I have not come to refute the claims of editor-in-chief Jeff Giles, because it would be pointless. NBC is slowly finding out just how pointless, in fact, as they proceed to take a pounding from their advertisers and affiliates for their penny wisdom. “Jay Leno is beloved,” they said. “Jay’s fans are loyal, ” they said. What NBC brass feared was losing Leno to ABC, who probably would have snapped him up right quick, dumping Jimmy Kimmel like, well, like Sarah Silverman dumped Jimmy Kimmel (What, too soon?) With the costs rising by the year for scripted programs, the nighttime dramas leading the charge with more explosions, dead body mannequins and pricier locations, the Peacock network sought to kill two birds with one formerly skunk-haired stone. Talk shows are cheap. Run one five times a week and tell David E. Kelley to take his tired crap elsewhere. And with Jay, you get an instant audience! Win-win!

Only now, NBC has to wonder if the sponsors clamoring to back out of the 10 PM timeslot, and the money they represent, is more or less than the expenditure they would have otherwise incurred. Jay Leno, it seems, has become an albatross around the network’s neck, and if you think the added pressure would have caused him to step up his game and liven up the show, you probably were thinking this was originally a pretty good idea. No, the show still sucks.

But give Jay the teeny-tiniest break here. What would they have run in that slot if they hadn’t taken the big gamble? As I’ve said many times before: lawyers, cops and doctors. If for no better reason, give the big man a pat on the back for at least momentarily derailing the same old hackneyed, worn out and blood-drained train of thought that has plagued these “wonderful” nighttime dramas lo these many, many moons. It has been a long time since St. Elsewhere, L.A. Law and Hill Street Blues and, unlike the diehard loyalists, I don’t think the last couple seasons of ER were anywhere near the level of the first three. But there’s no doubt in my mind that without Leno shoving his chin into that ten o’clock dike, the dam would burst forth with edgy cops with hearts of gold, horny doctors still adherent to the Hippocratic Oath and lawyers who’ll do anything to win, but they won’t do that (No, no, they won’t do that.)

I never saw an episode of Southland, the most recent NBC cop show to bite the dust. I suspect I wouldn’t have bothered to, either, as the promotions department kept throwing out the tidbit that the show featured “the first primetime gay policeman!” like the whole show would rest on that plot point as some sort of radical departure for broadcast TV. NBC has Must See TV and gay cops! This, friends, is what is known as a stunt. What would have been revolutionary would have been to have that same character in the program and not made such a stink about it. It just is; no need to shout from the 30 Rock rooftops, “It’s here, he’s queer, watch NBC!”

Television critics have taken to calling the past decade a new golden age of TV, and they may be right. Among all the half-wits clamoring to be famous for fifteen reality-filled minutes, and all the other half-wits who were formally famous and now trying to reclaim notoriety by putting on tights and shaking their groove things, we’ve also had shows about Mob families and their regular families, siblings who run a mortuary, an advertising agency, vampires, and foul-mouthed, crudely animated children who usually find something potent to say about current events, all the while marveling at the massive girth of feces. We’ve had shows about police as well, but The Wire was also about politics, journalism and the lives of the criminals and seldom-seen that tie the three institutions together. Cable TV has succeeded in mining new veins for drama by looking into entirely different caves. The only standard broadcast program to come close to this nirvana of creativity is the long-running Lost, a show indebted to the viewer’s desire to engage in mindgames and, not so subtly, to the British drama from the late 1960s, The Prisoner.

An Americanized redux of The Prisoner is underway as well, and while the notion first causes me to wince, I have to remind myself that the most insightful program about politics, religion and the human condition in I don’t know how long was based on the bones of an often campy Star Wars clone from the 1970s. Who thought the Battlestar Galactica reboot could have been as well executed as it was? Who thought, initially, it should have been rebooted at all? That it took the framework of something that was better left to memory, turned it inside out, then retrofitted it into a modern allegory once again indicates where the best minds have been hanging out, and it’s not over at the Big Four. Sure, House isn’t bad, but there isn’t much else over at Fox that screams “revolutionary.” “Exploitative,” maybe. And over at CBS, they have two NCIS shows now, three C.S.I.’s with the threat of a fourth looming on the horizon, and a wide swath of C.S.I.-like shows littering their schedules with mutilated corpses. They learned their lessons well, yes they did. They learned from NBC, which found that cloned Law & Order shows practically sell themselves until, apparently, they don’t.

That’s why you get Leno five times a week. See, without him, you would get policemen five times a week, or lawyers five times a week, or surgeons five times a week, not a new wrinkle to be had in the lot. Don’t mourn the loss of these dramas because you’re not really losing all that much, simply a carbon copy after a Xerox of a mimeograph. But I’m fairly confident you knew this already, which is why cable viewership has, in aggregate, managed to eat away at its freebie cousins. There is a simple honesty to Mr. Jay’s show, and that in and of itself should be considered a breath of fresh air. They’re feeding you the same old story Monday through Friday, but they always have.  At least they’re not trying to convince you that “it’s new to you” now.

Tags: Dw. Dunphy, Dw. Dunphy On..., Jay Leno

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 22nd, 2009 at 5:30 pm and is filed under Dw. Dunphy On..., Featured, Featured - Frontpage, Television. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.