The more I mull it over, the more sense NBC's new deal with Jay Leno makes to me. It's a gamble but not an illogical one. As the prime time audience shrinks, this kind of gamble is going to become more and more thinkable. It really marks a turning point for network television in that NBC is recognizing that the old dynamic of prime time is going away.
Despite reports that similar arrangements were once suggested for Johnny Carson and David Letterman, I don't think either of them actually got a real offer to move their shows into prime time, at least not five nights a week. (Jack Paar, after he left The Tonight Show, did a nearly-identical show for NBC in prime time for a while, but only once a week.) An earlier hour may have been dangled at Johnny or Dave because that was something the network had to dangle at that moment of negotiation, but NBC wasn't ready then to give up on the idea of competing head-to-head with CBS and ABC in the grand arena of prime time.
It is now. They're in fourth place, the economy is bad, money is tight. What NBC is doing, in essence, is deciding that they'll pour all their energy and funds and strongest prime time shows into the 8-10 PM slots…and then from 10 to 11, they'll just try to make whatever money they can. They can't possibly expect Leno to beat the strongest things their competition can schedule at 10 PM every night but he could beat the weaker ones and easily show a substantial profit for them finishing in second, third or even fourth place. A hit hour-long drama these days can cost $2-3 million an hour to produce. Even paying Leno the fortune he's going to clear from this, his shows will run them a lot less than that.
The costs can't be compared exactly since Jay is reportedly going to do 46-48 weeks of original programming per year and I'm wondering if part of the plan also includes rerunning those shows elsewhere, either late at night on NBC or the next day on MSNBC or CNBC. (I'm also guessing that NBC might experiment with putting other programming in, as opposed to reruns, during the weeks he takes off.) Back in the seventies, Johnny Carson had NBC stop rerunning an old Tonight Show each weekend, as they'd been doing, because he feared he was getting overexposed.
Someone's got to be pondering if that'll sink Leno and also if rerunning him at other hours will cause viewers to think, "Oh, we don't have to watch Jay tonight at 10. We can watch that show we like on CBS and catch (or tape) Jay's rerun tomorrow." I believe they pulled day-old Conan O'Brien reruns off CNBC a few years ago because they felt too many people were watching him then instead of when it mattered more to the network.
I said that this idea of putting Leno on earlier had occurred to a lot of people but it was so radical that no one said it aloud. A few friends of mine wrote to remind me that they had when we'd discussed it (so did I in those conversations) and David Carroll, who anchors local news down in Chattanooga, wrote to remind me that in this article in July of '07, he floated the notion.
Carroll was thinking Leno could either air at 10 PM or local stations could move their late news broadcasts there and then air Jay from 10:35 to 11:35. Will they have the option of doing the latter under the new configuration? If they do, NBC may try to head it off by having Jay do a "throw" at the end of each show, similar to the way Jon Stewart sometimes ends a Daily Show with a live hook-up to Stephen Colbert. Since Conan O'Brien will be doing his show from the same coast — from the Universal lot, about three miles away — it would be simple for Jay to end each show by saying, "Let's check in with Conan and see what he's got for you, following your local news."
They may do this even if local stations can't move Leno to just before O'Brien. I would imagine will see a lot of stunt-connections…some bit that will start on Jay's stage and conclude on Conan's, some guest who will do both shows the same night, etc. (Anyone remember the night Jay was doing his program from New York and at the end of it, he got up and a camera followed him as he walked downstairs and onto Conan's set to be a guest on that show?)
Obviously, a lot of this is new and unprecedented and there's a certain fun to all this speculation. Another question that occurs to me is that if all the shows underperform in this new configuration, does NBC have the option of just shifting them all back to their old time slots? Does Jay have anything in his contract about getting The Tonight Show (or just 11:35) back at some point under certain conditions? So many questions. Maybe I like the idea just because it shakes things up and it'll be fun to see what happens.