After months of speculation, NBC finally seems ready to admit that its experiment in torture also known as The Jay Leno Show—now averaging between four and five million viewers a night—just isn’t working. While no official changes have been announced, Variety is reporting that the network is about to move Leno back to his old 11:35pm home after the Winter Olympics come to a close. In one scenario, Leno would only do a half-hour show, focusing mostly on a monologue, with The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien to follow. If, however, O’Brien decides that he doesn’t want to be pushed around by the network that announced his succession of Leno five years in advance, Leno would take back Tonight and O’Brien would have to look elsewhere for work. Similar to what happened with Leno before he ultimately re-signed with NBC, O’Brien may have prospects at Fox or ABC, though those prospects would be greater if he wasn't finishing behind both Nightline and Late Show with David Letterman in total viewers.
All of these changes may be too little, too late for a network in freefall. Taking Leno out of primetime will open up five hours of programming that NBC is in no way prepared to fill. They are being aggressive in ordering pilots, but any series that come out of that group won’t be ready to air before the fall. Does this mean more episodes of Dateline NBC and reruns from the Law & Order franchise in the meantime? Probably. The network can also raid its cable siblings’ lineups and put on repeats of, say, a Bravo reality show or USA’s Burn Notice. Honestly, I’d rather they wait out the season with Leno at 10pm than throw on any old thing they can find as filler; at least Leno would be new. Dumping Southland a few months back suddenly looks even more boneheaded than ever. If there’s an upside to any of this, it might be that those who don’t subscribe to DirecTV may no longer have to wait until the summer to enjoy the brilliant fourth season of my beloved Friday Night Lights.
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