After three years and 139 episodes of Lopez Tonight, TBS is pulling the plug on George Lopez's ratings-challenged late-night talk show. The abrupt cancellation — it was announced Wednesday that Thursday's episode would be the last — comes less than one year after Lopez Tonight was bumped from its 11 p.m. time slot to make room for Conan O'Brien's new talk show. Since Lopez' show took over the midnight slot, it's been consistently beaten in the ratings by Nickelodeon re-runs of the '90s children's show All That. Is the demise of Lopez Tonight O'Brien's fault?
Yes. This is death by redhead: Moving Lopez Tonight to midnight has hurt it, says James Poniewozik at TIME, especially considering that O'Brien's lead-in ratings have been declining, too. But "the writing may have been on the wall" since TBS hired O'Brien in the first place. It's unlikely that TBS planned to keep funding two talk shows unless the ratings for both proved "phenomenal."
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