Quotes of the Day

Jay Leno drove to work today in an 84-year-old car. It sits in his parking space in the NBC lot, on this sweltering summer morning in Burbank, a 1925 Model T Roadster. "That's part of my social experiment, being green," he tells me. "It's my theory that if you drive the same car for 80 years, you're more environmentally friendly than buying a new car every five or six years, even if it's a hybrid. I mean, that is the original green car. It has nothing on it. There's no water pump, no oil pump. There's no — it just has what you need to get from point A to point B."

Leno has newer, fancier cars and motorcycles, more than 100 of them; he drives a different one nearly every day to his job, which presently involves figuring out how to make sleepy people laugh and keep a legendary TV network from imploding. But his eco–Tin Lizzie is a particularly good metaphor for Leno's new show. It's a simple antique being repurposed to solve a 21st century problem of limited resources.

No offense to the former Tonight Show host — who at 59 is a quarter-century younger than his wheels — but NBC's The Jay Leno Show, which debuts Sept. 14 at 10 p.m., is the oldest thing in TV: a comedy-variety show, with a funnyman, a stage, guests and in-show ads. And yet it is also a radical experiment: a single show airing every weeknight during prime time on a major broadcast network, cheaper to produce for an entire week than a single hour of the pricey scripted dramas that usually hold such a time slot.

NBC says it's facing media reality, that big audiences are getting harder to find. That the network business model is drying up as viewers turn to cable, skip ads by recording shows on DVRs or watch online. That the major networks, which once gathered tens of millions of viewers and promulgated a homogeneous national culture, are now, essentially, just big cable channels. And that they — like the automakers whose commercials once lavishly floated them — must learn to get smaller or else end up like American Buggy Whip Inc.

If The Jay Leno Show succeeds — where succeeding means not getting more viewers than the competition but simply increasing NBC's profit margin — it suggests a TV future in which ambitious dramas become the stuff of boutique cable, while the broadcasters become a megaphone for live events and cheap nonfiction. "If the Leno Show works," says former NBC president Fred Silverman, "it will be the most significant thing to happen in broadcast television in the last decade."

It's a business model that says, essentially, the mainstream has shrunk, if it exists at all. Yet the guy NBC has enlisted to usher it into this specialized world is TV's most middle-of-the-road entertainer: a "big-tent guy," he calls himself, who lives and breathes the old-fashioned something-for-everybody philosophy of broadcasting, whose icons include Jack Benny and Ed Sullivan. NBC is trying to adapt to a media future in which audiences choose from a thousand flavors by signing up with America's most successful purveyor of vanilla.

Is this the future of TV? And is Jay Leno the man to drive us back to that future? If so, let's hope he also has a DeLorean.

Not Tonight
For the moment, Leno is not focused on the future of TV. He's pausing on a comfy couch in his dressing room; relaxing is not the word, since Leno doesn't exactly relax. When he was hosting The Tonight Show, he would do 160 stand-up gigs a year. He worked Fridays (unlike David Letterman), didn't vacation and only grudgingly took holidays — "sometimes Thanksgiving, so [the staff] could be with their families," he says. Even now, one foot wiggles like an engine on idle. He would rather be working on something.

For instance, planning his show: how to organize it, how to pace it, how to distinguish it from Tonight while keeping the familiar features his old fans expect. (Bandleader Kevin Eubanks will return, and already Leno has gone back on an earlier declaration to do the show without a desk, allowing that he'll need one for seated-comedy bits.) Like Tonight, the new show will kick off with a topical monologue. On Leno's coffee table is a cue card with the beginnings of a joke from a practice run: "The Amsterdam city council wants a bailout of the prostitution business ..."

Also like Tonight, The Jay Leno Show will occupy five hours of NBC's real estate. If it hits, it will be like five hits at once. And yet it's hard to see the move by the once dominant network as anything but a gamble, though Leno plays down his responsibility for "saving" the Peacock. "The network is on its own," he said at a press conference this summer. "Screw them."

