Why Team Coco Matters

More than three months after leaving NBC, Conan O’Brien still has Jay Leno preceding him. On Sunday, May 2, O’Brien went on 60 Minutes for his first interview since he jumped/was pushed from The Tonight Show. The night before, Leno did stand-up at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.

Despite a few sarcastic asides, O’Brien played his interview surprisingly straight, showing that his feelings about his “toxic” relationship with NBC were still as rough as his bristly unemployment beard. Leno, for his part, fell flat, telling safe John McCain–is–old jokes and getting upstaged by President Obama, who cracked, “I’m also glad that I’m speaking first, because we’ve all seen what happens when somebody takes the time slot after Leno’s.”

(See Conan O’Brien on the TIME 100.)

Jokes aside, Leno and O’Brien are not really competing against each other anymore. With O’Brien launching a show this fall for cable’s TBS and Leno restored to old-fashioned broadcast late-night TV, they’re now in two different games. The question is, Whose game–and whose model of stardom–matters more today?

Leno is the last of the big-tent comics, dedicated to the principle of something for everybody; late night is the last bastion of humor as sleep aid. And time was, Leno’s inoffensive style would have been perfect for the correspondents’ dinner. (He first headlined it in 1987.) That was before 2006, when Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert delivered a searingly satiric monologue, sending up not just President Bush but also the reporters at the dinner. Colbert bombed in the room yet won raves outside it; the YouTube video of his performance sealed his reputation as a leading political comic.

In the age of Colbert and The Daily Show–not to mention the polarization of cable news–there’s not much comedy in comity anymore. When the President is working edgier material than you are, something has changed.

O’Brien, meanwhile, has moved from Leno’s world to Colbert’s. He’s leaving the broadcast model, which measures success by the absolute number of viewers, and entering the niche-media model, which measures success by the intensity of your following. (And cable can monetize that intensity: O’Brien’s deal at TBS is potentially richer than a big-network contract.)

So O’Brien’s comeback after the Jaypocalypse has been more Colbertian. Leno did damage control in front of a middle-of-the-road audience, appearing on Oprah in January to say he did “the right thing” in taking his show back.

O’Brien simultaneously went more serious and more edgy. On the one hand, his surprisingly earnest 60 Minutes interview gave him the chance to counter NBC’s spin in a respected forum. He made the point (often overlooked in the press) that NBC dumped him not solely because of his ratings but also because Leno’s 10 p.m. show failed, and it would have cost NBC tens of millions more to buy out Leno’s contract than his.

On the other hand, he has played to the fans who have adopted him as a folk hero–Team Coco–with a grass-roots, underdog approach. He went straight to his public with self-deprecating jokes on Twitter, and he came up with a DIY solution to the buyout-deal terms that kept him off TV by launching the cross-country Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tour, like some pre-TV-era populist doing a road show (albeit a populist with a $30 million severance package).

O’Brien’s strategy may seem contradictory, but it’s really not. The Team Coco crowd, like Colbert’s and Stewart’s fans, are drawn to icons they see as both hipper and brainier than Middle America’s. Leno is the old-school model of a mass-media personality whom we all share: “America is standing up for Jay.” Team Coco and the Colbert Nation instead appeal to a sense of personal investment–“I’m with Coco”–in a host who’s not for everyone.

The way O’Brien’s path is diverging from Leno’s raises the question: What does it mean to be a media star today? Is it about household viewers or Twitter followers? Breadth or depth? Mass appeal or cult appeal? (TV ad money is focused on under-50 demographics, so the right cult audience can have outsize influence.)

Conan and TBS are betting it is better to have a smaller group of fans who care intensely about what you do than a bigger number who care just enough to not change the channel. It doesn’t apply only to comedians. More people watch Brian Williams every night than Glenn Beck; that doesn’t make Williams more influential.

Maybe it’s fitting, after all, that Leno was playing the White House. Outside The Tonight Show, the only seat of American power that still depends on building a wide coalition is national politics. We have only one President. In the world of digital cable, everyone can be king.

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