Saturday, May 30, 2009

Post-mortem for Jay Leno's TONIGHT SHOW tenure.

It's been a long time since 1991-92--a period immortalized in Bill Carter's THE LATE SHOW. Jay Leno, with the aid of Helen Kushnick (his then-manager), received NBC's blessing to host THE TONIGHT SHOW over the shattered ego of perceived successor David Letterman.

Leno started his tenure wanting to retain a few facets of the Smart Comic persona on display through his 80s career (most notably when he was a favored guest on LATE NIGHT WITH DAVID LETTERMAN). Smart Comic Paula Poundstone was a semi-regular and Leno, desiring some continuity with the Johnny Carson-era jazz-based TONIGHT SHOW band, anointed Branford Marsalis as bandleader. And authors were even welcome on the show.

But Leno eventually decided to dumb down. Marsalis was shown the door and guitarist Kevin Eubanks took the bandleader job--no more of that alienating jazz stuff. Leno asked Hugh Grant "what the hell were you thinking" re a prostitution encounter--and THE TONIGHT SHOW's ratings soared ahead of Letterman's on CBS. And there was the hand-over-handshaking with young front-row fans. Not to mention the increasing coarseness of the jokes, with only occasional flickers of the Smart Comic Leno of old--like a lightbulb filament just before burning out.

Now, Leno gets to continue a prime-time version of his show in a 10:00 p.m. nightslot Monday-Friday. Conan O'Brien will now get the "is he too smart for 11:35" treatment that Letterman received upon moving to CBS in 1993.

And one of the last commercials on the last episode of the Jay Leno TONIGHT SHOW was a thinly-veiled plea for viewers to buy General Electric stock in these less-than-robust economic times.

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