Actually, NBC has done a fantastic job of screwing itself, and that's why Leno has a new show. The Peacock has been the fourth-place network since 2004. It had no top-30 shows besides football last season; Heroes, The Office and 30 Rock are niche hits at best. It's had few major successes since Jeff Zucker, now president and CEO of NBC Universal, took over the network in 2000. Two years ago, it hired 36-year-old producer Ben Silverman to revive the network. A string of wild parties, gaffes and high-profile flops (Knight Rider, Kath & Kim, Rosie Live) later, Silverman announced in July he would leave the network to pursue the proverbial "opportunities."

On top of all this, five years ago, NBC, as if it had things too easy, announced it would ditch its most successful and reliable moneymaker, Leno, and give The Tonight Show to Conan O'Brien. "The logic behind it was, you get rid of someone while they're on top, so the transition is easier," says Leno. "I don't really see that analogy in sports. 'He's scoring touchdowns, so we've got to get rid of him immediately!' " Still, the host, who believes in not taking business personally — in his words, "Never fall in love with a hooker" — was publicly agreeable.

But Leno also believes in working, and as it became clear that he wasn't ready to retire and tinker in his garage, NBC had to find a job for him or see him go to a competitor, probably ABC. At the same time, the network had a hole in its prime-time schedule big enough to drive Leno's car collection through. Its 10 p.m. dramas (like Lipstick Jungle and My Own Worst Enemy) were regularly slaughtered — by CBS's crime procedurals, in particular — and it hadn't developed a hit for that hour in years. So after considering several possibilities — an 8 p.m. half-hour show, prime-time specials — Zucker offered 10 p.m. to Leno.

The move would keep Leno from battling Conan (at least directly and on another network). It would be easier and cheaper than developing five separate hour-long shows. Above all, it fit Zucker's modus operandi. NBC in the Zucker era has been less successful at creating new hits than at strategically deploying old ones. Zucker gave us the supersized Friends, the fourth hour of Today, the two-hour Biggest Loser. What's still working at NBC? The Tonight Show? Why, then, NBC shall have two of them!

But the show also crystallizes an argument Zucker has been making about broadcast TV, that it can no longer afford to be run the way it used to be. Traditional network prime time — three hours a night of largely expensive, scripted comedies and dramas — evolved when the Big Three networks had the audience (and ad dollars) to themselves. Today, cable channels siphon off viewers. DVRs like TiVo, now in roughly a third of homes, make prime time any time and allow viewers to easily skip ads. Online TV — including Hulu, which NBC founded with Fox — is growing and convenient. It's also mostly free and does not deliver close to TV ad money.

This leaves broadcasters in the same spot as other old-media outlets in the digital age (like the magazine you are holding in your hands or perhaps reading for free online). People want the content, but it's harder to make a buck off it. And the recession hasn't helped. The "upfront" ad sales for the coming season netted an estimated 20% less than last year's did. "The world, for better or worse, has evolved," says Zucker. "If we don't acknowledge those changes, then we're going to totally get left behind." If they can't grow out of their problems — and audiences are shrinking every year — then they must cut their way out.

The former Big Three networks, in this view, are like the former Big Three automakers: 20th century behemoths burdened by legacy costs and business structures cemented during their baby-boom heyday. Their traditional armadas of dramas and sitcoms are like so many redundant product lines and vestigial tail fins. And The Jay Leno Show — free of large casts and five separate writing staffs — is the restructuring plan.

NBC's competitors' response: Speak for yourselves. To them, NBC is self-servingly spinning a collapse of its own making as a symptom of industry-wide problems. "It might be an accurate picture for them, but that doesn't mean it's an accurate picture for everybody," says Kelly Kahl, senior executive vice president of prime time for CBS, the top network in overall viewers. "We don't like being painted with the same brush." CBS will face off against Leno with the imposing likes of CSI: Miami, and right now, it likes its chances. "We have successful shows at 10. We dominate 10 o'clock. It's a good business for us now and a business with the potential to get better."

That said, TV is a nervous business today, and other broadcasters are cutting costs. (And it isn't only the big networks that are under pressure: John Landgraf, president of FX, which makes some of cable's best dramas, says, "The digital video recorder has been a plague upon the land.") It's cheaper to stock a dating show with booze and roses than to cast a drama. The networks went through a devastating writers' strike over payments on digitally distributed shows; since then they've cut series' budgets, rerun shows from cable and bought series from Canada, Europe and South America.

