Conan adjusting to cable-sized portions

As their new 11 p.m. TBS talk show gets ready to roll Monday, Conan O'Brien and his staff have started to learn how the other half lives. After 17 years at NBC, they're adjusting to cable-sized portions.

"We have a lower budget for the show," Jeffrey Ross, executive producer of "Conan," said in an interview. "So unfortunately we couldn't bring everybody with us" from "The Tonight Show," where O'Brien was unceremoniously dumped and Jay Leno reinstalled as host earlier this year.

And then there's that 250-seat studio on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, "The studio is a little bit smaller than what we had" at "Tonight's" studio in nearby Universal City, Ross said.


Yet O'Brien's switch from legacy broadcaster to basic-cable outpost represents a hugely symbolic moment in the evolution of late-night TV, as the audience tilts away from aging franchises such as "Tonight" to younger competitors.

In October, for the first time ever, Comedy Central's "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" became the No. 1 late-night program among adults ages 18 to 49, beating "Tonight" and CBS' "Late Show With David Letterman," according to the Nielsen Co.

Leno and Letterman are now battling for supremacy of a diminished and notably grayer audience. The median age of the Letterman viewer is 56; for Leno, it's 55. Meanwhile, Stewart generates just as much news and water-cooler chatter as do the traditional hosts. And the field includes a growing roster of other personalities with their own followings, such as Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert and Chelsea Handler.