Conan & Leno

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I've been following this whole debacle cause I'm always interested in reading up on Pop Culture stuff( I didn't say I follow fads or anything, I just like learning about all the sh!t like this, and whatnot).

I know folks have been (unfairly) bashing Jay Leno left and right over this. And I must confess: Leno is one of my favorite comedians, but I still find Conan funny..and the few bits I saw here and there I thought were quite good, of his tenure on the Tonight Show.

Well, I decided to watch a full episode of the Tonight Show with Conan on Hulu....and I fully understand now why ratings plummeted.

Everyone saying that Conan should do something online...I totally agree with.

I see the Tonight Show as a very classy venue for a "seasoned" audience...not necessarily old people per se, but just a bit more.....I don't really know how to put it exactly.

For me, Jay's jokes always come off as so amazingly smooth, and it just all worked so nicely.

Conan...not so much. His style, IMO, just fell flat on the Tonight Show. I even found Andy Richter to be very annoying and obnoxious when he announced the show...to a point where Ed McMahon would've been spinning in his grave. And this is Andy Richter...and I love Andy Richter.

It was like trying to watch a webisode of my generation...on network TV.

It's like Conan was good in small spurts here and there, but when he tried to do a whole monologue of jokes....again, it just didn't work.

It just wasn't his style. That's why the ratings tanked.

Any thoughts?

For whatever it may be worth, I always liked Leno and didn't care for Conan. Leno is a guaranteed laugh and Conan is a maybe. That's the whole point as far as I'm concerned.

I liked Leno's standup comedy in the '80s, but I've felt that The Tonight Show spoiled or changed him into some kind of Hollywood snark or something, even pretty clearly anti-Hispanic/anti-immigrant. It's one thing for Johnny Carson to tell one joke about having to be a non-citizen to win the California lottery ... but Jay just went on and on, year after year, nastier and nastier ... think Craig Kilborn when he had CBS' Late Late Show. It got so I couldn't bear to watch Leno anymore, very disappointed and irritated. (Except "Headlines"!)

Is what you're thinking of, that The Tonight Show had acquired a kind of "glam" tradition, probably from being in Hollywood fulltime and all? Certainly the Carson show was not the old Letterman show, and the Leno show was not the O'Brien show ... though don't forget Johnny's "physical humor" (I'm remembering that line from an old "Larry Sanders" episode)! I've been a huge Conan fan, but I *was* surprised that he seemed to import his whole Late Night 'thing' into the Tonight Show slot. (Did he keep Triumph? the Masturbating Bear?) Recalling (IIRC) that Jay wasn't originally supposed to stay around, maybe it evolved that some network suits thought his audience had aged enough that they'd love to catch him 90 minutes earlier before turning in, while Conan's would somehow just switch to the 11:30 (ET) slot, and add those who still wanted The Tonight Show no matter who was doing what there. But they forgot that Letterman and O'Brien were of a piece, 'cool vs. cool.' I'm under the impression that many people used to do what I usually did, and caught Letterman at 11:30, then changed channels to O'Brien at 12:30. But up against each other at 11:30, sorry but Letterman was The Original!