Above all, they're finding new ways to work advertising into shows — another dawn-of-TV staple getting new life in the TiVo era. Simon Cowell sips from a Coca-Cola cup, Jimmy Kimmel pitches Jack in the Box on-air, and from the get-go, NBC has promised that The Jay Leno Show will be open to placements. One of the first features Leno announced was a celebrity "green-car challenge," in which guests will race on a custom-built track behind the studio — in electric Ford Focuses.

Mr. Big Tent
Business models aside, somebody still actually has to watch Leno. NBC has set the bar low enough for a sleeping man to clear. If Leno can just get the ratings he did in late night, some 5 million viewers (paltry by 10 p.m. standards), his show will be more profitable than what it replaced in that time slot, reps say. But having a lower-rated lead-in for the 11 p.m. newscasts would infuriate affiliates. (Boston's NBC station originally said it wouldn't air Leno at 10, until NBC threatened to drop the station as an affiliate.) And a weaker lead-in would be a further blow to O'Brien, whose Tonight Show has struggled; at one point this summer, Letterman reruns were beating O'Brien originals.

If a failed Leno Show could undermine Tonight, so could a successful one. Even if it draws good ratings, how many of those viewers will be old Jay fans watching expressly because he's not Conan? The shows are already fighting intensely for bookings — though both parties call it a friendly rivalry — and at least in the early going, Leno is winning. His first show will have Jerry Seinfeld, Kanye West, Jay-Z and Rihanna; Tom Cruise, Miley Cyrus and Halle Berry fill out the first week.

"My plan is to have a van that says 'The Jay Leno Show' pick up his guests and drive them here," O'Brien says. "It could be 15 minutes before Robin Williams realizes what's happening." Seriously, O'Brien argues, few guests matter much to ratings today, when celebs are available from so many outlets — a point that Leno echoes.

So what will matter to The Jay Leno Show if not its guests? As he and NBC pitch it, comedy. The network claims viewers want a light alternative to grim 10 p.m. dramas, though CBS, whose grisly crime shows crush all comers at the hour, begs to differ. And to keep affiliates happy, Leno will throw to the local news immediately after his last joke — no commercial — defying viewers to race him to the remote.

To share the lifting, Leno has staffed up with comedy "correspondents." D.L. Hughley will do segments from Washington (though Leno says the program will bear little resemblance to the edgier Daily Show), and NBC anchor Brian Williams will moonlight with a recurring bit on stories "not good enough" for the Nightly News.

The last half-hour will close with segments familiar from Leno's Tonight, like "Jaywalking," a segment that captures the paradox of Leno's populist, Main Street appeal. His signature bit is a feature in which he hits the street in his denim shirt and asks questions to prove how ignorant average Americans are. And yet his fans somehow accept that Leno is mocking all those other Americans, not them.

Many of those viewers have drifted away from O'Brien's Tonight. But the difference between Conan's and Jay's Tonight is not just about personal style; it's about two different philosophies of TV.

The idea behind giving Conan Tonight is that there are no more Johnny Carsons. No one is going to unite a mass audience of all ages and persuasions and from all walks of life every night. The audience is dispersed, by Comedy Central, TiVo, DVDs, video games and the Internet, and the key to success is to do well with the right niche. In Conan's case, that's younger viewers — an audience that doesn't want "something for everyone" but watches, say, Jon Stewart because he's not for everyone.

The corollary to this is that smaller crowds can't support as many expensive network shows at once. Hence, The Jay Leno Show. And yet few entertainers are more antithetical to this idea of niche programming than Leno, Mr. Big Tent. "Everybody gets a little something" in his monologues, he says. He doesn't work blue. He doesn't make his political jokes too pointed because that would make someone feel excluded. "There's the close-the-goddam-window school of thought," he says, "and there's the is-it-cold-in-here-or-is-it-me? school of thought. I come from the is-it-cold-in-here? school."

Leno grew up when mass media were mass. He recalls how "comforting" it was to watch Eric Sevareid with his parents, before kids had TVs in their rooms and a different network for every stage of childhood. "We don't gather anymore," he says. "It's the difference between standing outside a comedy club and looking through the window and standing on the other side of the wall in the room. The experience is a hundred times better when you're in the room because you're part of a communal thing with other people. And that's what TV is to me, a gathering place."

