Conan O'Brien's "Tonight Show" swan song on Friday night scored a 7.0 household rating, around three times the number he's been pulling in over the past seven months, according to preliminary overnight ratings from Nielsen Media Research.
But it's in the measure of viewers 18-49 that O'Brien showed the ratings oomph he's gained in the drama that resulted in his departure from NBC. He scored an 4.8 in the 25 biggest markets (Milwaukee is 35th.)
As the New York Times' Bill Carter notes, if that holds up when the rest of the country is measured and easier-to-digest totals are available, it'll be a bigger number in that key age group than almost anything NBC has aired this TV season.
Tim Cuprisin is the media columnist for OnMilwaukee.com. He's been a journalist for 30 years, starting in 1979 as a police reporter at the old City News Bureau of Chicago, a legendary wire service that's the reputed source of the journalistic maxim "if your mother says she loves you, check it out." He spent a couple years in the mean streets of his native Chicago, and then moved on to the Green Bay Press-Gazette and USA Today, before coming to the Milwaukee Journal in 1986.
A general assignment reporter, Cuprisin traveled Eastern Europe on several projects, starting with a look at Poland after five years of martial law, and a tour of six countries in the region after the Berlin Wall opened and Communism fell. He spent six weeks traversing the lands of the former Yugoslavia in 1994, linking Milwaukee Serbs, Croats and Bosnians with their war-torn homeland.
In the fall of 1994, a lifetime of serious television viewing earned him a daily column in the Milwaukee Journal (and, later the Journal Sentinel) focusing on TV and radio. For 15 years, he has chronicled the changes rocking broadcasting, both nationally and in Milwaukee, an effort he continues at OnMilwaukee.com.
When he's not watching TV, Cuprisin enjoys tending to his vegetable garden in the backyard of his home in Whitefish Bay, cooking and traveling.
