One challenge Leno, on his new set, faces is pleasing old fans without seeming to copy The Tonight Show.
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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.