IIUC though, the problem wasn't so much that Letterman beat Conan in one or two Nielsen books, but that NBC *affiliates* were in open revolt over JAY in prime time: Not only were people NOT following Jay to 10:00 in great numbers -- old habits die hard -- but Jay was trying to pre-empt more traditional/popular primetime fare such as drama or even (God help us) "reality" shows NOT ONLY at 10, but by his insistence, at 9, with his "nothing negative leading into me" dictum -- God, the man was coming after the NEWS for 17 years: murders, fires, rapes, gangs, Nor'easters, petty politicians, corruption, war, terror(ism), sports frustration! [OK now, guess where I live! Not NY!] Now he expected to basically *gut* prime time all five weeknights across the network? The problem really was that NBC mis-handled Jay's 'easing-out' 5-6 years ago, so Jay was able to keep enough credibility to continue to make demands. Was all this "5 more years," then "you can put me at 10 but with nothing negative before me," then "well, maybe we can stick me back at 11:30 for half an hour," *orchestrated* by Jay to turn out this way, basically him getting back the (whole) show he was supposed to be eased out of starting 5-6 years ago now? Hmmm.... The man's not old or sick, and while he's made something of stashing all his TV money and living off his occasional standup gigs -- with that house, and all those cars, I dunno -- actuarially, he's gonna have many years of big bills to pay. I can't help thinking his standup 'star' would fade over the years, so he'd need the TV money. What happened to Johnny after Tonight? Gosh, McMahon literally went broke, died pretty much penniless! "The fickle mob" (Shakespeare) easily forgets. Maybe Jay even saw Ed's post-Tonight professional decompensation -- "Star Search" became a running joke, as did "You may already be a winner." Jay's from somewhat of a working-class background, and you don't forget that -- *I* am, and I don't. But hell, The Tonight Show's the top of the show-biz/media world, why let it go without a fight if you don't have to?! Letterman's still bitter over not getting it, 18 years ago now, even though he has nothing to be ashamed of!

I've always tried to like Jay as a person even after I became disappointed in his work. I never saw him at 10 since I don't control the TV at that hour, and we don't have DVR. I really hate Conan being edged out, and I'd hate to have to watch him on Fox, for reasons of politics as well as taste. He didn't want to go back any later, maybe he thought he'd lose face, though clearly everybody realized this became some kind of weird TV experiment that failed, so that would be quickly forgotten, especially if his show remained so much his show as I've noted above. Jimmy Fallon? Something was up from the very beginning: Did you see Jimmy's first show-open, with him in the dressing room, and Conan comes out as if he's finishing-up his own moving-out of there? (Scripted, of course.) Jimmy asks him, "Is it gonna be like this in LA, you getting Jay's dressing room?" And Conan responds (mock?-)bitterly, "That's just it: Jay's not leaving." And Jimmy goes, "Oh, yeah, I thought I read something about that somewhere..." (Laugh-line as if it's live/real.) Is Conan protecting Jimmy, not d***ing Jimmy over like Jay seems to be doing to Conan? Does Conan get brownie points, good karma, or something more? ("I'm a-gonna go ta hell when I die...!")

As for Conan and Andy, remember that while Jay is a career standup, Conan is a writer pretending to be a comedian, basically. I don't mean that in a bad way, just that that's why Jay comes across so smooth, whereas I always considered Conan's awkward self-consciousness and self-deprecation to be somewhat intentional, almost deconstructive if you will. (He did go to Harvard....) Like *much* of Late Night With Conan O'Brien, actually. And I actually saw little TV in the '90s, but apparently 'Edgy Andy' that we saw on Tonight was also pretty much in line with most of his presentation on Late Night; the 'milder Andy' I remember must've been less frequent then. Just as well, probably: If I'd seen too much of Andy being pushed naked/pixeled onto the set of The Today Show, they might've lost me. (Nevermind that Today is put to bed long before Andy got up in the ... midday!!) But I was one of those sad to see him leave Late Night, and always felt Conan needed, or benefited from, a sidekick; at the same time, I was rooting for Andy's TV/acting efforts ... oh well.

I guess I've "held forth" long enough. Full Disclosure: Broadcasting is my career-of-record, though grad school and disability have kept me from it professionally for almost two decades now. It's nice to flex those old muscles once in a while!

Yaaay!! This entire subject is an obsessive interest for me, so I'm thrilled to have an opportunity to rant about it for a moment! Pardon me while I digress a bit...

You say you've been following the whole debacle...well...if you have , then you'll remember that it all started oh, say, about thirty years ago...back when The Tonight Show was the only thing worth watching after the Ten O'Clock News, and most of us only had three channels to choose from, unless we could afford thirteen channel cable...

