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