I'm sure you've all read and heard about Rod Blagojevich, the governor of Illinois, and his arrest for what U.S. Atty. Patrick Fitzgerald called a "political corruption crime spree." I don't know anything about the guy or what he may or may not have done. I kinda thought being corrupt was part of the job description when you were governor of Illinois.
Only three things interest me about this. One is that right now, every late night and topical comedian in the world is wishing the guy had an easier last name to pronounce. There's no way to deliver a crisp punchline with "Blagojevich" in it.
Secondly, I'm wondering. The guy had like a 6% approval rating before this scandal broke. What do we think it is now? Is there such a thing as a negative approval rating where less than 0% think you're doing a great job?
Lastly: One of the corrupt scenarios he was working involved selling the Illinois senatorial seat to someone who would step aside later and allow him to take it over, thereby positioning himself for a presidential run in 2016. Shouldn't your approval rating be over 10% before you start planning to be elected to the highest office in the land? In an odd way, I admire that stubborn denial of reality. It comes from the same place as his statement today that he would never resign.
An actor sent me the following. He didn't ask that I withhold his name but I'm going to, anyway...
Hi. I had a similar discussion on Facebook and I disagree slightly with you. Leno's new show will eliminate 4 hours of jobs for actors, a big number. With the glut of reality shows and now this, where will we actors get jobs? Perhaps cable and/or the web. Or maybe Leno's show will be a variety show and we can work as comic actors in sketches. But now, it's disappointing as a job source.
Perhaps. But it's disappointing for an L.A. actor when the networks do more production in Toronto or New York. It's disappointing for all actors when they put on more hours of game shows, "reality" shows, awards show, news shows or football games. One football game can displace three hours of acting jobs. We don't yet know if giving five hours per week over to Leno means that NBC will buy fewer dramatic shows and sitcoms or if it means the Deal or No Deal models will all be on street corners with signs that say, "Will smile and open cases for food."
I don't mean to sound unsympathetic but it's the nature of show business that trends change and the amount of work expands and contracts and changes. Once upon a time, there were a lot of guys who wrote westerns and one day, when the pendulum swung over to variety shows and sitcoms, many of those writers saw their careers end. Years later, they would be joined by many of the folks who wrote variety. That's kind of how the game is played.
My understanding is that Leno's new show will not be a variety show in the Carol Burnett tradition. It'll be more like The Tonight Show with more comedy pieces. That may mean more jobs in sketches for actors, including some who aren't Gilbert Gottfried. It may also mean that thespians will have to look elsewhere.
There will always be jobs for actors...though never enough for even 5% of those who want to act. A lot of those opportunities will be in what we now call "new media," and the tragedy there is that AFTRA took a bad deal in that area, and SAG is going to have a hard time not taking the same terms. If I were an actor, I'd be a lot more disappointed in that than in Jay's new gig. At least once Leno starts at 10 PM, if you do star in a movie, you'll be able to go on in prime time to plug it.
The more I mull it over, the more sense NBC's new deal with Jay Leno makes to me. It's a gamble but not an illogical one. As the prime time audience shrinks, this kind of gamble is going to become more and more thinkable. It really marks a turning point for network television in that NBC is recognizing that the old dynamic of prime time is going away.
Despite reports that similar arrangements were once suggested for Johnny Carson and David Letterman, I don't think either of them actually got a real offer to move their shows into prime time, at least not five nights a week. (Jack Paar, after he left The Tonight Show, did a nearly-identical show for NBC in prime time for a while, but only once a week.) An earlier hour may have been dangled at Johnny or Dave because that was something the network had to dangle at that moment of negotiation, but NBC wasn't ready then to give up on the idea of competing head-to-head with CBS and ABC in the grand arena of prime time.
It is now. They're in fourth place, the economy is bad, money is tight. What NBC is doing, in essence, is deciding that they'll pour all their energy and funds and strongest prime time shows into the 8-10 PM slots...and then from 10 to 11, they'll just try to make whatever money they can. They can't possibly expect Leno to beat the strongest things their competition can schedule at 10 PM every night but he could beat the weaker ones and easily show a substantial profit for them finishing in second, third or even fourth place. A hit hour-long drama these days can cost $2-3 million an hour to produce. Even paying Leno the fortune he's going to clear from this, his shows will run them a lot less than that.