At the very end of the Seventies, David Letterman was one of several people (among them Joan Rivers, Rich Little and a half dozen or so other well-knowns of the time) who were regularly tapped to stand in for Johnny Carson as guest hosts on Tonight, when Johnny was doing stand-up in Vegas, or taking time off. Although a new face to most late night viewers, Letterman had been in LA doing bit parts on sitcoms and game shows for a few years and was already developing the slick sardonic style that would become his trademark, though unlike the other guest hosts (until Garry Shandling was added to the roster in 1981), he had no established career independent of his Tonight Show appearances.

Once he connected with Johnny Carson, that rapidly began to change. Carson made it clear that he was grooming Letterman to take the helm of the Tonight Show upon Johnny's retirement (at some unspecified date in the distant future), and plans were made to make sure that David Letterman would still be available for the gig when that day came. First was the creation of The David Letterman Show, a talk and comedy venue NBC place oddly after the Today Show, in the morning. While the show was a critical success (2 Emmys in its four month run), as one might imagine, the midmorning housewives were not the right audience for Letterman's odd mixture of cynicism and whimsy. NBC and Johnny Carson however, had no intention of letting him get away and spent a year tooling a new show to run immediately after Johnny each night, called Late Night With David Letterman.

Personally, although I thought Letterman was funny, he seemed too goofy and sarcastic to ever win over the more mainstream late night audience of the Tonight Show. Besides, he wasn't even a very good interviewer, often talking over his guests while they pitched their new book or movie, with wacky zingers and impish comments. I just couldn't really understand what Johnny Carson saw in him. Today, I realize why Johnny was the King of Comedy. He saw things in Dave I didn't have the experience in those days to perceive. And he was right. While Letterman has never lost his oddball sense of humor (reminiscent of earlier Tonight host Steve Allen), he has matured over the years into a much more sensitive and sometimes incisive interviewer and an all around showman par excellence. His comedic timing is impeccable while he always gives the impression that he's just rambling off the top of his head. He's not. And unlike a lot of chat show hosts, when a guest inadvertently blunders into double entendre territory, as often as not, rather than take the comedic fumble and run with it, Letterman takes the high road and lets it pass.

While Dave was developing his chops on Late Night, several new faces were added to the Tonight Show's guest host roster over the next few years, among them (in 1987) boyish Jay Leno, whose softball jokes about his folks and cars and middle America made him an audience darling. There was even media buzz about Garry Shandling being asked whether he had any interest in the Tonight Show, and Shandling let it be known clearly and publicly that he had no interest in the Tonight Show or any other talk show chair. Once he pie-faced the entire talk show industry (yep, it had become an industry during the 80s, with expanding multi-tiered cable and too many channels to fill with mindless drivel) with his second cable series The Larry Sanders Show, it became clear how Shandling perceived the gig and why he would never want to become that in real life.

One could easily understand Shandling's reasons for feeling that way when, in 1992 Johnny finally did retire from the Tonight Show and in spite of his long openly expressed intent, after several secret backroom negotiations at NBC, it was announced that (perhaps not so boyish and innocent) Jay Leno would be taking over the Tonight Show. Letterman was publicly snubbed after having waited for the job for more than a decade. Apparently, as soon as Johnny announced his retirement, his influence at NBC went from Godfather of Television, to zero in an instant. Nice to know the people you've made billions of dollars for for over 30 years respect your opinion and your wishes. There must have been a 'focus group' that disagreed.

So Letterman moves to CBS, starts over with the Late Show going head to head with Leno and the massive audience that Tonight once commanded is rent asunder, never to be seen again. From that point on, the two shows run neck and neck (though to hear the number crunchers talk it's a nightly battle to the death for supremacy), but no late night show will ever again see the numbers that Johnny Carson built and held consistently from 1962-1992. The Tonight Show is now and will always be) just another also-ran. Johnny starts faxing Letterman jokes to use in his monologue from his home every day. No doubt about who Johnny wanted. Not that it mattered.

