciates his words, but all in all, a lot of his stuff just isn't funny.
Agreed. He's not even remotely funny nor entertaining.
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Once Joe put the three amigos in jail, I wonderered how they'd get out of it without just magically ignoring everything. They did come pretty close. That said, the episode wasn't bad and there were a few funny jokes. Mort is best in small doses, though.
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