NBC gives up the goat

Or “I’d buy that for a dollar!”

I heard on the news tonight that coming soon, NBC will begin programming a ‘new’ Jay Leno show 5 nights a week at 10PM. There are so many things wrong with that I don’t know where to start.

Personal: Not a Jay Leno fan. Don’t hate him, but his middle-of-the-road persona is just so uninteresting compared to contemporaries like Dave Letterman and Conan O’Brien. Both of those shows you can’t imagine them going on without their hosts (although NBC will likely place some new yukster in Conan’s late night-time slot unless it turns out they can make more money running infomercials), but a Jay Leno-type gabfest could just as easily be fronted by any one of a dozen comics… Pauly Shore, Seth Green, one of the lesser Baldwin brothers. He’s a cup of warm milk. Nyeh.

Up side: When NBC has any scripted dramas worth broadcasting, it usually runs them at 10pm. Which I TiVo then have to make time to watch later. So by eliminating all the relatively pricey scripted content in the 10-11pm weeknight slot, I should see a lot of time freed up to pursue more worthy endeavors during the daytime hours.

Sympathy: Poor Conan O’Brien. He finally gets the plum gig, the crown jewel, “The Tonight Show…” only to have its former host cut him off at the knees by continuing to precede him 5 days a week, the same way he is now! It’s like someone finally conquering the capital city only to have the seat of government move away before he can take physical possession. Plus some of Conan’s edgier, funnier fare will probably be scuttled by his new earlier time slot.

Equivocation: Here’s Jeff Zucker, head of NBC programming, doing his best Rummy call-and-response impersonation, spinning like crazy for the AP: “Can we continue to program 22 hours of prime-time? Three of our competitors don’t. Can we afford to program seven nights a week? One of our competitors doesn’t,” Zucker said in comments that were relayed online. “All of these questions have to be on the table. And we are actively looking at all of those questions.”

Here’s my favorite Zucker quote, where he throws a shovelful of dirt on my own beloved, long-suffering industry in passing while he sells his down the river [emphasis mine], “We're in an era where if we don't change the models of these local TV stations, we will be newspapers, we will be car companies,” he said. “I don’t want to be a company that files for bankruptcy.

Well fuck you very much. MSNBC is all the proof I needed anyhow that you weren’t interested in being in the journalism business.

Although not technically a 10PM show, “Heroes’” spectacular, high-profile failure is largely what’s got NBC walking the streets in “The End Is Near” sandwich-boards. About “Heroes”: It’s really sucked this year. Not sucked like last year, where everything took forever to not go anywhere really slowly. This year they’re throwing everything they’ve got at the wall every episode. And characters are still acting dumber than library paste. During a recent 2-parter, all the super-powered cuties lost their abilities at exactly the same time as a total eclipse of the sun occurred, and not a single one of them put 2 and 2 together. They all wailed endlessly about facing a life without their powers and gnashing their teeth at this inexplicable turn of events. And the fucking eclipse lasted two whole episodes!! What planet are they on?! NBC, don’t mistake one show’s awful writing with an inevitable trend-line for a whole genre of television.

Down side: This is just the continued dumbing down, as if it needed more, of American TV. Whatever is cheapest to produce is what we’ll feed to our willing, complicit masses, and we’ll feed it to them till they like it. How far are we, really, from the sophomoric, anaesthetizing television content parodied so presciently in Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 “Robocop” – the drunk swell with two brainless bimbos preening on his arms bellowing, “I’d buy that for a dollar!” to riotous offscreen canned laughter.

A dollar? I wouldn’t give a plugged nickel for Leno’s looming 60 minutes of prime-time swill, nor for the fate of American television in general.

Time to get serious about that Great American Novel. Maybe someday I can find somebody who’ll be willing to buy that for a dollar.