Conan And Mayor Booker Make Up, Everything Fine Now

The ongoing feud between Conan O'Brien and Newark Mayor Cory Booker ended last night with Booker appearing on the show and Conan donating $100K to Booker's charity (video 1, 2). Conan also set up a "Newark Joke Jar" and promised to add $500 any time he made a joke at the city's expense, the Star-Ledger liveblogged (really). The feud began when Conan made a joke about health-care in Newark—"The health-care program would consist of a bus ticket out of Newark"—and resulted in his being banned from Newark Airport. And thus ends the scandal that never really was because Letterman had to go and ruin everything.

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By Jaya Saxena in News on October 17, 2009 6:27 PM

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thewildpansy

Sometimes I look up at the empty nights sky and howl "ballloooooon boyyyyy" in hopes that you will hear my cries and come back to me.

Spirit of 76

Yeah, everything's fine now. Except that NBC is a sinking ship and Conan is just bailing water. The results for the Jay Leno experiment are in. It's an unmitigated disaster. Yeah, it's cheap to produce, so NBC is "happy" with the lower ratings Leno gets compared with last year's dramas. But it's killing everything around it. Any 10 p.m. shows from last year moved up to 9 p.m. are getting lower ratings. Late night news at NBC affiliates across the country are suffering from the weak lead-in. One affiliate saw this coming and planned to move their newscast earlier instead of airing Leno; only NBC threatening to pull their affiliation stopped them. And if fewer people watch the 11 o'clock news, fewer people stay for Conan, so he's getting half the ratings Leno did last year (no thanks to the fact that he's not funny). Letterman is wiping the floor with him. It's not even a contest anymore.

azzh01

Have you noticed all of the "live segment product placement" type stuff they are airing lately? It's kind of pathetic. The "Today Show" is looking more and more like "The Price is Right" with all of the product segments. They even had an hourlong advertisement for the new Dan Brown book featuring Matt Lauer on friday primetime. Sad NBC.