Jay Leno takes over the Tonight Show and his demeanor and sense of humor change literally overnight. Suddenly he's using his opening monologue to bash every celebrity in the news - not just poke fun at them, but viciously beat them down. His favorite tossoff becomes "Morons!", which he uses to describe not just stupid criminals in the news, but people in general. It becomes apparent to anyone with their brain engaged and paying attention that this is Mr. Leno's opinion of humanity at large, including his own audience. Its the comedy equivalent of the Sex Pistols spitting on their audience. To my mind, if you keep tuning in to a man who thinks you're an idiot, you're only proving him right.

Which brings us to the current fiasco. Letterman leaves NBC, Late Night with David Letterman now, after ten years of good ratings has no host and no one waiting in the wings to take over. NBC looks to executive producer Lorne Michaels (creator of Saturday Night Live) for an emergency solution. Michaels looks to his then current cast of comic minds at SNL and picks - not a star comedy performer, but a member of the SNL writing staff, Conan O'Brien. One wonders if the reasoning was that he didn't want to lose a cast member and figured Late Night was now doomed anyway. Well, that's hardly fair to O'Brien, who to his credit was a fine comedy writer having written for the Simpsons during their initial rocket to success and who had worked on several well received comedy programs for several years before that, as well as having done improv work with the Groundlings. Like Letterman before him, his sense of humor was (and is) very offbeat and edgy and it took nearly three years for Late Night to recover, as the viewing audience gradually warmed to O'Brien and he matured as host and performer.

Once he had established himself as a recognized television presence, offers began to come in from other networks (notably his former employers at Fox, who were now much better established themselves) to host a chat show opposite Leno and Letterman, and NBC, rather than let that happen, contracted for O'Brien to take over the Tonight Show in 2009. Apparently they felt confident that no one would want to attempt to hold onto the seat as long as Johnny Carson had and Jay Leno would surely be ready to move on to other things after seventeen years. But he wasn't, and Mr. Leno made it clear that retiring from the Tonight Show was the last thing he wanted. Truth be told, the best reason for such a change is the aging of the potential audience pool. Especially with the rapid pace of social change that has accompanied the technological explosion of the past two decades, there is a widely expanding generational gap in the sensibilities and expectations of younger viewers, which is rather clearly defined by the humor and attitudes of these two hosts. However, it would be beyond foolish to assume that NBC executives are smart enough to have thought of that.

No, their bright idea was, that since Leno's ratings had been consistently good with the Tonight Show, rather than let him walk away and retire, they'd find another use for him, in hopes he could translate those late night ratings into numbers elsewhere in the schedule. One wonders how much of that may have come from Mr. Leno himself, as it's hard to imagine that anyone else at NBC actually thought a softball chat show in Prime Time, not once but five nights a week, was a good idea. Whatever lamebrain exec allowed themselves to be brainwashed into going along with such nonsense, it was a classic recipe for failure. Depending of course, on who you want to fail.

If you're Jay Leno and you've just had your favorite toy taken away because its time to share, its a perfect opportunity to passively-aggressively sabotage the new kid. If Leno's prime time show tanks, the local affiliate's evening news tanks, costing them not just ratings, but actual cash money. They scream bloody murder and threaten to bolt, but that's just icing on the cake. The real coup de grace is that when The Jay Leno Show tanks and the Nightly News tanks, the next domino in that sequence is The Tonight Show With Conan O'Brien. When O'Brien tanks, it looks to the dumbass executives who fell for this whole ridiculous plan in the first place, that Conan just can't handle the NBC flagship as well as Leno did, so the solution...

Of course, nobody stops to think that Conan might have done just fine, if it weren't for The Jay Leno Prime Time Show dragging him down like an anchor...who can be expected to draw big numbers when the 90 minutes preceding you is currently the least watched programming on television?

