Total Number of Ratings: 13
REVIEW: 'The Jay Leno Show'
First Published: Tuesday, September 15, 2009 1:49 AM
Last Saved: Tuesday, September 15, 2009 8:51 PM
Tonight saw the debut of The Jay Leno Show, the new talk show that (according to everyone involved) is NOT The Tonight Show, the grand daddy of all late night talk shows that Jay Leno hosted for 17 years. Earlier this year I wondered if NBC had just given up on making popular television by giving over 1/3 of its primetime schedule to Jay Leno (it did) in an effort to keep him from competing directly with his old show by hosting a talk show for ABC all the while saving on costs and attempting to distract everyone from the fact that NBC hasn't had a hit show in years..
So how did it go? Here's how the show went down:
Jay comes out on stage the same way he did on The Tonight Show -- Kevin Eubanks and his band play as Jay shakes the hands of everyone sitting in the front row of his audience. The opening monologue is full of familiar Jay Leno-esque jokes (you either like them or you don't) played to the camera, the crowd and Kevin Eubanks in virtually the same manner as The Tonight Show. The monologue set is laid out the same as before.
Next we get a video package in which Jay Leno appears on the trashy show Cheaters. Apparently, Kevin Eubanks has been hanging out with a Jay Leno impersonator. All three of them are wearing the same sweaters. The skit is about as funny as it sounds.
Jay Leno acts like he just discovered The Dan Band, which we all knew about after Old School. Dan Finnerty comes out to intro another video package called Everything is Better With Music. Dan offers to sing for people at a car wish. No one wants him to sing, no one that is, until a pretty young girl named Meg agrees. Dan sings her a car wish song and then a song about getting her shoes shined. Dan himself is funny and charming, but the whole thing comes off as overly staged. We're 0 for 2 on video packages.
It's time to interview a guest! But this is not The Tonight Show, so there is no table in front of Jay's chair and no couch. Just two big chairs set up at somewhat awkward angles. Jerry Seinfeld is the first guest. It's a funny, amiable interview between two veteran comedians and friends. With the awkward stand up and hug at the end of the interview, one gets the sense that Jay isn't totally comfortable in this new interview set-up. The best bit from the interview: Jerry makes fun of Jay for leaving The Tonight Show and then coming back with a similar show. "You know in the 90s when we quit a show we actually left. But not in the Brett Favre/Lance Armstrong double ohs. We take a three day weekend and right back at it." The worst bit: Jerry makes fun of Jay not having a bigger first guest: "Is your staff aware that I have not been on television in 11 years?" Jay says he tried to get Oprah but couldn't. Jerry says he can get Oprah for Jay. A TV drops down and Oprah appears on-screen. Jerry interviews Oprah, not allowing Jay to get a word in.
Another taped comedy bit where Jay pretends to interview President Obama by inserting himself into the President's 60 Minutes interview. This bit was okay.
The best segment of the show comes when Jay interviews Kanye West in the wake of his disrupting Taylor Swift's acceptance speech at the MTV Video Music Awards the day before. People must not hate Kanye as everyone says they do because Kanye got a pretty rapturous response from the crowd when he came on set. Kanye was already scheduled to perform with Jay-Z and Rihanna but this interview was inserted last minute based on the controversy from the day before. This was a nice bit of timeliness from the show. Kanye said he was rude to Taylor Swift. No shit, dude. Jay asks Kanye what his mother (who is dead) would have said about what he did to Taylor Swift. Kanye goes quiet for 19 seconds, which is a lot of dead air on television. A good question from Jay, but ultimately he lets Kanye off the hook, which was almost welcome because Kanye's mumbled, rambling apologizes were getting uncomfortable.
Kanye West then joins Jay-Z and Riahanna to perform "Run This Town" from Jay-Z's new album. Rap is rarely as good live as it is on the album.
Hey! There's suddenly a big round desk in front of Jay's chair! That's because Jay is wrapping everything up with his signature Headlines bit where he reads misspelled headlines and advertisements and the like that are sent in by viewers. This bit is hit and miss.
So? opening monologue? comedy bits? two interviews... a musical performance... headlines. In what what is this not The Tonight Show? You take away the opening titles and I see no real difference between the two shows. If I was Conan O'Brien I'd be pissed.
The Tonight Show with Jay Leno was late night comfort food for a lot of people and he's not serving up anything different here. If you were a fan of what he did before, then you'll probably enjoy this show just as much. If Jay Leno wasn't your kind of thing before, it probably won't be now. Nothing has changed except the name and the hour.
I only caught a bit of the beginning of the show, because I'm in the far end of Canada, and it's on an hour later than you Yankees, and I wasn't impressed.
I fear that Jay was set up by NBC who used his legendary insecurity to seal the deal. They want to unload him, but feel that they could only get rid of him by hitching him to a sinking ship. So they talk him into doing a nightly show, which once the novelty wears off, will turn into a ratings black hole. He agreed to it because I think that deep down he feels the need to prove that he's still got it.
I have to disagree with your assessment of what NBC wants. If they wanted to simply unload Jay they would have just said "thanks for the memories" after hustling him out the door of THE TONIGHT SHOW. But when it was clear to everyone that Jay didn't want to stop working they had to bring him back, otherwise he was going to end up with a talk show on ABC at 11:35 that would have crushed both Dave and Conan and NBC would never have been able to live down the embarrassment. Coupled with the fact that NBC seems pathologically incapable of developing any hit programming and you have a network in desperate need for THE JAY LENO SHOW to work. They absolutely do not want this show to fail. Of course, they are the only ones in Hollywood who feel that way.
Ratings have dropped by about 34% since the premiere which is not unexpected.
The thing about this show is that it's so cheap to produce that it doesn't have to have super huge ratings to turn a profit for NBC. Hell, the most profitable show NBC has had for years has been THE TONIGHT SHOW.
