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.