Let's face it, Conan O'Brien just got massively screwed on network television, just like David Letterman before him. And who's the sneaky rat b*st*rd who stands to benefit most in both cases? Seriously, who's the ONLY person to come out of this with a tote in the win column? Big Jaw Jay. Nobody else. And the only thing Conan did wrong, was to stand up for what he felt was the legacy and honor of his hero Johnny Carson and the house that Johnny built. Like Letterman before him, Conan found out the hard way what corporate suits think about legacies and honor. The same thing they think about talent and loyalty - its all expendable, all replaceable. No human individual has any value. Only big numbers, like Jay used to get. You can see why people who think that way are so easy to manipulate, especially if you kinda think the same way yourself. Its all about getting stuff. Like big numbers and big money and the big chair.

Can Jay come back to the Tonight Show and get the ratings he had before? Well, if he's right, and his audience are all morons, probably so. Would Conan O'Brien have drawn the same numbers as Jay if he'd had a stronger lead in? If history teaches anything, yes, he almost surely would have. Conan, like Letterman takes a while to grow on you, if you're used to old school comedy. If you're young, however, you're probably more open to laughing at things your dad thinks are just stupid. That's the way of the world. But audiences age and die off and Jay's (and Dave's) fans will eventually dwindle. NBC might have been better served to have shown a little patience (and better judgment all around).

My sense of social justice has me outraged for Conan, just as I was for Dave years ago. Conan's not really my cup of tea, but I hate to see anyone get screwed for trying to defend what they feel is right and something they have pride in. And truth be told, the last three nights of Conan's Tonight Show, he was AWESOME! He transformed from the gawky dweeb he often seems, into a confident, self-assured professional and the shows he put on were television chat show comedy at its best. Ending his seven month run with Will Ferrell playing a pot-bellied southern rocker and closing the show with a rousing rendition of Free Bird was both moving and hilarious. I've always hated that song, but I'll forever after associate it with Conan O'Brien and his dignified walk to the gallows.

Go, Coco, Go.

And I must say, it's been loads of fun to see David finally talk about the whole thing on camera after all these years of tight-lipped silence. As he said several times over the past two weeks, he 'has no dog in this fight' - and that's true, its all water under the bridge for him now, the Tonight Show is no longer the golden goose it once was, and he's done perfectly well for himself on CBS and tweaked Leno's nose the whole time by just doing it. As the saying goes "The best revenge is living well", besides, after surviving quadruple bypass surgery and having a son while in his sixties, I'm sure all that feuding is pointless and meaningless now. But he sure has had fun ridiculing his old network and sarcastically exposing Jay Leno for the creep that he is, all the while assuring his audience that Jay is a stand up guy, who'll surely do the right thing.

As if.

interestingly put.....I won't really argue with you here on most of it, cause you do seem to be the expert.

I never found Letterman funny at all though; I mean never.

Yeah, Conan seemed "on fire" as soon as the debacle with NBC started, but only seemed to start at that point, and not before then.

It makes me wonder how good Conan would've been without that situation.

That said, I have intense respect for Carson; I think his judgement was poor in having wanted Letterman to take over, but I do respect him intensely for one reason above all: he knew how hard it was to do what he did, and he let other comedians who wanted that height of their career find out the hard way.

I remember reading about him letting Joan Rivers guest host the Tonight Show in his absence, and she admitted how difficult it was to do. One of my favorite comedians--Dennis Miller--did some monologue on the show, I believe, and after going off, he got a call from Carson who flat-out said to him "not as easy as it looks, is it kid?"

To be fair though, I'll be 28 in March, so I don't really know all the things going back as far as the '70s regarding the Tonight Show, but I'll take your word for it.

In the end, I believe it came down to money. I read one article that said while NBC ended up paying Conan (and staff) around $42 million, it would have cost them over $150 million to buy out Leno's contract.

Also to be fair, in Leno's circumstance, if his numbers are consistently good, they'd be wise to just keep him there.