I went ahead and finished watching the first show last night (just figured I would). One strange thing from an interview standpoint was how Jay failed to set up the Kanye piece. I mean, if you're not someone who watches MTV (like myself), and don't pay attention to this aspect of the media then you would have no idea what they were talking about. Jay just needed to set the situation up a little bit (does his core audience really know what's going on?) Or another way to think of this, in 20 years when someone watches this first episode are they going to be aware of the context?
I know, I know, I?m old school, and nowadays people can be expected to locate this info independently via the web, but that does mean you need to stop the show in order to search for this information to understand what they are talking about.
I'm a Conan guy, so I don't see why he has to change when he moved to the Tonight Show. It worked.
As for Jimmy Fallon, I think his show is more about audience participation. They are so many skits that involves bringing the audience to play games. I haven't been to the show yet, but I definitely will go for the prices.
As for Leno, the older demographics like him. I read an article that he is more popular in Middle America. The Jay Leno Show, is really pretty much the same with less guests. I really hope they change the order of the skits. Putting Headlines at the end didn't help at all.
Unfortunately my graveyard shift at work has prevented me from watching late night programming for the past 9 years so I'm afraid my perspective on this whole ordeal is rather 1999 so it might sound a bit odd when I say that I don't notice the difference when I watch youtube showings of these kinds of shows.
I'm very glad The Jay Leno Show exists. This means I'm even less tempted to watch television, and thus I can spend more time one other activities. (I'm always working hard to carve out a little time for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert everyday.)
I watched a bit of the show on Hulu, and gave up. I only made it to the end of the Cheaters segment, and since it felt exactly like his Tonight Show (which was never that interesting to me), I saw no reason to keep watching.
Nice article, Conor! You capture the experience of the show well.
I think my respect for you increased after you mis-augmented the VMAs.
Also, I think the show should have the rating of TV-60+
In retrospect my earlier comment seemed a bit too mean. It was late and....well I was very angry at the time because of this show.
As a whole this was just not a good talk show. Even if they did lie and say it wasn't (whether I thought it was a sketch or variety show it doesnt matter) a talk show doesn't matter. The fact of the matter is that this show, last night, proved NBC has truly went down the gutter.
To put an over the hill comedian on and not try with new ideas just proves how the company doesn't care anymore. This could get great numbers because the public doesn't give a shit about quality programming. It just makes me sick that this could be considered a success. It really does.
As expected, the premiere got strong numbers.
http://www.thrfeed.com/2009/09/jay-leno-show-premiere-ratings.html
Leno pulled a 12.1 preliminary metered-market household rating and 19 share for the debut of NBC's high-wire-act 10 p.m. comedy show.
That's 70% stronger than the final national household rating for Conan O'Brien's "Tonight Show" debut last June (7.1 HH rating, 17 share, 9.2 million viewers and a 3.8 adults 18-49 rating) and 38% higher than Leno's final "Tonight Show" last May (8.8 HH rating, 20 share, 11.9 million viewers and a 3.4 rating).
I don't know how much you can glean from opening night rubbernecker numbers. I do appreciate everyone else watching this and talking about it, so I didn't have to.
Can we get over the Kanye thing. One millionaire interrupted another millionaire.
Anyway my review. i didn't hate the show, but it's noe conan O'brien.
Well now letterman and leno won't leave, yippee! Hopefully conan does not go down this road.
From what I've seen, they've only just moved each one up one slot.
The Tonight Show => Jay Leno Show
Late Night => The Tonight Show
Jimmy Fallon => Late Night
The Tonight show is just Conan's Late Night rebranded. Sure he has a new set on the west coast, but they have the same segments, same band and same jokes.
I find Jimmy Fallon so arkward as a host. I'm sure he'll settle into the role eventually, hopefully before he's replaced! I never saw early Conan, so I'm not sure how he was back in the day.
This was so painful to watch. It really was. In fact I would say this is very insulting for us, the audience. Cause for months we've been told: "This is not the Tonight Show v.2, nor is it a talk show. The new show for Jay Leno will be a sketch show ala like the Phil Shivers Show or Sonny and Cher."
Where was that tonight? Where was this new show that NBC and Leno was advertising like hell? We got into a bit of an arguement on it on Twitter but really: The network lied to what this show was actually going to be. I was expecting his trademark 'Headlines' and 'Jaywalk'; which is fine if this is going to be more of a sketch comedy. But instead all we got was The Tonight Show at 10pm.
If you look at it the other way, just as a talk show, it bombed. The jokes from monologue to Headlines fell flat on their face. Clearly the writers are not ready and if these are the same writers for when Jay was on the Tonight show, then they should be ashamed of themselves. That interview with Seinfeld was a snoozefest and the Kayne West video (like this whole episode) was insulting.
Just get this man off of television please. Now Conan O'Brien looks like a tool because he's once again second fiddle. The entire 10pm timeslot has been taken over by nonsense. I was upset with the people who complained about this move; only because if they were so upset by this why didnt they make a good show to stick on the 10pm slot? But clearly they were right and America got the screwjob.
Utterly amazing how this network lied to us. Great article as always conor.
Sorry to respond to myself but I also wanted to add one more thing.
If NBC thinks that just making a Tonight Show v.2 but making it different by adding a segment with 10mins to go will make the people watch....Then they are clearly down for the count. If NBC doesn't go under after tonight I will surely be shocked.
Respond
Yeah. It felt just like his Tonight Show. Without a desk. I expected something more for the first episode. All NBC has done is move everyone's time slot earlier. The show names don't matter anymore. This is Leno's Tonight Show and what is currently the Tonight Show is just Conan.
That said, I couldn't even finish the first episode of Jay.