The costs can't be compared exactly since Jay is reportedly going to do 46-48 weeks of original programming per year and I'm wondering if part of the plan also includes rerunning those shows elsewhere, either late at night on NBC or the next day on MSNBC or CNBC. (I'm also guessing that NBC might experiment with putting other programming in, as opposed to reruns, during the weeks he takes off.) Back in the seventies, Johnny Carson had NBC stop rerunning an old Tonight Show each weekend, as they'd been doing, because he feared he was getting overexposed.
Someone's got to be pondering if that'll sink Leno and also if rerunning him at other hours will cause viewers to think, "Oh, we don't have to watch Jay tonight at 10. We can watch that show we like on CBS and catch (or tape) Jay's rerun tomorrow." I believe they pulled day-old Conan O'Brien reruns off CNBC a few years ago because they felt too many people were watching him then instead of when it mattered more to the network.
I said that this idea of putting Leno on earlier had occurred to a lot of people but it was so radical that no one said it aloud. A few friends of mine wrote to remind me that they had when we'd discussed it (so did I in those conversations) and David Carroll, who anchors local news down in Chattanooga, wrote to remind me that in this article in July of '07, he floated the notion.
Carroll was thinking Leno could either air at 10 PM or local stations could move their late news broadcasts there and then air Jay from 10:35 to 11:35. Will they have the option of doing the latter under the new configuration? If they do, NBC may try to head it off by having Jay do a "throw" at the end of each show, similar to the way Jon Stewart sometimes ends a Daily Show with a live hook-up to Stephen Colbert. Since Conan O'Brien will be doing his show from the same coast — from the Universal lot, about three miles away — it would be simple for Jay to end each show by saying, "Let's check in with Conan and see what he's got for you, following your local news."
They may do this even if local stations can't move Leno to just before O'Brien. I would imagine will see a lot of stunt-connections...some bit that will start on Jay's stage and conclude on Conan's, some guest who will do both shows the same night, etc. (Anyone remember the night Jay was doing his program from New York and at the end of it, he got up and a camera followed him as he walked downstairs and onto Conan's set to be a guest on that show?)
Obviously, a lot of this is new and unprecedented and there's a certain fun to all this speculation. Another question that occurs to me is that if all the shows underperform in this new configuration, does NBC have the option of just shifting them all back to their old time slots? Does Jay have anything in his contract about getting The Tonight Show (or just 11:35) back at some point under certain conditions? So many questions. Maybe I like the idea just because it shakes things up and it'll be fun to see what happens.
I think the Coyote may have finally caught and devoured the Road Runner. All evening, Road Runner High-Speed Cable — which brings me to you and vice-versa — has been going on and off, with the 'net inaccessible for hours at a time. If you can read this, it's working at the moment but may not be for long. E-mail has also been erratic. It's strange how much some of us come to rely on this thing. Every five minutes, I found myself thinking, "I need to look that up on the Internet" and then realizing I couldn't.
Wait...it gets worse. I decided to see if I could get my dial-up connection, which I haven't used since the Clinton administration, to work. I should have that capability in case, one of these days, the cable modem goes kablooey for some extended period. Well, it didn't work...and when I was trying to figure out what was wrong, my first thought was: "I know! I'll look it up on the Internet!"
That's right! I'm going to use the Internet to figure out why I can't use the Internet!
It's time to go to bed. Maybe in the morning, things will have stabilized around here.
And here's another commercial produced by Jay Ward's outfit. This one's for Quisp and Quake and it's kind of interesting because it features villain Simon LeGreedy and a heroine who are very much like Snidely Whiplash and Nell Fenwick from Ward's Dudley Do-Right cartoons. They even have the same voices...from Hans Conried and June Foray. Quisp's voice is Daws Butler, Quake's is William Conrad and the announcer at the end is Paul Frees.
December 10, 2008
