Conan deal any minute (NYT, WSJ, DH)

By R. Kinsey Lowe

Waiting for word on Conan. Still. Representatives of Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien said an agreement could come as early as Sunday night. Well, that didn't happen, probably because they didn't want it to compete with NBC's Golden Globes show.

With the heat NBC is taking you couldn't blame them if they put the news out during the Golden Globes, but this seems to be one case in which the network has milked the negative publicity for all it's worth. The principals certainly have.

Writing for Media Decoder in the New York Times, Bill Carter said all major points of the deal have been worked out with only "legal issues" remaining.

Financial terms include a payment of $40 million, the Times said, but some of that will go to O'Brien staffers who have their own contracts.

Earlier, the Wall Street Journal's Nancy deWolf Smith offered a rare, and refreshing, feminine perspective on the late-night drama kings and their shenanigans.

As we lay aside the cares of the day, the dueling egos of two middle-age comedians is just the thing to let us drift to sleep on a tide of froth.

She concludes that the feud is making these guys more interesting than they otherwise would be.

As ratings spike, if only briefly, there is reason to believe that such shows will continue their inexorable decline. I suspect so particularly after having sampled a gaggle of six hosts on a single day this week: Jay Leno at 10 on NBC; George Lopez at 11 on TBS; the Comedy Central hour, beginning at 11 p.m., which includes Jon Stewart's "Daily Show" and Stephen Colbert's "The Colbert Report"; Conan O'Brien at 11:35 on NBC; and David Letterman on CBS at the same time.

Television viewing figures collected by Nielsen between September 2009 and early January 2010 show that among the after-11 group of Mr. Letterman, "The Tonight Show" and the two Comedy Central shows, only Mr. Letterman picked up some viewers since the same period of 2008-09. The others had lost about three million pairs of eyes, or about a quarter of their collective audience. Even with Mr. Letterman, there is no telling what might have happened to his overall ratings without the bump of people tuning in last October to gawk at the man who can't get a date the normal way.

She further wonders whether the direction of the ratings for these shows has anything to with �

� the fact that the universe these male-hosted shows reflect, and play to, is overwhelmingly masculine? And not manly, as in calm and capable, but closer to Mutant Ninja Teenager.

� The staple of juvenilia on many of these comedy shows�the sex talk�is almost never interesting. The fact that our hosts are physically mature men in suits makes their smutty material feel even weirder.

DeWolf notes that over the course of several hours she was subjected to

barely concealed f-words and multiple references to masturbation, erections, backsides (of humans and of a tiger) and vibrators, and other sexually charged allusions. Mr. Leno led the parade of tee-hee references by a wide margin. But he was not alone, and I lost count of how many times someone referred to a, or said the word, "penis" (a particular prop of Mr. Lopez, along with much sticking out of the tongue).

Little of this was witty or stirring in any pleasant way, and you didn't have to be a woman to reach that conclusion.

Ouch.

But she does have a point. All the attention this is getting, diverting as it may be from our more serious daily travails, for some of us it's way too much ado about not very much.

Even more coverage of the subject:
It's not Jay or Conan, its us (MD)
VIDEO: Seth Meyers reveals how Conan got screwed (TLF)
NBC�s slide from TV heights to troubled punch lines (NYT)
Anti-NBC frenzy continues over Conan (DH)
Looking at his own record, Ebersol has a lot of nerve calling Conan an 'astounding failure' (Deadspin)
Conan using 'Tonight Show' site for eBay sales (CNET)