Oh, jeez. That’s going to be on every night in primetime? I assumed it was a 1-night-a-week thing. <vomit>
I haven’t followed Leno’s career much at all, but who at NBC does he have pictures of?
It’s not that. A few years ago, they thought Leno’s show was declining so they promised the Tonight Show to Conan O’Brien starting this year. And since Leno is still young and relatively popular, they were afraid that he would go to ABC and do a competing show at 11:30pm.
The Tonight Show is highly rated for the timeslot, and after they announced Conan O’Brien would take over the show this year the fear was that Leno would take his audience to Fox or ABC and clobber O’Brien. So they’re giving him five prime-time hours to fill. The same numbers that were good in late-nite will be poor in prime time but not horrid, and the show costs like $15 a night to produce. It’s not a terrible decision given that over the last couple years NBC can’t buy an audience for new dramas, even with strong fare like Journeyman, Life, and Kings. But it is a shame to see the Peacock, which rode so high because it was legitimately better than the competition for close to 20 years now fall so low.
–Cliffy