More Late-Night Weirdness
In a move that was every bit as stunning as the revelation of Illinois Governor Rod R. Blagojevich’s greed-crazed rantings, NBC recently announced it was going to create a talk show for Jay Leno, airing at 10 p.m. Monday through Friday. Conan O’Brien will take his rightful place hosting “The Tonight Show” at 11:35, and minimally talented “SNL” alumni Jimmy Fallon is slated to take over hosting the 12:35 “Late Show.”
On the face of it, this a shrewd move for NBC. They get to keep all their cards, with no possibility of Leno hiking over to, say, ABC and giving Kimmel the boot. They get to move Leno’s strong demographics to prime time, where they can try to move the bottom edge of his numbers to younger, more ad-desirable, brackets (median age of the average “Tonight Show” viewer: 56). And best of all, they can stop programming scripted or even pre-taped shows in the 10 p.m. slot. NBC normally programs about 23.5 hours a week: That means about twenty percent of their programming suddenly turned into a low-cost, high-ratings-yield talk show.
If I were programming ABC or CBS, I’d be pretty damn happy to hear this as well. As far as they’re concerned, NBC has given up 10 p.m., withdrew from the field of battle. The whole strip suddenly became less competitive: A good scripted show in this slot will easily cream a talk show. Hell, if ABC follows “Lost” at 9 with cheaply annotated repeats of “Lost” at 10, they’ll take the slot every week.
This is such a radical change to the television landscape that you can rest assured that Fox’s Rupert Murdoch is planning how he is going to break the news to his affiliates that he is going to bump their news up an hour.
This change is sort of bad news for The Industry at large, though. Those five 10 p.m. slots NBC is no longer filling with scripted TV represents a lot of potential big-budget television production, gone. Even reality television, which may be a lot cheaper than true dramatic shows to produce, still employs an army of staffers, show-runners, editors, and those guys who create the all-keyboard music tracks.
Eh, maybe just as well. NBC was dumping too much reality programming into 10 p.m., and this lost strip may help wean us from this genre, which has gone as bad as egg salad on a dashboard in August. Especially on cable. Have you ever seen what passes for reality programming on MTV? “Paris Hilton’s My New BFF” or “A Double Shot At Love?” (”The Hills” doesn’t count: It’s scripted. No, seriously: It is.) Let’s just say there is a reason MTV is so heavily sponsored by the armed forces: Every youth-oriented reality show on there is a passionate and convincing argument for bringing back compulsory military service.
–Skot C.