conan just got paid

Just seven months after he took the job as host of the Tonight Show, Conan O’Brien and NBC agreed early this morning on a buy-out for the remainder of his contract, which will allow NBC to replace Conan with Jay Leno. The New York Times says…

The deal is worth a reported $44 million.
Network spokeswoman Allison Gollust confirmed the deal early Thursday but did not offer any other details. Earlier, The Wall Street Journal reported that O’Brien will get $32 million and that the network agreed to pay his staff $12 million in severance.

And to make sure they pissed away as much money as possible, NBC caved on the “mitigation” clause. If that were still in place, and Conan had signed a deal with Fox paying him 25M a year for example, then NBC would only have been responsible for 7 of the 32M. Now he gets 32 no matter what.

So, to recap, Conan hosted a very successful and popular talk show on NBC for 16 years, but then his show moved 60 minutes earlier and NBC decided he forgot how to host a talk show. Then they freaked the fuck out and panicked like some kind of woman. By some accounts this will cost NBC $250 million, partially because of lost ad revenue but mostly between moving Conan, firing Conan, hiring Jimmy Fallon, and creating a show for Leno. It’s fiscal leadership like this that took NBC from a $1.8 billion profit 8 years ago to a $600 million loss this year. Horny 16-year-olds think about the consequences of their actions better than this. You could take Steve Jobs, chase him with a bear, and he still would have figured this all out better than NBC did.