If Leno feels at all vindicated that Tonight's ratings have sunk since he left, he doesn't say it. Conan will be fine, Leno says; he's going through the same new-guy hazing Leno did. NBC, meanwhile, says Conan is a success anyway because his audience is younger than Jay's — by 10 years, on average — and advertisers pay a premium for that. I ask Leno if he buys that argument. "Whatever you want!" he says, laughing. "Whatever works for you, babe! 'Sure, honey, great, you look thin!' "

Is it cold in here?

Down by the Mainstream
Zucker says he believes there's still a role for big TV networks. "We know that the pipes still work," he says. "When we put on the Olympics, the Super Bowl, the Nightly News, the Today show, American Idol, millions of viewers come." I point out that none of his examples are comedies or dramas. "That's a fair point," he says. "Broadcast TV is definitely moving toward live, nonscripted events." If the Leno model is broadcast's future, it will mean less room for ambitious shows on the scale of Heroes and Lost. Says Rick Ludwin, NBC's executive vice president in charge of prime time and late night: "We're not the National Endowment for the Arts. This is a business."

But NBC's business is built on its history of acclaimed scripted TV from its '80s and '90s golden years (which lives on, in lower-rated form, on a few shows like The Office and Friday Night Lights). If NBC salvages its business model through cost-cutting, it could undermine its brand, both inside and outside the TV business.

"Nothing against Jay, but there are a lot of people in the industry who hope this fails spectacularly," says Shawn Ryan, who created The Shield for FX and executive-produces Lie to Me for Fox. To someone who grew up watching the glory days of NBC shows, Ryan says, "that used to be a special network. L.A. Law, Hill Street Blues, The Cosby Show, ER, Friends and Seinfeld — there was a whole generation of us that this was the network you turned on first. It's just sad. It seems like giving up."

Steven Bochco created Hill Street and L.A. Law, which made NBC synonymous with form-breaking drama in the '80s. Now he's making Raising the Bar, a legal series, for TNT, which airs a full schedule of summer dramas while the broadcasters are filling up on reality. Cable, he says, is where the opportunity and creative freedom are now. "I don't want to work for [the big networks]," he says, "and quite frankly, they don't want to work with me."

That said, Bochco doesn't blame NBC for giving Jay the 10 p.m. slot in today's business climate. Nor does the man who put Hill Street on the air, Fred Silverman. "You have to change with the times," he says. "They can't afford to keep spending $3 million an hour."

NBC says it's committed to airing The Jay Leno Show five nights a week for at least two years, good ratings or bad. The network gave Leno years to find his legs in late night, but in prime time, success is measured in scant weeks. The Jay Leno Show will almost certainly get a huge tune-in at first; research shows its awareness among viewers is twice that of a well-promoted new show. Does that mean it's a slam dunk? Ask Katie Couric.

Leno — who for all his laid-back attitude is as hard a competitor as he is a worker — seems energized by the challenge. No one can take his Tonight success away, but a host who analogizes himself to a quarterback has to be thinking of Brett Favre — the old pro who tried to stay in the game too long. Will The Jay Leno Show be the last TV show Leno does? "I have no idea," he says. "I'd like it to be." He pauses. "Probably. I mean, I'm 59. I'm glad I'm in a young man's game and competing, and that's all good. I don't like trying to act younger than I am. You just do what you do, and hopefully people will like it."

In late night they did, but prime time is a question mark even for a known quantity like Leno. One possibility is that the show will seem, well, lame. I don't mean that as a judgment on Leno's comedy. If you think the Dancing Itos were an incisive work of satire, good on you. But TV is about context. When Letterman and O'Brien moved an hour earlier, they had to adapt their 12:30 comedy (edgy, niche) into 11:30 comedy (accessible, broader). Likewise, comedy that's familiar and soothing at bedtime could seem cheap or corny at the hour of CSI and cable dramas. Leno calls 10 p.m. "the new 11:30" for people exhausted by kids, work and so on. (Um, but they should stay up for Conan anyway, right? Leno feigns a flustered recovery. "Oh — yeah!")

