Taking It On The Chin #5

Someone who signs himself "Steve" with no last name writes…

Appreciate your blog and have probably checked it daily for 10 years+. On the Conan/Leno situation, I guess my question is I believe the main problem that NBC was faced with was not that Conan on The Tonight Show was failing, but that Leno's Primetime show was getting disastrous ratings, leading into a ratings drop for the affiliate's local news, and then into Conan's Tonight Show. NBC's problem was not how to fix the Tonight Show, but how to fix the 10 PM eastern time slot, and please their affiliates. What would have Conan's ratings been on the Tonight Show, if NBC had maintained a more traditional prime time lineup, rather than Leno's prime time program? We will never know, and he was never given that opportunity. I'd appreciate any insight or thoughts you have on this.

I've been a huge fan of Conan since his show started in 1993 (it took about 1 year to make it must see TV, but especially between 1995-1998 the show was fantastic). To me what distinguishes Conan/Letterman from Leno is the quality of their comedy "bits". 1980s Letterman in particular is fantastic and has created memories that last 30 years later on how funny various remote segments and recurring characters were. Watch any Letterman anniversary show where they show an hour of these clips, they are hilarious. Early Conan also has this (I have actually put together an exhaustive episode guide and catalog of all of the Late Night with Conan O'Brien episodes and memorable moments from the show), while I don't think Leno has ever generated these kinds of moments of excellence. What is the trademark moment of Leno's Tonight Show? Hugh Grant's appearance, not too special, and not specifically about Leno. Leno's monologue while it is funny, is disposable humor, that just gets churned out day after day, with no lasting impression formed.

I pretty much agree with the above paragraph but I do think we are well past the era when any late night show outputs the kind of memorable bits that are worthy of an anniversary retrospective…which may be why none of the late night shows do them. At best, they seem to come up with the occasional moments that draw some decent YouTube hits. At WonderCon, I got into a conversation with a friend who loves Letterman and hates Leno and the expressed reason for his Dave-love is those brilliant moments like the Velcro Suit and bits with Larry "Bud" Melman. The actor who played Larry "Bud" died in 2007 and Dave put on the suit of Velcro twenty-nine years ago.

A couple of folks have written me that Jimmy Kimmel is doing some clever, memorable comedy moments. That may well be so but I have made repeated attempts to watch that program and never gotten more than about five minutes into it. I just find him so smug and unappealing that I want to delete the shows before they damage my TiVo. (Kimmel, who I can't watch because I don't like him, should not be confused with Jimmy Fallon, who I can't watch even though I do like him.)

jayleno04

My understanding is that the affiliates' ire at Leno's 10 PM show was mainly this: It wasn't that the show was getting low ratings and damaging their 11 PM newscasts. There was a little more to it than that. NBC affiliates were used to 10 PM shows getting low ratings but Leno's show was getting a more pronounced drop-off in its second half-hour and especially its last fifteen minutes. The ratings for the first fifteen or so were pretty good but unlike a drama which builds to a climax and resolution, there was this massive tune-out. If you watched the beginning of a cop or lawyer show, you might want to stick around just to see how it came out. That wasn't the case with Jay. Every time they went to a commercial, a large chunk of viewers changed channels or went to bed or hauled out the PlayStation 3.

Affiliates expected a certain amount of this. Before Jay's 10 PM show started, they got together en masse and insisted that Jay's most popular comedy bits — Headlines, Jaywalking, etc. — be positioned at the end of the show. They had identified the problem but demanded the wrong solution since it threw off the whole rhythm of the program. Much could be written about other things that damaged that show: The insistence that Jay not sit behind a desk, the rule that Jay could only have one interview guest (NBC originally said none), the barring of musical acts, etc., all with an eye at not infringing on what Conan would be doing.

Neil Simon once agreed with a reviewer who trashed one of his lesser plays and said, "Simon didn't have an idea for a show this year but he wrote one anyway." I think the problem with Leno's 10 PM show was that nobody quite knew what The Jay Leno Show was going to be before they committed to five prime-time hours a week of it. Once someone said, "It can't be too much like his Tonight Show," no one had much of a Plan B.

So affiliates objected to the show's drop-off even though they helped cause it. But what really upset them was that the parent network said they were committed to the Leno-at-10 experiment for up to two years. The programmers had in effect said, "We don't have the ammo to win at 10 PM so let's put all our assets into the earlier hours and schedule Jay at 10 to cut our losses." The affiliates were used to NBC not winning at 10 PM. They just weren't used to NBC conceding the hour — a third of its evening schedule — and not even trying to win there.

Look at it from their viewpoint: You have this guy who's been consistently winning at 11:35. The network takes him off and brings in a guy who can't win his entire first week even after a massive publicity push. Then they take the guy who had been winning at 11:35 and put him on at 10 PM in a not-as-good show that they don't even expect will win its time slot…and they want to keep him there for two years!

We'll never know how Conan would have done if NBC had had blockbuster hits on at 10 PM…but that was not going to happen at NBC. Wasn't going to happen then, hasn't happened since. We do know how Conan did following the kind of shows NBC could put on at 10 PM. Between the time Conan's Tonight Show went on and the debut of The Jay Leno Show, there were a few months of that and he didn't do so well. You have to think some folks at the network thought, "Hey, regardless of what you think of the two guys, Jay was at least able to win at 11:35 with a flop show at 10 PM!" That and the fact that they didn't want to have to pay off his contract was the reason NBC wanted him back on at that hour. What did Jay do in any of this that was unethical? I still don't know.

I think I'm going to wrap this series up Tuesday or Wednesday. If you have some question or comment you'd like to have addressed, send it in now. Thanks.