And the Network yawned.
First David Gregory gets appointed to moderate Meet the Press and now the announcement that Jay Leno is going to host a five night a week show in the 10 o'clock time slot that is sorta kinda like The Tonight Show. Here are my thoughts if you really care.
On Gregory:
I think NBC news wants to stay FAR away from anyone who has a sniff of partisanship, which Mike Murphy or anyone from the MSNBC roster has in oodles -- not that that is in and of itself a bad thing. Gregory is a safe, if completely uninspiring, choice. His show on MSNBC is/was forgettable, and I don't ever see him rocking the boat with any of his guests. In fact I don't see him putting a new spin on MTP at all. My bet is that he will just use the Russert model with little innovation or distinction. I give him 5 years.
I was hoping that they would return to the old version of MTP with a moderator (say Gregory) and a few reporters/press who get to question a the guest(s). You could have press from the right and left asking tough questions with (gasp!) follow up questions. For God's sake the fucking roundtables need to be executed from MTP post haste because theirs are exceptionally dreadful. They are mind numbing and provide little to no information. If I wanted the convential wisdom from the Washington establishment I would just shut down my brain and read David Broder. (And yes that is me taking a giant swipe at the old windbag of conventional beltway sages who's time passed decades ago.)
On Leno:
Please NBC. This was a purely defensive move. You green light shitty programs that no one wants to watch (like the much hyped My Own Worst Enemy or Knight Rider...seriously Knight Rider?), and you were pissing your pants that Leno might take his star power to ABC. So you gut your 10 o'clock slot for the weekdays. In essence then you totally giving up on edgy programing then because you really can't air anything adult before 10. So you put too many eggs in your basket with 1990s Must See TV and ran it into the ground. You let a few shows run just too long, like Fraiser, and you kept shocking e.r. with defibrillation paddles for an extra 5 season trying to resuscitate a show that should have slipped into death due to natural causes. You expanded from one Law & Order to three -- all of which I still watch on an irregular basis, and though some of the actors have been unwatchable the current casts are actually really good again, but just stop the "Ripped from the headlines" bullshit and pay your writers to come up with original stories. I do give you kudos for show patience with some shows in the recent past, such as The Office, and currently with Life. I do wonder how my two favorite shows of this year eluded your gasp: The Emmy award winning Mad Men (on AMC), the somewhat violent Sons of Anarchy (F/X), and another one I am trying to catch up on is Breaking Bad (again AMC, and again winner of an Emmy). All three of these shows are 10 o'clock shows, as is e.r. Are you going to stop developing adult approriate shows and just ceded that audience to ABC, CBS, and cable networks? If so you are sadly playing your hand on the wrong side of history.
Young people don't regularly watch late night teevee. I am sure you will hold the baby boomers, especially the tailing end of it, and that generation right before Gen X. But Gen X and onward are not drawn to the late night shows like previous generations because we never really lived during a time of nearly infinite channel choices. Our choices after the nightly news were not Johnny Carson, NightLine, or whatever else used to be called late night programming. There is no mystique around that time slot for us and I bet a lot of the younger viewers are like me in that when we watch, it is because we want to see which entertainer is on to be interviewed or perform and not to enjoy the pleasure of spending an hour with the host and his witty repartee. Yes, I still watch Letterman on occasion -- I was never wild about Leno -- and do check out Conan and the Late Late show once in a while, but that is rare and usually on TiVo.
NBC made the boring and easy choices. Their slow slide in their viewership will continue unabated, and I let out a giant yawn in their honor.
_John
PS. NBC's sports department are still morons. Losing the NFL all those years ago only to overpay to get the Sunday night game? You have the NHL, but treat it like a red-headed stepchild. If you didn't want it than you didn't have to pay for it -- I know it came relatively cheap (Gary Bettman I am looking at you), but come on how about a little exposure and marketing? The NHL was near third place as a sport in terms of ratings before lock out. (The lock out was good and bad for the sport, but I will get into that later.) You are the sports channel of the Olympics and golf (and maybe NASCAR, I can't remember and don't care about four left turns), and other random "sports" that I don't watch most weekends of the year on your desert of a sports broadcasting. How is all of this working out for you? Seriously you can't be happy about that. No MLB, lost the NBA, and your only college football is Notre Dame. Notre Dame football got you to pay how much to watch them get destroyed every week?
After writing all of this I have to ask: Who the hell is making decisions at that network? Seriously, have you made any good financial decisions recently with your programming? Seriously.
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