Word: nbc
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...Leno were to have his NBC bosses on his show, he could ask them what he famously did Hugh Grant in 1995: "What the hell were you thinking...
...NBC made clear what the hell it was thinking in creating The Jay Leno Show. It was trying to adjust to the post-Big Media world. With cable, DVR and online media snagging viewers, programming a full night of expensive TV was a bygone luxury. Leno might get lower ratings than NBC's 10 p.m. dramas, but those were struggling anyway and cost much more. (See the top 10 Jay Leno moments...
...thing right: the ratings were lower. To be fair to NBC, so were the costs. Even getting no more viewers than Leno did in late night, the network was reportedly ahead in ad revenue. But that was no comfort to NBC's affiliates, the local stations that make up the network by agreeing to air NBC shows. Their nightly newscasts suffering, they found The Jay Leno Show even less amusing than TV critics did and threatened to revolt...
...Leno at 10 will be a memory. With that, NBC showed itself to be in the same boat as the rest of Big Media - caught between an old business model that is no longer working and a new one that hasn't yet been invented...
...easy to mock NBC, which fell to fourth place over a decade, put a retread of The Tonight Show in prime time, alienated TV-drama producers and publicly shafted Conan O'Brien, who said he would quit Tonight rather than move so that NBC could shoehorn Leno in at 11:35. As I wrote in a TIME cover last year, Leno's show was a paradox: a radical experiment with TV's most old-fashioned, middle-of-the-road star. It proved to be an unsustainable contradiction. (See the top 10 Conan O'Brien moments...