Was Coco so-so?

I will always remember this month as the month we lost one of our best talk shows.

Conan O’Brien stepped down as host of The Tonight Show on Friday, forever cementing Jay Leno in our generation’s minds as “Evil Chin Man.” Leno cannot stay in his reclaimed spot forever. Eventually his audience will die.

The late-night wars have produced some great television, and you can count me as one of the Conan loyalists. For all the support the Pale Man has received, I have to ask how many of those who cried foul have actually watched the program regularly in its seven-month span.

I planned to write today about how you (and I) had failed Coco by declaring our love for the man without watching the show. As my pimp hand came crashing down, ready to lay some knowledge on you, I caught it at the last minute. I realized that despite our sins, it was not entirely our fault. The standards by which both Conan’s and Leno’s shows were seen as failing – the Nielsen ratings – are flawed in themselves.

Nielsen creates a sample audience of a few thousand households which are monitored to determine what shows are being watched. It is these figures that networks use to justify ad sales.

I cannot imagine what it must be like to be part of that representative sample, to have one’s viewing habits worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

If you or anyone you know is part of this elite group, please contact me at the Indiana Daily Student. I would love to chat with you about why Hannah Montana does so well.

The system is an outdated form of measurement. In the age of telephones it was completely impractical for a network to take a census of every viewer in the country. Nielsen ratings are akin to the electoral college system, a way to funnel the thoughts of millions into a few representatives.

For on-demand viewers, those who watch prime-time shows at 3 a.m., every single habit is easily traceable. There’s no need to depend on the trends of a few thousand to speak for us. Probability says that there have to have been a few flukes, a few misrepresentations of a show’s popularity. Who knows what might still be around?

I’ve spoken enough times about the errors of entertainment executives that I likely won’t find a job with them after graduation. But to whoever weasels their way into a position like NBC’s executive Jeff Zucker, abandon this tradition. Find other ways to prove a program’s popularity. You might be surprised to find what show is actually talked about at the water cooler the next day.