TBS changes game with Conan O'Brien

What changed? The impending arrival of a pale, red-headed talk-show host known for good-natured, absurdist humor and characters such as Triumph the Insult Comic Dog and the Vomiting Kermit.

Snagging Conan O’Brien to start a new late-night show this fall is what many in the TV world call “a game changer.”

“Conan is going to bring a whole new generation of viewers to TBS that may have never considered it before,” said Brad Siegel, a former Turner Entertainment Networks president who now runs Atlanta-based Gospel Music Channel. “It gives TBS a brand of humor on a nightly basis it doesn’t currently have.”

Steve Koonin, president of Turner Entertainment Networks, said media response to the move announced this past week has been overwhelming and excited advertisers are calling him at home. “And I’m not even in sales!” he said in an interview at Turner’s Techwood campus in Midtown Atlanta.

“Conan is an icon of television,” Koonin said. “His brand evolved and changed from a wacky beanpole doing goofy stuff late at night to a heroic figure who stood up to ‘The Man.’”

‘We needed a face’

That would be Conan’s former employer, NBC, which gave him his first on-air job in 1993, handed him “The Tonight Show” reins last year, then tried to pull the rug out from under him when ratings failed to take off. He refused to move his show to a later time and negotiated a massive exit deal.

O’Brien’s most obvious new home would have been Fox, but with talks progressing slowly, Koonin last month decided to make his move.

At 12:04 a.m. March 31, Koonin e-mailed O’Brien’s manager a brief sales pitch promoting TBS. He noted the network’s youthful audience, its diversity and its reach. And he vowed to make O’Brien the centerpiece of the network, giving him creative freedom and ownership of his show. It worked.

Within days, they had a deal. And TBS suddenly had a host of new possibilities.

For one thing, the network plans to use O’Brien as a platform to broaden its relatively scant original programming lineup during primetime. Koonin expects O’Brien’s writing team will develop shows the way Jon Stewart was able to spin off Stephen Colbert onto his own show on Comedy Central. Indeed, Stewart and Colbert will be the closest competitors to O’Brien once he starts his show in November.

Koonin also hopes O’Brien will attract big-name comedy talent to TBS. Sister station TNT was able to bring in the likes of Holly Hunter (“Saving Grace”), Timothy Hutton (“Leverage”) and Ray Romano (“Men of a Certain Age”) after Steven Spielberg used the network to air his Emmy-nominatd miniseries “Into the West” in 2005.

“We needed a face for TBS,” Koonin said. “Conan sends a message to the comedy world: “Wow! This might be a great place to work!’ ”

O’Brien as a brand

Don Seaman, vice president of communications analysis at ad agency MPG in New York, said TBS has been a great place to sell ads because it brings in a broad audience. TBS last year was a top five network among cable channels during primetime and No. 2 among 18- to 34-year-olds.

But research has shown TBS, by relying on so many reruns, has had a problem: “It’s a network people watch but don’t realize it. It’s forgettable. People connect Comedy Central with Jon Stewart or ABC with ‘Lost.’

“Now,” Seaman said, “they’ll tie TBS with Conan.”

When Bill Burke, president of Turner Broadcasting from 1995 to 2000, heard the news about O’Brien, he was reminded of the mid-1990s, when then-owner Ted Turner tried (and failed) to take “Seinfeld” away from NBC.

“We spent three crazy days coming up with a plan to justify the licensing fees,” Burke said. “It’s precisely the kind of thing Ted Turner always tried to do. It’s great to see the legacy of really shaking things up continuing.”

Turner was out of the country this past week and unavailable for comment.

Brad Adgate, senior vice president for research at media buying firm Horizon Media, said pressure on O’Brien to pull in big numbers will be less on TBS than if he were on Fox. While Jay Leno and David Letterman usually draw three to five million viewers nightly, O’Brien will likely attract around 1.5 million but skew much younger. And advertisers like younger. Already, the median age of TBS viewers is just 33, far lower than those of the broadcast networks.

From WTCG to TBS

TBS, originally known as WTCG, was Turner’s baby. The entrepreneur had the foresight in 1976 to beam the station all over the country via satellite. “I didn’t even know we were on satellite at first,” said Bill Tush, the original face and voice of the station, who said he can’t seem to live down the time he put a dog licking peanut butter behind a desk while he read the news offstage during his overnight show.

Turner didn’t have much to offer viewers except reruns of “Gilligan’s Island” and “Beverly Hillbillies,” black-and-white films from the 1950s and Braves games. But the formula worked. It helped that there wasn’t much competition at the time.

In the early 1980s, while Turner was building CNN from scratch, WTBS provided the company’s only profits. It created Braves fans from Salem, Mass., to Spokane, Wash. It dabbled in original programming including sitcoms (“Down to Earth”), a soap (“The Catlins”) and a game show (“Starcade”).

Turner’s ambitions for WTBS grew. He spent and lost millions on a Jacques Cousteau miniseries. He created and aired the Goodwill Games, his own version of the Olympics, another huge money drain and a bust in the ratings. He put the company $2 billion in debt buying the MGM/UA film library.

TBS soldiered into the 1990s as a testoterone-driven home to John Wayne and Clint Eastwood films and professional wrestling. But as cable matured and splintered into niche programming, TBS modernized its image with newer films (“Dumb and Dumber”) and sitcoms (“Fresh Prince of Bel Air,” “Roseanne”), dumped wrestling and began ceding cop dramas and action flicks to its sister station TNT.

‘Comedy is hard’

When Koonin took over in 2003, he used branding skills honed at Coca-Cola to cement the differences between TNT (“We Know Drama”) and TBS (“Very Funny”).

Over the past decade, TBS became a mainstay for repeats of “Sex and the City,” “Family Guy” and “Seinfeld,” which can air over and over again and bring in fans who may have never seen them the first time around. The network gradually cut back, then ended its legacy relationship with the Braves. Ratings improved.

Efforts to build original programming, however, have been more scattershot. A Down Under “Bachelor” ripoff “Outback Jack” lasted one season. A heavily promoted sketch comedy show in 2007 starring Frank Caliendo ran out of steam after two seasons. Bland family sitcom “The Bill Engvall Show” survived for three.

“Comedy is hard to develop,” Koonin admitted. “It’s subjective. I put a gun to her head, that’s dramatic. I’ve made three jokes today that didn’t work.”

On the bright side, Tyler Perry’s two comedies draw African-American audiences abandoned by other networks. And George Lopez’s new TBS late-night talk show last fall brought in a young, ethnically diverse audience not watching Stewart or Leno.

But O’Brien finally brings TBS something it’s lacked: hipness.

Turner Broadcasting System Inc. (a Time Warner company)

Headquarters: Atlanta

Employees: 11,000 worldwide

Chairman/CEO: Philip I. Kent

Networks: TBS, CNN, HLN, TNT, Cartoon Network, Adult Swim, truTV, Peachtree TV, Boomerang, Turner Classic Movies, CNN International, CNN En Espanol

Sampling of TBS originals: “Tyler Perry’s House of Payne,” “Tyler Perry’s Meet the Browns,” “Lopez Tonight,” “My Boys” “Major League Baseball” on Sundays

Sampling of TBS reruns: “Married With Children,” “Saved By the Bell,” “Home Improvement,” “Seinfeld,” “The Office,” “Friends,” “Family Guy,” “Sex and the City”

TBS’s ratings rankings in 2009 among basic cable channels during primetime: No. 5 overall; No. 2 among viewers age 18-34; No. 3 among viewers 18-49