In tomorrow's column (available on-line today!), I go further in-depth into the mess at NBC that led to them giving Jay Leno the 10 p.m. timeslot five nights a week:
Midway through the press conference yesterday to announce that Jay Leno would stay at NBC and take over the 10 p.m. timeslot Monday through Friday, I asked NBC boss Ben Silverman what sort of domino effect devoting five hours a week to Leno would have on the rest of primetime.
Silverman, an excitable type fond of the latest aggressive management buzzwords - "killer app," "firepower" - rattled off an answer about "taking the swings we need to take" earlier in the evening, and said the deal's allure was "having the stability of Jay on every single night, on that lineup, driving what the NBC brand is, which is a comedy brand, and is a brand of true talent, and that's what Jay is."
"What Ben's saying is we barely have six hours of programming," Leno cracked.
The best comedy comes from the simple truth, and in that one line, Leno plainly laid out the real reason NBC is handing him the keys to more than 20 percent of its primetime real estate:
They've got nothing else.
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In tomorrow's column (available on-line today!), I go further in-depth into the mess at NBC that led to them giving Jay Leno the 10 p.m. timeslot five nights a week:
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