Iron Jay

Judging from the ratings, not a lot of you are watching the hoary reruns of The Tonight Show at NBC, for some reason, is showing while Mr. Leno and his writers are on strike. Last night, it was a show from January of '96 and the lead guest was Chris Farley, who was either coked-up or might as well have been. Back when we could pretend his excesses weren't likely to kill him — he died in December of the following year — Farley seemed like a very funny, lovable boy. It's a little harder to see him that way now.

I find the old shows fascinating in their way but I'm not surprised America doesn't want to watch jokes — there was one on Tuesday's rerun — about how President Bill Clinton wasn't likely to get elected to a second term. It's interesting to see what passed for Current Events back then and also to see what Leno's show was like back then before he decided, for example, to stop trying to do characters in sketches.

More interesting to me would be to know what was on the mind of whoever decided that during the strike, they'd dip back into the days when Leno's hair was just going charcoal, and he was doing shows that he never wanted to have rerun. They're not making audiences happy and I doubt Jay is thrilled about them. So how come they're not dumping that approach and doing what Letterman's doing, which is to dig back no farther than last year, even if it means running some episodes for the third time?