Conan on TBS

One of the biggest stories in pop culture of the last week was the announcement that Conan O'Brien was going to be taking his show to cable. To be more precise, he'll be on TBS as the lead-in to George Lopez at 10pm central time Monday-Thursday. A lot of people couldn't and still can't figure out why Conan wouldn't want to go to FOX to be on one of the major networks and directly compete with Dave and his new arch nemesis, Jay.

Something that everybody needs to remember is that Conan has a lot going for him at TBS. First and foremost, he owns his show, or at least a portion of it. That allows him to have even more so than he would have at a network. Another great thing about being on TBS is the ability to do more on cable than would be allowed on network television, even FOX.

Something that I'm sure has been discussed, but I haven't been able to find on the internet is the possibility that TBS is trying to become one of the mainstream networks to turn the big four into the big five. I'm not basing this off anything other than the progression of programming on the network. A network has to start somewhere, right?

After thinking about this, I decided to look into the history of FOX and how it became a network. Much to my dismay, the evolution of the two networks does not have a similar trend. Of course, that doesn't mean they don't him similar endpoints. The thing I noticed that is familiar is that prior to beginning a slew of original programming, FOX was basically a grounds for syndication. Similarly, TBS is mostly syndicated shows at this time, but has a few shows on the table for the fall 2010 season as well as I'm sure many others in development. Ted Turner is an excellent businessman, and it wouldn't surprise me in any way if he was able to turn TBS into a big time station.