Conan O’Brien Gets the Last Laugh as Jeff Zucker Is Fired
Conan O’Brien must be having a good chuckle right now. Jeff Zucker, the man who engineered his ouster and the chaos surrounding it, was essentially terminated today by NBC and its new owner, Comcast.
Aucker has much conceded to the New York Times this morning that Comcast’s Steve Burke fired him two weeks ago.
The whole O’Brien-Jay Leno catastrophe is laid at the feet of Zucker. Instead of just canceling “The Jay Leno Show,” Zucker put him back at 11:30pm, forced out O’Brien, and caused one of the greatest pr disasters in TV history.
There are other media changes today. Jon Klein, head of CNN, is also out. The network has been gutted and destroyed during his six year run. Eliot Spitzer, who had to resign in disgrace as governor of New York after spending thousands of dollars on hookers, was rewarded by Klein with a new talk show. That’s Klein’s legacy. That, and forcing out Larry King for a Brit, Piers Morgan. The incoming head of CNN, Ken Jautz, will have to figure all of this out now.
Over at the New York Daily News, Orla Healey is out as features editor. She follows editor in chief Martin Dunn, who was either sacked or forced out a couple of months ago.
Roger Friedman began his Showbiz411 column in April 2009 after 10 years with Fox News. Friedman previously wrote the Intelligencer column at New York Magazine, He writes for Parade magazine and has written for Details, Vogue, the New York Times, Post, and Daily News and many other publications. He is the writer and co-producer of a film about R&B Music called “Only the Strong Survive,” which was released by Miramax in 2003 and was a selection of the Cannes, Sundance, and Telluride Film festivals.
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Kevlar
Klein was nuts to hire Morgan. That’s gonna tank big time.
Natalie F
All of this just give me a headache — and flashbacks to when I was working in television.
Lots of “idiots in suits” who make other people’s lives miserable and show nothing but incompetence again and again.
Jeff Zucker is a nice guy. We share the same social circle. But he deserves to be let go, because at the end of the day, somebody has to be held accountable for the MILLIONS of dollars that NBC lost in that entire Jay/Conan mess — not to mention the dozens of NBC affiliates that saw their 11PM newscasts suffer, along with lower local ad dollars.
Jeff will bounce back — just like all ousted network heads do.
Let’s just hope that he doesn’t do a “Fred Silverman” and launch another “SuperTrain” or “Hello Larry.”
MissMimi
Spitzer is an odious excuse for a human being. I do not know a single woman/mother/wife/daughter who would choose to watch him on television. What a stupendous miscalculation.
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