Actually he was. He and Letterman went back and forth for the top spot until Leno came back on at 10. Factor in that Letterman had a ratings boost thanks to a controversial joke about Sarah Palins daughter, and then another controversy over his affairs with interns, and Conan actually was doing fairly well. Matter of fact, looking back now at the ratings Leno got when he premiered, Leno actually got worse ratings. It's just absurd that NBC would do this just to make Leno happy.
Unfortunately, Leno is at the very least partially to blame. For a while I was with you in thinking Leno was an innocent party, until I started seeing old videos of Leno bragging 5 years ago about how excited he was that he personally chose Conan as his successor, and now he's acting like he was never privy to any of that information, and that he was forced out without any knowledge, which is so flippantly false, that he just makes himself look like a bigger douche.
I mean, let's face it, whether or not you agree with him being replaced, the long term plan was there, and if he was so outraged by it, he could have walked, gotten a new show on another network, for at least competitive pay, and gotten some money out of NBC to boot. But he didn't. Certainly NBC looks worst of all out of all of this, but Leno wasn't innocent. As difficult as it may seem, he could've just declined NBCs offer, and walked, and Conan could have stayed. He would've become the classiest person in television almost overnight, and that's saying something with his past, and NBC would have been the sole party to blame. Instead, he let his ego, and selfishness get in the way, and he's got no one to blame but himself.
Letterman hasn't really been beating him soundly as people have been lead to believe. Letterman was beating him, but Conan starting climbing back at the beginning of December, and the two went back and forth for the first few weeks of the new year.
What makes me personally angry is the status of Conans staff. The entire staff uprooted from New York with their families, and only at the insistence of Conan in the legal negotiations were they compensated even remotely closely to what they should have received for this debacle. I just found out this week that one of my roommates from college works for Conan, and the guy now has nowhere to go, which just makes me detest NBC and Leno just a bit more.