Especially in this age when the TV medium is dying--and dying hard. There comes an old saying: if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Basically, NBC just cost themselves a sh!tload of money, and for no real reason. Also some bad publicity.

I wouldn't really refer to Leno as "the spoiled kid who won't share", but more as "the guy who's basically keeping these morons at NBC afloat, so let 'im keep doing what he's doing, cause it must be something right"

I'm not American and I work early so I only get to watch all 3 shows (Letterman, O'Brien & Leno) intermittently. I've seen the last few months of Leno's Tonight Show (including the finale), the start weeks and end weeks of Conan's Tonight Show, a fortnight of the Jay Leno Show and a fair dose of Letterman of the years.

In terms of my comedy taste, I guess I do lean towards Letterman's and O'Brien's acerbic styles, so I'll let that be known up front.

That said and trying to be objective about it, I do agree with Avengilante. The only person coming out of this with what he wanted was Jay Leno. I can accept the fact that Conan O'Brien told NBC he wanted the Tonight Show gig or he'd look elsewhere - because he knew what happened in 1992 and he didn't want to be screwed. I can understand why Jay Leno wouldn't want to give up the show. I believe he had second thoughts about what he viewed as a forced premature retirement. So he did a Conan - threatened to go to another network. Jay Leno was one of the few things NBC had that was working. They didn't want him to go to the competition. So for the first time in history, he was given a 5 weeknight primetime slot.

The result? Poor ratings for Leno. Worse ratings for the news. Dismal ratings for Conan. In fact Conan's ratings were the worst for the Tonight Show in 17 years - since 1993 - when Leno took over. Back then NBC was having a golden run - not being Network #4.

So let's move Leno back to where he was and shift Conan back. Problem solved. The Jay Leno show would be the old Tonight Show at 11:30pm. I wonder how long it would've been before a half hour became an hour...

If given the same amount of time - about 2 years - that Leno had, Conan would've built an audience. The Tonight Show will never be what it was in Carson's hey day - there's too many imitations now. People say why should Conan be given 2 years to grow his show in this day and age? Well as Jay Leno said himself, only Johnny Carson could host the Tonight Show in his late 60's. Assuming Leno can wipe away this smudgemark and reclaim his 'good guy' persona and rebuild at least part of what his audience was - at some point it's going to happen again. Leno and Letterman are getting old. At some point they'll need replacing when their audiences shrink. NBC had the right idea - do it at the peak rather than the decline and get more time out of Conan. That was the point - the decade that was going to be Conan's before he then handed it over to someone else.

In the end, I think it comes down to this. If Jay Leno was in Conan's shoes and was being treated in this manner, he'd no doubt be pissed - and rightly so. Jay Leno obviously knows what's happening. He could've just said - hey guys, come on, I don't want to screw Conan over, just stop it - and NBC would've listened. But he wanted The Tonight Show back so he just played coy 'Oh NBC are doing this, out of my hands...' and was patient and it came together.

Conan O'Brien - poor ratings - gets his show pushed back almost to where he started or told he could leave (yes, despite reports to the contrary, an NBC official commented that was on offer although that was a last resort - which ended up happening )

Jay Leno - poor ratings - gets Conan's timeslot.

In the end it comes down to this:
* NBC idiocy
* Money
* Jay Leno's desires

you're forgetting poor ratings during a time of declining TV viewership; that of course added to it.

The problem with Conan starting the Tonight Show when he's young, with Jay retiring now is that I have a feeling the Tonight Show may not necessarily keep those ratings as the new decade comes( this isn't the beginning of the new decade, jus' so ya know; it's the end of this past one).

TV really is a dying medium; House MD gets like 3 million viewers. Back in the heyday of TV, execs would've laughed at that. Today, that's considered a success.

This may've been fate for Conan; he can do something where people will notice him for a while, rather than fade into obscurity with the dinosaur that is the old media of television.

