Gene Popa writes to ask…
I'm writing to you now because you mentioned something in your observation about Jay Leno's new show and I, being largely ignorant of how these things happen, am hoping you can clarify it in a future posting. Specifically, you mentioned that NBC affiliates might "start to defect or juggle their schedules to move Jay later." I don't doubt that independent affiliates have the power…what I'm wondering is, what happens after they use it?
For instance, here in Chicago, I don't see our local NBC affiliate GM saying, "Okay, let's dump Leno and start running CSI's from CBS in that slot!" It would seem to me that everything which the network offers for airing is already committed to other time slots, so if an affiliate suddenly pulls Leno out of five hours of prime time each week, what can be put into those hours to plug the hole? I can't see local news programming or infomercials bringing in any better ratings than what Leno garners, so what recourse does an affiliate have were it to opt to not air Leno?
Well, first off, the NBC station in Chicago is not an affiliate. It's what's called an "owned and operated" station, meaning that NBC owns it. NBC also owns its stations in New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Dallas/Fort Worth, Washington, Miami, San Diego and Connecticut. While it is not unprecedented for an "o and o" station to not carry the precise network feed, it's pretty unlikely. An affiliate would be a station like the one in Boston that's owned by a separate company but which contracts to carry the NBC programming. Boston, you may recall, was briefly considering not carrying the new Leno show, or maybe they just wanted to bump it to a later hour.
That would probably be the first sign that Jay's show was in serious trouble…if an NBC affiliate moved him later. The most likely way they'd do that would be to put their local news on at 10 PM and start Jay at 10:35. (Subtract one hour from those times in a marketplace where Leno now starts at 9 PM.) It's doubtful that will happen any time soon because NBC has presumably convinced all its stations to give The Jay Leno Show a decent period in which to prove its value. Still, NBC has to be worried that if and when some affiliate does reconfigure, it could trigger a ripple-effect.
"Clearances," meaning how many stations carry a show in its intended time slot, have figured big in the history of late night. NBC dominated that daypart for years because of its clearances, and CBS and ABC were long at a disadvantage because of the many affiliates that had something else — a syndicated rerun or something locally-produced — ensconced in a late night slot that the network wished to program. Before Letterman agreed to sign on at CBS, he had to be satisfied that enough CBS stations would actually carry his show at 11:35…and the few that didn't quickly fell into line when he got those huge early ratings. If the whole Leno/O'Brien/Fallon parlay at NBC crashes and burns, the lasting damage may be what it does to the network's clearance factor.