NBC Gives No Respect to Leno
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Jay Leno has become the Rodney Dangerfield of NBC.
The guy gets no respect.
The NY Daily News writes that you’d think that by now, network brass would know how to deal with him.
They don’t.
It was only four years ago that they tried to push ol’ skunkhead off “The Tonight Show” to make way for Conan O’Brien.
Look how well that worked out for Conan: He’s on cable and Leno rules the late-night ratings, as he has for two decades.
I’m no fan of Leno, but it’s shocking how he’s expected to happily give up “Tonight” to make way for Jimmy Fallon sometime next year — a scenario, by the way, that NBC continues to deny.
It’s a situation that began to spiral out of control last week, when it was revealed that NBC Entertainment Chairman Robert Greenblatt had actually warned Leno to stop making fun of the network’s low ratings.
And then someone at the top leaked word that NBC was not only planning to give “Tonight” to Fallon but was quietly building him a studio at 30 Rockefeller Center.
So the scheme is not just to dump Leno from one of NBC’s few successful shows, but to move “Tonight” back from Los Angeles to accommodate Fallon.
No offense to Jimmy. His show is great. But if I’m Jay Leno, dissing NBC is the least I do.
Leno has consistently crushed David Letterman on CBS and anyone else who has been thrown in his path.
He accomplished this by filling Johnny Carson’s shoes.
Carson. The king of late night.
Now Jay looks around and sees NBC’s prime-time lineup burning. Univision, a Spanish-language network, gets more viewers. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but for NBC executives this has got to be humiliating.
