When NBC fired Conan O’Brien, they said his numbers sucked and Letterman was beating him and they were losing money. So they replaced him with Jay Leno. The bad news is that Leno gets even lower numbers than Conan did. The badder news is that Lenos comeback numbers have dropped and now he doesn’t beat Letterman either. So if NBC’s plan was to piss away 200 million dollars on a complete clusterfuck, mission accomplished!

For the first week since Jay Leno’s Tonight Show return, he was tied by David Letterman’s Late Show, as both shows averaged a 0.9 adults 18-49 rating for the week of June 7-11. Coming off a week of repeats for both shows, Leno fell a tenth of a point and Letterman gained two tenths.

Conans biggest problem may have been that he started too great. His debut had 2.3 million viewers. Lenos comeback debut had 1.5. So when both settled in to a normal range (of a million or so), Conans drop was more dramatic. TV by the numbers has two charts, and the first shows Conan vs Leno in the same sequential weeks of their run as host, and it shows that Conan has had better numbers for a month now.

That put Leno’s Tonight Show two tenths of a ratings point below Conan O’Brien’s Tonight Show, comparing the ratings for each show’s fifteenth week.

(Leno) was 0.6 ratings points below the same calendar week of Conan’s Tonight Show ratings last summer.

Sources say NBC executives are taking the news is stride, and by that I mean they’re hopelessly lost and confused. One of them tried to fuck a dog the other day.