The Spice Of Life… And A Bland One At That.
I am more movies than television (and surely, more filmed entertainment than live or recorded music), but there are TV things that I know and this is one of them: the Jay Leno deal is terrible. Horrible.
Set aside for the moment all the lousy mediocrity Leno represents - the middling career, the pale imitation of Carson, all of it (and don’t worry, I’ll get back to it) - and consider something more fundamentally wrong with what NBC has announced: that rather than produce 5 different hours of anything, they have decided to stretch their late night offerings into three endless hours of comedy-lite and celebrity-land overload stretching across the evening news hour and not ending until 1:30 in the morning on the East Coast.
Now tell me about how this is genius.
If there’s one lesson learned in modern television - after the part about splintering audiences produced by the wide availability of programming alternatives - it’s this: the variety show is dead. Deader than dead. Massively, totally dead.
It wasn’t always like this - like many in even my generation (this is what it means to be forty, I find), I have fond memories of the waning days of variety shows. I lived to watch Cher (gay!), even Sonny and Cher. I watched Carol Burnett in syndicated reruns. I watched Flip Wilson - and was even happier when Gladys Knight showed up for a summer as his replacement. I even watched the whole genre die out at the hands of Donny and Marie Osmond (both of whom still have a fond place in my kid memory).
There was a time when the variety show made sense in prime time - popular music was about mass taste, audiences craved exposure to a wide array of entertainments, movie stars who didn’t “do television” could justify “guest” appearances in variety segments. But those days are passed. We do not show up, en masse, for almost anything. We get our popular music from videos and iTunes. We crave realism, not the enforced unreality of “celebrity friendships” no deeper than a program appearance. And movie stars… well, are there any, at this late date? Really?
NBC proposes to have Jay Leno do in prime time what he’s done, basically for close to 20 years on late night - vaguely amusing monlogues, some weak sketch humor (Leno has, over this period, consistently lost the Variety Show writing Emmy to essentially any - and every - one else), some live performances. That’s not even Saturday Night Live or Mad TV (recently cancelled, remember) level humor… and they are the closest to the old “Carol Burnett” type model of sketch comedy/variety program.
And all of this… five nights a week.
Five nights a week while Conan moves to Jay’s old slot, Jimmy Fallon takes over Conan, David Letterman continues on CBS with Craig Ferguson following, and Jimmy Kimmel limps along at ABC. Think of the practical problems - what’s he doing for guests? how many musicians can realistically be engaged? How much sketch comedy is any audience breathlessly waiting to see?
No Variety Program - not ever (I’m not kidding) - was ever asked to sustain quality in prime time over 5 hourlong nights a week. The closest I can think of is the “Arthur Murray Dance Party” and that was 15 minutes of dancing, a night, all week.
And Arthur and Kathryn Murray were good at it. Dancing, I mean.
My dislike of Leno is visceral and longstanding. I don’t apologize for it and you’ll never convince me otherwise. Fundamentally, I find him not funny. More to the point, I find him emblematic of the kind of safe mediocrity that indicates capitulation to mass taste: no one ever thought Leno was best at the Tonight Show… just safest. Promoting him to Prime Time just says mediocrity rules (and as my Mom points out - hamstrings Leno, because what’s saucy and naughty late at night is essentially useless even at 10).
This decision is so insane on so many levels one can only wonder how long NBC’s current management has left: it virtually kills NBC’s role in developing scripted television (though as Nikki Finke has been demonstrating in the past few weeks, that’s probably because they’ve fired everyone responsible for developing it), and it virtually guarantees that ABC or CBS - or more precisely, both - have been gifted with the biggest ratings “gimme” in TV history: it’s virtually assured that their 10pm dramas will now dominate the entire week.
I can’t actually put into words how appalling I find all of this: as I said, I grew up on variety shows, I’d love nothing better than to see some form of them revived. But truly reviving the genre in an interesting way would involve far more creativity and risk taking than NBC can hope to demonstrate. One could, actually, point out that the variety music program already has been innovated… and its name is American Idol. I’d even make a strong case that prime time dancing has been vastly extended by the minimal success of So You Think You Can Dance and Dancing With the Stars.
What I would not do is pin any hopes for success on Jay Leno. That NBC’s management has, I think, is indicative of the desperation, and fear, gripping TV, and especially the subsidiary of GE least likely to improve its bottom line (which is saying something, when this financial crisis is killing GE Capital). Loving TV as I do - and always will - I can only hope that sanity, of some sort, steps in. Or at least, as I continue to believe, that the audience will speak resoundingly with their eyes and remote controls… and go somewhere, anywhere else, for the variety of TV that is, really, the spice of life.
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March 12, 2009 at 2:08 pm
[...] enormous drops in audience share, as well as drops in future ad revenue projections. NBC’s desperation play of the ...