TBS Extends Conan O’Brien’s Contract Into 2015

One place where late-night programming is facing no tension or instability is the cable channel TBS, which announced Monday that it had extended the contract of its signature star, Conan O’Brien, until November 2015.

The news comes, perhaps fittingly, as Mr. O’Brien is set to produce a week of shows from Atlanta, which is the home base of TBS.

While his old network, NBC, is in the midst of the latest late-night upheaval, trying to smooth a transition from Jay Leno to Jimmy Fallon at “The Tonight Show,” TBS is promoting Mr. O’Brien’s success with young viewers. The network notes that his audience has the youngest median age in late-night television, 39.7 for this television season. By contrast, Mr. Leno’s is 58.1 and Mr. Fallon’s is 53.3.

TBS also emphasized Mr. O’Brien’s reach on the Internet, claiming that his show leads late-night entertainment in online activity and engagement, with 8.3 million followers on Twitter and two million on Facebook.

Over all, Mr. O’Brien’s show attracts a little more than 900,000 viewers and averages just under 600,000 viewers in the 18-to-49-year-old category, which defines much of the success in late night.

TBS said that Mr. O’Brien’s real strength lay in the lower segment of that age group, those between 18 and 34, where he has more viewers than Mr. Fallon. (In fairness, his show also starts 90 minutes earlier than Mr. Fallon’s.)

Because TBS has yet to have a real star in prime time — virtually all its success is based on reruns of sitcoms like “The Big Bang Theory” — Mr. O’Brien has become the standout individual face of the network. So it is all the more important for TBS to lock Mr. O’Brien in for another two-plus years.

That also means he would not be on the market when other late-night changes might take place at any other network (CBS for example), though whether Mr. O’Brien would ever seek to return to the more cutthroat world of late-night network television is certainly open to question.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/02/business/media/tbs-extends-conan-obriens-contract-into-2015.html?partner=rss&emc=rss