Another possibility: maybe the show won't be lame at all. We know it will begin with a Tonight-style monologue and end with familiar Tonight gags. But in the middle, Leno will showcase new comics, like Jim Norton of shock-jock show Opie and Anthony. Maybe the new start will give Leno the eye of the tiger. (Like a boxer in training, he's already lost 12 pounds.) NBC recently ran a Blair Witch–like trailer for the show in theaters before movies like District 9. In it, Leno went on the lam after believing he killed someone in a hit-and-run. It was funny, fresh, against type — Conanesque, even.

A final possibility is that The Jay Leno Show will be just lame enough to be a hit. Leno has long been written off by people, especially in New York and L.A., who think his humor is toothless. But Middle America kept him at No. 1 for 15 of his 17 years on The Tonight Show. Advertisers have resisted paying prime-time rates up front for Leno's experiment, but Rino Scanzoni, chief investment officer for media buyer GroupM (which buys advertising time for corporate clients), says his research reveals healthy interest in the show in middle-American homes, nonurban homes and homes without DVRs. (The last is a mixed blessing for advertisers; these individuals watch more ads but have less money.)

In other words, there are still viewers in Leno's mainstream — or what's left of it. And this is NBC's paradoxical bet. The great American median is no longer a majority, if it ever was one. But as a niche, it still exists — older, less kowtowed to by advertisers and TV critics, still interested in simple old-fashioned TV. A lot of people, after all — about 16 million of them — are watching The Mentalist. NBC's modest dream is that some of them might watch Jay instead, maybe just a little, maybe when CBS is in reruns. Not a Silent Majority but maybe a Silent Decent-Size Minority.

The End of Mass
Ultimately, the great Leno gamble signals a change in TV, boom or bust. If it hits, other broadcasters will feel pressure to cut costs too, further driving creative TV to cable. If it fails, it will leave NBC in a bigger hole and desperate for other ways to downsize. Either way, creatively, the show is ushering in an era in which TV is both moving ahead (becoming more varied and experimental, especially on cable and online) and retrogressing into its past (on the broadcast networks), returning to TV's earliest days as a raw distribution medium for cheap content, with variety shows and built-in product placements.

The cold fact about NBC's Leno strategy is, it is giving up. Whether it's a brilliant strategic retreat or a premature surrender remains to be seen. But bottom line, what was once TV's premier network is drastically reducing its expectations: giving up the possibility of developing a lucrative CSI-size hit at 10, swinging for singles rather than the fences, seeking — wisely, for all we know — to ride out the decline of big media with a minimum of damage.

And it's doing this with a remake of a 17-year-old version of a half-century-old franchise. NBC is trading creative innovation for business-model innovation. It is becoming the Sheinhardt Wig Co. (In case you don't get that reference — and you probably don't because broadcast TV is dying as a mass medium — that's NBC's fictional corporate owner on 30 Rock, more interested in making portable microwaves than original TV.) Even NBC's "People want comedy" pitch for The Jay Leno Show is, when you think about it, kind of sad. It's an awful world out there. People are losing their jobs. Everywhere you look on TV, there's another murder. You're tired, so tired. Let Jay take away your pain, America!

The Jay Leno Show could be funny. And there will still be ambitious TV (like cable's Mad Men) because there are so many outlets now making it — some of them owned by NBC's corporate parent, GE. Who knows? Maybe the fact that NBC is, essentially, doing what cable channels do (that is, reducing costs and targeting its scripted shows) is a harbinger of the day when it, or another big network, will literally become a cable channel, trading the system of local affiliates for the freedom and licensing fees of cable.

But the certainty is that even as Leno makes his biggest debut, the TV that he loves — the great 20th century American unifier, which gave us a mass-culture lingua franca, from moon shots to M*A*S*H to "master of my domain" — has moved on from being the "gathering place" he remembers. And the existence of The Jay Leno Show is ironic proof that it has. The show could be a footnote, or it could make its host bigger than ever. But either way, the small screen is only getting smaller.

• James Poniewozik
• His new show may seem like the oldest thing on television. But it's a radical gamble for NBC -- and a turning point for broadcast