Five shows a week for Conan

Sharp-eared reader Don Day heard this on last night's NBC promo for its late night block of shows: "And
starting September 18th, Conan's going to be all new on Mondays too!" NBC confirmed this morning; guests for the first Monday live show are TBA.

So there you have it. The goodbye-to-Late-Night era has begun in earnest. Faced with the almost inevitable switch to a five-nights-a-week schedule when he takes over "The Tonight Show" in three years, Conan O'Brien is increasing his load by one night a week starting this season. It won't be the first time he's gone nightly -- after 9/11 he did it for a while -- but it isn't an experiment this time. David Letterman, incidentally, did four nights of TV weekly from 1982 to 1993, but he was following Johnny Carson's lead, not Jay Leno's.

Comments

[roy]

Do we really know that Conan will be, ahem, "all-new" five nights a week? They're not merely shifting the rerun to Friday are they?

[Aaron]

Well, I'd think the words "NBC confirmed" would sort of cover that.

Well, of course once he starts on the Tonight Show, Conan could do five nights a week for a few months, then switch back to doing four a week.

[Don]

The more Conan the better. His performance at the Emmys shows he can take that Late Night brand that he's crafted over the past decade or so and make it mainstream -- without making it seem like he's trying.

Can't wait.

And thanks for the plug Aaron.