At today's TCA session, FX Networks president John Landgraf said he would jump at the chance to get Conan O'Brien to host a late night show for FX "in a heartbeat" if Conan made himself available to basic cable.
Landgraf also said he is scheduled to have lunch with Joss Whedon within the next few weeks to discuss future prospects. "I have enormous respect for him," Landgraf said of Whedon.
That poor guy deserves a break. Uh, both of them.
I wouldn’t want Joss anywhere near anything even vaguely related to Fox again. How about pay cable? Showtime or HBO would be a good fit!
If the two actually did a project *together*, you might as well call me Masturbating Bear.
Late night doesn’t work on Cable. See George Lopez. Weekdays at 11 pm on Fox is the best-case scenario for Conan
If Conan does not end up on Fox, he will be stuck doing sit coms that no one watches and or laughs at. THINK ANDY RICHTER…Ironic isnt it??
Let’s hope. Predictions on how their first nights on FOX be?
“It’s going to be one of the most exciting? nights of television in the history of radio.” – Conan, 1995
“This is simply going to be the most fascinating piece to television in the history of radio.” – Joss Whedon, 2008
Conan the Vampire Slayer? Hm.. not sure its going to work.
I wouldn’t read too much into it right now. Joss Whedon made it very clear that he wants to take another long break.
I had figured if Conan was going to go to cable it had to be FX. Viacom and Turner both have late night talk shows on one or more of their networks, so they wouldn’t want to compete with themselves. And of course it can’t be any of the NBC Universal networks. So what else is left besides FX?
I would love to see a Joss Whedon show for cable.
Joss Whedon on FX would be great, I won’t be holding me breathe though
Where’s JBF? I want to here his take.
o, and I want to hear* his take. I guess I can’t spell
Late Night doesn’t work on cable? Please call Comedy Central to let them know the Daily Show and the Colbert Report are failures.
Joss has stated time and time again that the only reason he did Dollhouse is because Eliza was involved with the project and it *had* to be on FOX due to Eliza’s development deal. If Joss was doing his own project, he would have gone to cable. Does that excuse the failures of Dollhouse (both creatively and ratings-wise)? No.
But it does explain where Joss’ mindset is and has been since the first season of Dollhouse. Should Joss come back to TV – barring some weird set of circumstances – it’ll be on cable.
Take it away, JBF.
I don’t know why Jeremy claims late night doesn’t work on cable. You mention George Lopez, he’s doing some pretty good numbers. Especially around 800,000 (18-49). His show especially does well with Hispanics and African Americans.
Chelsea Handler also works very well on cable. She does better than Kimmel etc in the 18-35 and she really attracts a strong female audience.
Even FNC’s “Red Eye With Greg Gutfeld” has gotten tremendous ratings. Mediaite did a story on it a few months ago about how it was even beating CNN’s Campbell Brown’s show in the “demo”. This from a show on at 3:00 am compared with CNN’s prime time show.
I just feel sorry for Conan, he got screwed because of Leno
OH, YAY, another Whedon series to die a slow and painful death as we love it on it’s way out the door.
Anyone still watching Dollhouse? As usual, it’s getting SO much better near the finale. Not sure there’s anyplace to go with it from here…
Anyway…Conan just doesn’t seem that funny to me, but he’s beating Letterman, and that’s a good thing…
Jeremy – I don’t think Lopez is exactly late night material, he’s not exactly attracted rave reviews (and what I’ve seen of him was staggeringly unfunny. I’d repeat Family Guy’s line about him but I’m sure people would take it the wrong way.)
I think a late night show should work on cable, but it’ll never attract the same audience that one on a regular network would attract. But, and here’s the thing, talk is cheap, talk shows doubly so. That was, after all, why Leno was filling in the 10pm slot, despite low audiences the show was so cheap it was always going to be profitable, and if it wasn’t for the affiliate model, it’d almost certainly still be there.
Cable is cheap. If Conan can fill an hour of programming every single week day (an hour repeated at an early hour the next day too) for, say, 100 million a year (total, his salary, production costs, etc), then pretty much every *major* cable channel would consider it, even assuming the ratings are half what they are presently.
They’re not going to base their decision on Lopez Tonight any more than Fox would base a decision to have a talk show on the ratings of Jimmy Fallon.
HEY, scary thought. After Leno, will Fallon be the next host of the Tonight Show?
i wish NBC hadn’t outbid FX for Persons Unknown i’m pretty sure they would have treated it much better