If any state had the right to claim Betty White as its Beloved Elder, it would be Minnesota. In her two most iconic roles, she played happy homemaker Sue Ann Nivens, who scandalized Minneapolis in The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and naive Rose Nylund, whose St. Olaf roots informed her every earnest reaction on The Golden Girls.

But these days, everyone wants to adopt the comic legend. At age 88, White has reluctantly agreed to host this weekend’s edition of Saturday Night Live, a gig sandwiched between her scene-stealing turn in The Proposal and the start of her umpteenth sitcom, Hot in Cleveland, which debuts in June on TV Land. Read the full story

NBC says it has a deal with Conan O’Brien to produce a possible series, only days after his rancorous exit as host of the network’s “Tonight Show.”

NBC is picking up a pilot from O’Brien’s production company, Conaco. The drama, as yet untitled, focuses on a Supreme Court justice who leaves the bench to start his own practice.

Casting has yet to be announced for the pilot, which is bucking for a series slot on NBC’s fall schedule.

Despite O’Brien’s recent split from NBC as an on-camera star, he retains a development deal with the network.

Past series produced by Conaco include the comedy “Andy Barker, P.I.,” which featured O’Brien’s longtime talk-show sidekick Andy Richter.

It would’ve been very easy for Conan O’Brien to end up cynical after all of what’s happened in the last month.

Easy and, as we learned about O’Brien on his final Tonight Show, the last thing he’d be.

“I hate cynicism,” he said in a closing monologue. “It’s my least favorite quality and it doesn’t lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen.”

Instead, O’Brien’s final show was mostly full of fun and great moments — he continued his “crazy expensive” sketches, using what appear to be massively costly items and sticking NBC with the tab. On Friday, O’Brien brought out what he said was the skeleton of a “giant ground sloth” borrowed from the Smithsonian, which sprayed “beluga caviar” on a “Picasso.” Cost to NBC: $65 million.

(Then, nice guy that he is, O’Brien admitted the whole thing was fake. Again, it’d have been so easy to do that for real, but then the lawsuits… etc.)
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Now that the Jay Leno-Conan O’Brien-NBC is finally jumping over the line from speculated story to what amounts to a small bit of history, the obvious question on some folks’ minds is “Who could’ve predicted this?”

Colby Hall of Mediaite has the answer for you. Who could’ve predicted this? Howard Stern. More than three years ago.

Now that Conan O’Brien is jobless — or, will be after Friday, anyway — what will the soon-to-be-ex-Tonight Show host do with his free time?

Fellow NBCer Joel McHale (Community) decided to offer O’Brien a job — at his other gig, The Soup on E!

Don’t let the cover of this week’s Entertainment Weekly fool you — Jay Leno didn’t go the Don King route with his hair suddenly.

EW has ranked NBC’s move to put Leno on at 10 p.m. at the top of its list of “TV’s 50 Biggest Bombs Ever”. Though it seems fairly obvious, EW wraps up why it chose the Leno debacle nicely:

It destroyed not only five hours of primetime programming, but also the local newscasts that followed. However, the floppage of the move doesn’t even stop there: The Tonight Show ratings with Leno’s replacement at 11:35, Conan O’Brien, also took a 50 percent dip. And NBC’s attempt to remedy the situation was just as ugly—asking Conan to move back a half-hour to 12:05am so Jay could return to 11:35.

USA Today‘s Lifeline Live blog gave us a preview by posting the top 10, including Fox taking Family Guy off the air twice and the extremely horrible American adaptation of the great BBC sitcom Coupling. (I have yet to forgive for that.)

By PATRICK GOLDSTEIN

This is Conan O’Brien’s last week on The Tonight Show.

I’ve been following the NBC late-night meltdown just like everyone else, watching all the jokes about it on TV — Jimmy Kimmel’s sharp-elbowed appearance on Jay Leno being the highlight — along with the kibitzing from network elders, ranging from Fred Silverman — who heaped blame on NBC Universal chief Jeff Zucker — to NBC sports guru Dick Ebersol, who trashed O’Brien, calling him “chicken-hearted and gutless” for taking a few jabs at Leno.

Conan is finally a free man, getting a big payoff (estimated between $30 million to $40 million) while Leno gets to return (after the Winter Olympics) to his old 11:35 p.m. time slot.

(And speaking of big payoffs, I can only wonder how many office pools have sprouted up in the past few weeks, with over and under bets on how long Zucker, who got everyone into this fine mess in the first place, keeps his job after the Comcast takeover is completed.)

But what about Conan? He clearly emerges with a big reservoir of sympathy as the poor guy (yes, the extremely highly paid poor guy) who got the shaft, losing his show after just months on the job.
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On Monday, Jay Leno decided to tell his side of the NBC late night debacle involving him and Conan O’Brien.

Key among Leno’s words were: “Don’t blame Conan.”

Well, David Letterman, who has yet to hold back during this entire “brouhaha”, decided that once more, he had a point to make about things.

Here, then, is Letterman’s rebuttal to Leno’s State of the Network speech:

(Thanks to Warming Glow for the link!)

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Conan O'Brien is insisting on severance deals for his 'Tonight Show' staff.

The sticking point in Conan O’Brien’s complex exit negotiations with NBC involves his TV staff, not Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog, a person familiar with the talks said Tuesday.

Although discussions also focused on whether NBC would keep the rights to familiar O’Brien comedy bits including Triumph, O’Brien’s focus was ensuring severance deals for his “Tonight” staff and crew, the person said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the talks were intended to be private.
O’Brien is “dug in on that,” the person said.

NBC fired back in a statement, saying “it was Conan’s decision to leave NBC that resulted in nearly 200 of his staffers being out of work.”

“We have already agreed to pay millions of dollars to compensate every one of them. This latest posturing is nothing more than a PR ploy,” the network said.

A spokesman for O’Brien declined to comment.
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A few weeks ago, the Taiwanese news network NMA gained some viral steam by providing a new look at the Tiger Woods scandal with computer animation.

They’ve struck again — this time, they explain the Jay Leno/Conan O’Brien situation with animation and, um, superheroes.

It’s in Chinese, but trust me, you don’t need to understand it: