Leno helps Conan ... sort of

Jay Leno's big prime time debut last night helped boost his late-night successor's numbers, but probably not in the way Conan O'Brien wanted, according to preliminary Nielsen data.

In terms of audience, "The Tonight Show With Conan O'Brien" jumped 22% to 4.3 million viewers last night, compared to his Monday average this summer of 3.5 million viewers. There were also nice gains in adults 18-49 and adults 25-54. All that is good news.

The not-so-good news is that the biggest gain for O'Brien courtesy of Leno was in viewers over the age of 55, which jumped by 51% to 1.8 million viewers last night. Meanwhile, the 18-34 audience, which is O'Brien's core constituency, was off by 5% to 916,000 viewers.

The final numbers for last night's Leno premiere jumped from the preliminary report this morning. Overall, Leno attracted 18.4 million viewers.

-- Joe Flint

Comments

[Dan]

What's wrong with Conan having a shot to reach out of his target demographic? The only apparent concern would be retaining viewers, but he has a new opportunity to expand into another age group.

[Derrick]

Isn't this all pretty good news? Conan's making headway into a demographic he hasn't swayed quite yet. And he will always retain the young core demographic...so in my mind Jay Leno has helped Conan a great deal...

[Robert Hahn]

Nyaa, this is bad. People over 55 have cooties and never buy anything. If they watch your show you get cooties, too. That's why we need Death Panels to put them to sleep.

Eat more Soylent Green.