NBC’s Triumph

On Thursday we talked about the legal muscle involved with the Conan O’Brien dustup at NBC, and speculated that Conan might be able to take Triumph the Insult Comic Dog with him wherever he goes. According to the terms of the agreement reached between Conan and NBC, it looks like Triumph will have to stay with NBC along with other characters and sketches created by Conan and his team. It’s unlikely that NBC will be able to use any of the characters since they are so strongly identified with Conan, but by holding on to the rights they force O’Brien to start from scratch, sort of, when he hosts a show on a rival station. We say sort of, because Conan will have fairly wide latitude to create new characters that are essentially the same with a different name.