On today’s edition of KCRW’s The Treatment with Elvis Mitchell, New York Times reporter and author Bill Carter expounded with trademark expertise on a subject he knows so well: the behind-the-scenes machinations of late night talk show hosts.

Carter suggested that the real culprit with regards to the Jay Leno-Conan O’Brien debacle is the way all comedians are addicted to the cocaine-like rush of performing in front of daily live audiences. He paints this picture of Jay:

“Leno has done this 46, 48 weeks a year, and then he does 180 stand-up dates on top of that. Who does that? And that’s why it’s kind of interesting when people say, ‘Jay manipulated this situation’, or, ‘He’s the villain.’ I don’t see it that way. He’s just a mono-maniac. He has one thing he wants to do in life, which is appear on television and tell jokes, every single night. And he will do anything to do that.”

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After landing 4.2 million viewers and a 2.8 rating for his TBS debut on Monday night, Conan O’Brien‘s ratings have come back down to Earth. His second show fell to a 2.1 rating, 25% less than the night before. Some kind of dropoff was obviously expected. We’ll see if the slide continues tonight.

Previously on FBLA: Conan’s Ratings Are In: Better Than Leno or Letterman

4.2 million people watched the debut of Conan O’Brien‘s TBS show Conan last night–good for a 2.8 rating. The entire show is now up on the web too, in case you missed it. Or are too broke to afford basic cable.

Conan’s numbers handily beat Leno’s 3.5 million and Letterman’s 3.4 million viewers–even though Conan starts his show a half-hour earlier. Lets see if he can keep it up.

George Lopez‘s midnight debut drew a 1.1 rating after Conan.

Previously on FBLA:

This is the sketch that opened Conan O’Brien‘s new show “Conan” on TBS Monday night. If the trials and tribulations of a millionaire talk show host don’t interest you, then watch it simply for the cameo by Jon Hamm. He’s very handsome.

Generally lost amidst the hype for Conan O’Brien‘s huge TBS debut tonight is the fact that George Lopez‘s show Lopez Tonight is also making its new midnight debut tonight. Lopez was doing pretty well before Conan showed up–he was pulling in numbers right on par with The Daily Show. Color us crazy, but we haven’t seen much hype for Lopez at all since Conan came to town. You’d think TBS would want to remind folks that the guy who Conan bumped was still around. Especially because there are going to be some huge changes with his show. He’s on four nights a week instead of three now, and he’s apparently going to be going live to tape, instead of just going on for hours and editing the show down.

Well, they waited until the day of the show’s premiere, but the TBS folks finally bought Lopez some significant ad space on the web–Lopez Tonight was wallpapered all over TMZ for most of the day. Hopefully it helps a little, because we’re not quite sure Conan’s audience is the same as Lopez’s.

Conan O’Brien is bringing home the bacon for his new cable network. Advertising for the upcoming show “Conan” is reportedly selling at $30k to $40k for a 30-second spot — an amount that rivals the ad prices for Letterman and Leno. From The Wrap:

True, some rivals question that Conan truly is fetching broadcast-level ad rates. The show, they say, is packaged with other programming — “The George Lopez Show,” for example — allowing Turner latitude to attribute any value it wants to the highly anticipated late-night show.

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Conan O’Brien seems to be sticking with this whole Interweb thing. Too bad only after he lost the Tonight Show did O’Brien realize the Web might be a useful tool for self-promotion. Well, he gets it now and O’Brien just announced, via his TeamCoco website, that full episodes of his new TBS show Conan will appear for free online.

More from Team Coco:

One small bummer for our international fans: full episodes on teamcoco.com will only be available to users in the USA. But don’t despair! Clips of our show WILL be available to everyone on Earth! Provided you have a computer and an internet connection, of course.  Ha ha.  We ain’t gonna be transcribing our show and dropping leaflets into the jungles of South America, after all. (And what are you doing in the jungles of South America ANYWAY, dood? Didn’t you see the movie “Predator”?! THEM JUNGLES IS DANGEROUS).

Previously on FBLA: Conan O’Brien’s ‘Show Zero’

Wow, that sure was fast. It’s only been ten months since Conan O’Brien was forced off the Tonight Show by Jay Leno, but already the late-night drama is being immortalized in book form. New York Times television writer Bill Carter has a new book coming out about the battle from Viking Press called “The War for Late Night.”

Vanity Fair has an excerpt online. Worth reading the whole thing, but this is a juicy little bit:

Leno had hosted The Tonight Show for 17 years. He had handed it over and immediately shifted to 10 o’clock, voluntarily. How, Conan asked himself, could any of this be construed as unfair to Jay?

“I know how hard I worked for this,” Conan told the NBC executives. “It was promised to me. I had a shitty lead-in.” His tone was soft, but the words were clipped. Graboff knew this was Conan in the raw, speaking from the heart.

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When NBC let Conan O’Brien go from his Tonight Show gig last January, paying him $45 million to go away, they did their best to make sure O’Brien couldn’t take some of his most popular sketches with him. NBC made a point of saying popular recurring characters like Triumph the Insult Comic Dog and Masturbating Bear were the network’s intellectual property.

Up until now, Conan had been relatively mum on the matter as he geared up for the November debut of his TBS late-night show. But he’s finally broken the silence.

“If there’s something we did for a long time that we’ve established as ours, we’ll figure out a way to do it,” O’Brien tells Rolling Stone in the November 11th issue, a preview of which is up online. “I won’t be denied my Masturbating Bear!

“What I really wanna do is be sued over the bear and then appear in court with the Masturbating Bear. ‘Your Honor, this bear can’t help himself!’”

Look at Conan, putting up a fight. Maybe it’s the beard.

Conan O’Brien‘s much anticipated TBS debut is coming up on November 8 and his first week’s worth of guests has finally been released. Since the announcement was made via the horribly unfunny puppets above, we’ll post the lineup for you–just in case you feel like drowning some small animals after the first 15 seconds.

Conan’s very first guest will be decided by some kind of gimmicky online poll.