Actually house gets over 10 million viewers if you go to zap2it and leno got 5 mil or less so thats why they did not really want him on at 10 anymore. And I have to go with the guy who was promised the gig and also the guy who every other late night host backs.

Yes, poor ratings on a poor ratings channel. Leno was never going to bring in those numbers of 10mill+ for a rehash variety format. It was doomed from the start. They should've given him a one-night a week Ed Sullivan type show - that would've sorted it out.

And that thing about the decade - it's a quote from Conan O'Brien - he said that they were finishing a decade too early. He wanted to do it for a period of time and then pass it on. I would get fixated on whether or not the decade starts in 2010 or 2009...

But finally - and having talked to about ten or so different show runners in 2009 about this topic - this whole idea that television is a dying medium is a bit of tosh. The same thing was said about theatre when cinema came in and about cinema when television came in. Whilst theatre is no longer the be all and end all it once was, it's still around. These 3 storytelling mediums each offer something different. Television can't do what a film can. Film can't do what a play can. A play can't do what the internet can. And the internet can't do what television can.

In time television and the internet will combine and people will have an interactive storytelling experience - but - people will always have a desire for quality scripted entertainment. There are million of filmmakers on the internet learning the craft. But just like there's tens of thousands of people working in Hollywood, less than a fraction of a percent have the mastery of the craft. Youtube controls 10% of Internet Traffic - but a major proportion of its audience accept it for what it is - gimmickery. This is going to improve over time - but a gimmick can only hold your attention for so long. It's the craft that keeps you watching. Even the worst shows on television have better craft than the best internet pieces.

When the kinds of audiences the internet can reach finally match the learnt storytelling craft of television and that fusion occurs - that's when we'll be in the new age of digital media.

I dunno... the first movie was all right, it was great in the 80s, but now the effects are kind of dated...
the 2nd movie was Conan and the Mall Rat as far as I'm concerned, it's easy to see why they didn't make a 3rd...
And to think the actor is now a Governator...


what?...

Let's just not forget that it's not just the Big 4 networks, and non-TV media: There's also cable/satellite TV, pay-TV, and lately even iTunes/Netflix TV/movie reruns. TV's not dying, just diversifying ... although if it gets spread too thin, it may need a bailout!! !

I say that half-jest and full-earnest, because TV has become the emergency medium of choice for natural and manmade disasters, like radio used to be -- remember the Emergency Broadcast System? ("If this had been an actual emergency, you would all probably be dead!") In the U.S., terrestrial TV is still free (vs., say, in the UK), you just buy the TV set, turn it on, and find your local channels, usually there's at least one that pretends to do local news/events/emergencies/disasters/severe weather/etc. in some way. Everything else we (or somebody) have to pay extra for, whether it's on TV or the Web (Ask NetZero what the Zero stands for!!).

Of course, local TV theoretically doesn't need network TV in order to provide this basic lifeline service. But increasingly local stations are branding themselves according to their networks, even barely using their legal call letters anymore. And besides ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox (and don't forget PBS), we've had UPN, MyNetwork, The WB, CW (Sorry, whenever I see that one I think "Country & Western"!), etc., so the network-as-branding concept isn't dying soon, even if there's some shakeout among the newer attempts. In the old days "independent," non-network stations drew viewers with old movies, local sports and public affairs (though not necessarily news, since local news departments, though a "license to print money" if you can get people to watch yours, are a significant investment in resources and talent), kids' cartoons, religion, and the first infomercials(?) ... but now most of them feel they need network content to help turn a profit ... I guess because "local" sports (even if now taken over by networks instead of local announcers -- grrr), movies, cartoons, religion, and infomercials are now presented all over cable/satellite. But do we need all those local stations? Well, say the tornado, earthquake, blizzard, or terrorist takes out one, or more than one. It's really public safety first and foremost. Case in point: Very many of New York City's TV and radio transmitters are atop one tall building....

Cellphone alerts? They cost money too.