BY ALEX ISRAEL

In print | Published December 3, 2009

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how CBS’s Craig Fer-guson has been quietly reinventing the late-night talk show through his loopy monologues, hysterical, tangential interviews (if you haven’t seen his interview with his former bandmate Peter Capaldi, YouTube it immediately, because it is sublime), and occasional painful honesty. Today, I want to talk about something much less cheerful: the way that the network executives at NBC are doing their best to shit all over their glorious late-night legacy.

I do not object to Conan O’Brien’s takeover of that hallowed institution The Tonight Show; I have loved Conan since the days of In The Year 3000 and the Walker Texas Ranger lever. What I object to is the way that NBC dangled The Tonight Show in front of his nose for five years, announcing in 2004 that O’Brien would be succeeding Jay Leno as host, then trapped him in the same spot he had been in, playing backup to Leno, who now hosts a talk show at 10 p.m. every weeknight. Let me repeat that. Every. Fucking. Week. Night.

It’s not that I object to Leno as a talk show host (although, for the record, Newsweek just included him on a list of “Comedians Who Aren’t Funny”), his new show is just a warmed-over rehash of all the unfunny observational pabulum that he trafficked in during his tenure at The Tonight Show. But that’s just my opinion. And the opinion of almost every respected television critic in the country. The major problems with Leno’s move to 10 are that poor Conan (who is infinitely funnier than Jay – watch the sketch where he goes apple picking with Mr. T if you need proof), despite the fact that he has inherited what is arguably the most venerable institution in the history of television, is still stuck following Leno; and that Jay’s move has stripped the network of a full third of its primetime slots, which drastically lowers the chances that new, quality scripted programming will make an appearance on the peacock network.

The truly painful thing about this loss of primetime hours is that some of the most beloved television of the last 30 years aired in the slot that is now home to Jay’s unfunny rehashing of the day’s news. “E.R.” and “Homicide: Life on the Street,” two game-changing shows, aired at 10 p.m. on NBC, as did that most beloved and long-running program, “Law & Order,” not to mention its various spinoffs. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that L&O ratings have drastically decreased this year, since Jay took over the series’ former time slot.

NBC’s insistence on cost cutting has also cut short the runs of several promising new series. The critically beloved police drama “Southland” was axed earlier this year without airing a single episode of its second season. One of my personal favorite shows, “Kings,” was cancelled unceremoniously last spring and left to burn off its remaining episodes over the summer. It could have stood a chance to gain a following on the strength of the writing and acting had NBC not ousted it for underperforming.

NBC made a great deal of the fact that Leno’s show would be much cheaper to produce than any scripted drama, which is true. Leno’s move was a perfectly logical step for a network which had long begun to value money over creativity. Much was made of the fact that, to break even, Leno would only have to pull a rating of 1.5 on the Nielsen charts, much less than what would be considered even a modest audience for any scripted show. The show has been averaging slightly less than that (around a 1.4, according to CBS News) and advertising prices have been falling accordlingly; Entertainment Weekly reported that Leno’s thirty-second spot goes for between $40,000 and $60,000, less than a third of the ad rate for ABC’s “FlashForward” and about half of the $108,000 commanded by “Heroes,” a show that hasn’t been largely watched since its first season. If NBC is still turning a profit on “The Jay Leno Show,” it’s not a large one.

These depressing ratings have led NBC to seriously rethink their position on Leno, and industry buzz suggests that the network may be considering ending their brief, failed experiment in prime-time talk shows. There are several ways they could go about this. The network could buy Jay’s contract and send him packing. But a much more disturbing rumor (and one that has been mentioned by Jay himself) is that NBC will move Leno back to The Tonight Show, ousting poor Conan and sending him… well, God knows where. It seems unlikely that Conan would return to Late Night, and pushing him back to his former time slot would also break Jimmy Fallon’s contract. It’s even less likely that Conan would move to rival network CBS; “The Late Show with David Letterman” is flush with good ratings as a result of Dave’s recent extortion scandal, and Craig Ferguson is commanding the best ratings of his show’s history, routinely beating Jimmy Fallon in the Nielsen charts. Not to mention that it would be an unbelievable dick move to deprive the superior O’Brien of the show that he had been promised five years before.

If NBC doesn’t want to become the first casualty of the cable revolution (which seems possible, as Comcast is on the brink of purchasing NBC Universal), they need to get their act together and go back to the strategy that made them great in the first place: producing strong scripted television that had the entire country talking about it the next day. In short, the NBC suits have to start valuing creativity and intelligence over profit. Without that, NBC will surely come to embody the description of television as “a vast wasteland.”

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