The Curse of Jay Leno

Back in May of this year, Jay Leno made his much touted farewell from The Tonight Show where he reigned supreme for a solid seventeen years. There’s probably not that many people who would put Leno in the same class as his predecessor, Johnny Carson, but his departure from the show was a milestone nonetheless and in a perfect world he would have drifted into retirement knowing he went out on top leaving the future of the show in the younger hands of Conan O’Brien. But that’s not what happened. Instead a gamble was made and now, only four months in, it would seem that both NBC and primetime network television as a whole faces an unknown future.

On September 14, 2009, just 108 days after “retiring” from The Tonight Show, Jay Leno and NBC premiered their controversial new collaboration creatively titled, The Jay Leno Show at 10 P.M. where it would remain every night of the week. It was a bold move to say the least. The last time a network aired the same show in primetime every weekday our president was Dwight D. Eisenhower. Some local affiliates threatened not to air the show in favor of just about anything else for fear of losing viewers but NBC held strong and carried on with the series for an America curious to see what Leno would be doing differently in his new timeslot.

As it turns – he didn’t do much of anything differently. The show is virtually the same as when it aired at 11:30 P.M. despite attempts to hide that fact by shuffling some things around, having fewer guests and only featuring a couple of musical acts per week versus every night. In a nutshell, if you enjoyed watching Leno on The Tonight Show you’d probably enjoy his new gig too but it’s not quite that simple. Primetime series require much larger audiences to satisfy advertisers and even though The Jay Leno Show is cheaper to produce than most hour-long dramas, it now finds itself being regularly bested in the ratings game by shows on cable networks. Needless to say, industry observers are starting to get nervous.

Adding fuel to the fire is what’s being called the Leno Effect. Local NBC affiliates have long relied on the network to provide big audiences during the 10 o’clock hour so as to keep as many viewers as possible for their local 11 o’clock news. Well, Leno’s weak numbers are doing local news broadcasts no favors. According to The Chicago-Sun Times, many local newscasts have experienced audience drops of up to 25-30% and they aren’t happy about it. And by that nature The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien is also bleeding viewers thanks to the fewer number of people tuning into their local NBC news, which would air right before O’Brien’s show. This effect alone is bad news but when you add in the fact that both ABC and CBS have banned their primetime stars from appearing on Leno’s show in an effort to keep viewers on their 10 o’clock shows, things aren’t looking good for America’s favorite big-chinned comedian.

So what is NBC to do? Network reps claim that the series is still profitable with its current ratings level but now that its poor performance is affecting other shows, I think I smell blood in the water. But that’s where things really get awkward. Sure, NBC could cancel Leno and admit that it was a failed experiment BUT then they have to come up with at least five new shows to fill the hole that Leno will leave behind in addition to any other network series that may be ending their run. New shows don’t come cheaply and it’s not even a guarantee that any of them will be a success so rebuilding their primetime lineup is a major concern and could prove to be the most costly undertaking in the network’s history.

Filling the Leno void may prove so impossible that a more drastic and history-making move might be needed. Industry experts are now pointing to the possibility that NBC could turn over its entire 10 P.M. hour to its affiliates to do with as they will (most likely a newscast) and only have two hours of primetime programming per night from here on out from 8 – 10 P.M. FOX has been doing this since its inception and has found success but NBC is one of our founding television networks and its abandonment of the nationwide 10 o’clock hour would be a major event and telling sign of the decay of network television in an era of hundreds of cable stations.

It’s almost sad to think that a timeslot that once housed television classics like Hill Street Blues, ER, and The West Wing could instead just be used for syndicated reruns or yet another local newscast featuring shoddy journalism. I believe that we are slowly but surely witnessing the destruction of the big networks as we know them and when they write the history book about it one hundred years from now, the person credited most for that decay might very well be Jay Leno. Only time will tell.

Weeknights at 10/9c on NBC

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Photographs courtesy of NBC Universal and Justin Lubin.