All Talk, No Action?

On Friday, May 29th. Jay Leno will say good-bye to the time slot that made him famous. When he took over the reigns of The Tonight Show back in 1992 many thought that he wouldn’t be able to fill the mighty Johny Carson’s shoes. In fact, Arsenio Hall was on the cover of Entertainment Weekly professing to “Kick Jay Leno’s Ass” Well, Mr. Leno eventually proved all the naysayers wrong and wound up being a huge success in late night. Then, out of the blue, in 2004 both NBC and Leno made an odd announcement that in 2009 he would retire from The Tonight Show and Conan O’Brien would take the seat behind the desk made famous by so many.

So now in 2009 with his retirement date looming, Leno begins to have second thoughts about wanting to step down. So much so that he begins courting offers from other networks about another possible late night show. CBS was out, they were not going to give up Letterman. That left ABC and FOX. The Fox network  had many misfires in late night. Everything from Joan Rivers, and The Wilton NorthReport, to Chevy Chase. They weren’t all that excited to get back into the ring again, even with Leno. So that left ABC. After much negotiating it was looking like Leno was going to jump. What was NBC to do? They didn’t want a repeat of the Letterman Vs. Leno war from before, and they promised the slot to Conan. So what was Jeff Zucker head of NBC/Universal programming going to do? He gave Leno a talk show in prime time.

So in the fall of 2009, The Jay Leno show will be shown every Monday through Friday at 10PM (9PM Central and Mountain). Now many will say in the NBC/Uni program department that this is sheer genius. I said, and I still believe, that this could wind up ending Mr. Zucker’s career with NBC/Universal. You see, even though talk shows are cheap to produce, there is a sheer glut of them on the air now. On the big three networks alone they program 7-10 hours a night of talk shows. With all of the talent that goes around on these shows you start to get a lot of doubling up. Now we’re adding another hour into the mix. As I have said on this blog in the past, we now have 4 hours a day of The Today Show and soon, 3 hours a night of talk shows. Finally, one station today said “Enough is Enough”  WHDH-TV, Boston’s NBC affiliate, announced via its website Thursday that it plans to launch an hour-long 10 p.m. newscast in the fall. The stations ownership said that We don’t think the Leno show is going to be effective in primetime,” They said ”It will be detrimental to our 11 o’clock (newscast). It will be very adverse to our finances.”

I have to agree with Boston. I think that NBC is making a huge error in thinking that America will tune-in every night for all of this talk.  I have also said before, I think NBC is in a huge creative hole right now, and they don’t seem to have any logical way of digging out of it. With the 9/10 hour now locked up for a talk show, that leaves only 2 hours of original programming on NBC each weeknight.  Speaking of original programming this doesn’t even factor in the void of intelligence with reality programming. What you have here my friends in my own opinion, is the making of an “Also-Ran” network. I say this because I used to think that NBC was the best when it came to their programming. Now I don’t watch NBC nearly as much as I did. Even my once favorite morning program, “The Today Show” isn’t even enjoyable  to watch anymore. It seems like the entire cast of The Today Show is never on together  and it’s obvious some of them can’t stand each other. But I digress.

It will be interesting to see what happens if  “The Jay Leno Show” does not rise to the success that NBC needs it to. What will be more interesting to see is how long they keep it on the air. In these days of “If The Show Isn’t A Huge Hit By Episode Three Then Yank It”  we’ll see how long they leave it on the air to save face.

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