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A bearded LettermanNBC’s The Tonight Show, with Jay Leno, beat the heck out of CBS’s The Late Show with David Letterman on their first night back on the air Wednesday.
Leno pulled 7.2 million viewers - nearly 3 million more than its season-to-date average - while Letterman averaged 5.5 million viewers, nearly two million more than its average, writes The New York Times.
Letterman’s show was able to return with its writers, thanks to an agreement between Letterman’s production company, Worldwide Pants, and the striking Writers Guild of America. The Tonight Show, on the other hand, returned without benefit of the show’s writers. Leno wrote his own opening monologue, and got himself in trouble with the WGA, which told Leno that he violated its rules.
NBC has responded that Leno has not, in fact, violated any rules, saying, “The WGA agreement permits Jay Leno to write his own monologue for The Tonight Show… The WGA is not permitted to implement rules that conflict with the terms of the collective bargaining agreement between the studios and the WGA,” writes the AP.
The WGA moved yesterday to stop Leno from performing any more monologues. NBC executives said Leno would ignore strike rules set up by the writers and would tell his scripted jokes as planned.
Before the strike began, late night shows had been losing viewers, and were down by as much as 10 percent. Two months of repeats - at one point NBC showed an episode from 1992 - has sped the decline. With such high ratings from Wednesday, the clash between the WGA and Leno is a critical one, and one which has ramifications for other late night shows. Late Night with Conan O’Brien on NBC also returned to the air, and O’Brien did not perform a scripted monologue; if Leno is able to continue to perform his material, it may open the door for other hosts, like Jon Stewart of The Daily show and Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report, to do the same.
Craig Ferguson’s Late Late Show on CBS, which, like Letterman, was allowed to return with its writers, pulled 2.2 million viewers, up 28 percent from its pre-strike average. O’Brien’s attempt to navigate without writers was seen by 2.8 million viewers, up 37 percent.
Late night is a lucrative business for the networks. TNS Media Intelligence estimates that The Tonight Show and The Late Show earned more than $200 million in ad revenue in 2007. Media buyers say that a 30-second commercial on The Tonight Show goes for roughly $50,000.
The Times article lays out the full conflict between Leno and the Guild, including info on who said what, and when.
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