I thought Jay Leno missed an opportunity on his return Tonight Show to demonstrate that he might have new tricks up his sleeve. Yeah, NBC is probably so desperate to get back his old ratings that there was a natural inclination to try to bring back the old show. Back it came…complete, oddly enough, with the same theme song that got his failed 10 PM program off to such an unexciting start. (I did, however, smile to hear my pal, Wally Wingert, who's been retained from the prime-time show as Leno's announcer.) Bandleader Kevin Eubanks is reportedly leaving in a few weeks or months…but other than that, is there any reason to expect Jay's new show to not feel like a fresh rerun every night?
I like Jay and think he got a bum rap from those who think he somehow kicked Conan O'Brien out. But I've also gotten weary of the repetition…his and Dave's. It's like each guy reached a point years ago when he decided his show was just the way he wanted it and now he goes in every night to do that same show. I know the credo, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," but there's also such a thing as preventive maintenance.
Leno's opening monologue was solid but a bit too familiar…and then he did a remote piece based on the now shopworn premise that if you're from a famous TV show and you haul around a camera, you can get people to go along with darn near anything you want them to do. The best thing about it was that Jay did it himself, rather than dispatch some "correspondent" that you never heard of before and, the way their batting average goes, will probably never hear of again. Then came Jamie Foxx, who was a decent guest, and Olympic skier Lindsey Vonn who sat for a pretty good interview. I don't think any of the late night hosts except Craig Ferguson are good interviewers, but Jay at least seems to like most of his guests and he tries to make them the star of their segments, rather than to just prove he can top them.
How Jay will do, I dunno. Better than Conan did, I'm sure. In all the Sturm und Drang that accompanied the latest Late Night Wars, one topic that went largely unaddressed was why Mr. O'Brien's ratings weren't a lot better. His show deserved more than the numbers it was pulling down and weak lead-ins couldn't have been the only problem, maybe not even the main one. Jay does connect with the audience in a way that Conan didn't at 11:35. (I have a friend at one of the networks who argues that Conan wasn't even connecting that well with the audience his last year or so at 12:35.)
Still, I just find it hard to imagine audiences getting as excited about the second coming of Leno as they were by the first. I thought his 10 PM show suffered from too much familiarity. You get a new time slot — especially a prime-time one — and people are expecting something new. Sometimes, the old and familiar is comforting and people are glad to see it again. But it's a short hop from that to déjà vu and "I've seen this before," especially since the old can look older in a new context. If Leno's resurrected Tonight Show falters, I don't think it'll be because America resents him for taking Conan O'Brien's dream away and leaving Coco with that paltry $43 million consolation prize. I think it'll be because people just feel that, as enjoyable as it might once have been for some, they've seen that show before. Too many times.