late shifting
Why Conan’s TBS Announcement Left Team Coco Feeling Vaguely Unsatisfied
Is there an emoticon for perplexed excitement tainted by an unshakable sense of anticlimax? (How about ;-S ?) If so, that emoticon would have been littered all over Twitter the past 24 hours, as news spread that Conan O'Brien will be returning triumphantly to late-night this fall on
TBS.
Hmmm. Okay. ;-S.
We¹re guessing this wasn't the dramatic phoenix-rising conclusion Team Coco had been daydreaming about. No glitzy new three-hour juggernaut on Fox. No paradigm-busting mind-melter like, say, broadcasting a show directly to your Xbox. Instead, Conan will now be featured as a lead-in for Lopez Tonight (a show you don’t watch) on TBS (a cable channel you don’t watch, or at least never notice when you’re watching it). It's not just basic cable, it's unsexy basic cable. Twitter Nation's glee over Coco’s return was widely undercut by the fact that it's very hard to name three other original shows on his new channel. (No, Lopez Tonight doesn't count.)
This doesn't mean it’s not a good deal for Conan. He got lots of money (reportedly his biggest deal ever) and important real-world concessions, such as ownership of the show, which Fox wouldn't guarantee. And, of course, Coco’s online fans are saying all the right things about DVRs, the obsolescence of time slots, and their willingness to follow him anywhere — even to the channel that was once proud to bring you Frank TV.
Yet there's still a whiff of disappointment around the news, that unmistakable sound of a million souls online loosing a dejected sigh. Thus far, Conan's story had been an inspiring tale of the hip, cyber-empowered masses rallying around their wronged smartypants leader. #TeamCoco! We gave him a nickname, we designed a new logo for him, we indignantly tweeted! And in turn, we put all our hopes and dreams on him as our fearless tour guide into tomorrow’s television: He'll launch a new show on Twitter! No, he’ll form a Holy Trinity of hipster comedy with Stewart and Colbert on Comedy Central! No, he'll exist only as a hologram, projected nightly from your iPad like Leia from R2D2! Help us, Coco, you're our only hope!
Instead, he did what anyone might do, which is make the best deal he could to get into the best situation available to him. Hopefully, on TBS, Conan will flourish with the relative freedom that comes from shedding network-size expectations and shrugging off the Tonight Show yoke. (Not to mention instantly becoming the face of TBS, for better or worse.) But talk about #unsexy.
Yet that's our problem, not his. The Conan story is a lesson both in the power of online agitation and its limitations. Our ability to huddle online encourages us to dream and cry out and imagine revolution. The echo chamber of online discussions only reinforces how right we know we are. Ultimately, Team Coco ran smack up against mundane, real-world actualities such as schedule blocks and obstinate Fox affiliates.
In the end, Fox just didn't make sense. Comedy Central didn't make sense. Lord knows, an Xbox show didn't make sense. TBS makes sense. That’s the reality, even if it hardly inspires a throaty cry of Team Coco, at 140 characters or less.
