Two weeks into a new season, the talk of television is the Leno effect — and whether it is hazardous to NBC’s health.
On “The Tonight Show,” the host, Conan O’Brien, going for laughs with his guest, Hank Azaria.
It is not just a question of how the new “Jay Leno Show” itself is faring in the ratings, but also what the show’s occupation of the 10 p.m. hour on NBC means to the network as a whole.
As Shari Anne Brill, the senior vice president and director of program analysis for the advertising agency Carat, put it, “It’s really looking like dominoes.”
The dominoes in question are the other parts of NBC’s schedule affected by the network’s decision to relocate its late-night star, Mr. Leno, to prime time. Even though, as NBC executives point out, it is early in this experiment, signs of potential collateral damage have already emerged.
Shows seem to have suffered because they have been displaced to new time periods, like “Law & Order SVU,” which was the leading drama when it played at 10 p.m. on Tuesdays, but now is finishing last after moving to 9 on Wednesdays.
The takeaway here is that Leno’s mediocre ratings appear to not only be dragging him down, but dragging down the shows he replaced and were moved from 10:00pm, and the local newscasts because of the weak lead-in numbers.
As much as I wanted Leno to succeed in this new venture, the new show just isn’t that good. It’s the Tonight Show with more sketches and on earlier. One interesting thing from the article stood out to me, though…
The rationale for the move of Mr. Leno was simple: the network could not endure his likely move to ABC, where he would have created a new late-night program and undermined the strength of “The “Tonight Show.”
But NBC is justifying the move by citing both the savings Mr. Leno’s show represents over expensive 10 p.m. dramas and the apparent disintegration of the 10 p.m. hour across the board. Mr. Gaspin repeated NBC’s conclusion that hits cannot be established at 10 anymore, largely because the hour is dominated by viewers playing back recorded shows on digital video recorders.
Never thought about that, but it’s really true. Most of the time, at 10:00pm, I’m watching DVR’ed stuff.
I had no idea that was a trend.