LOS ANGELES — As far too many of us know, Jay Leno, who has been parked weeknights at9 p.m. (MST) since last September, is moving back to “The Tonight Show,” the job he left at the end of May. When he returns from the canceled “The Jay Leno Show” to his former chair, after the Olympics, it will be as if the last eight months had never happened.
And in other ways, it will not; certainly Conan O’Brien leaves this dispute with some new ideas about the business he’s in. And though it remains to be seen whether L’Affaire Conan has seriously injured Leno’s “likeability,” his fans seem happy enough to regard him, as he seems to regard himself, as a victim of NBC’s dithering, and, indeed, of his own niceness.
To be fair to Leno, the “failure” of his 9 p.m. show is partly a matter of context — the audience for “The Jay Leno Show” was roughly commensurate with that of Leno’s “Tonight Show” — and only became a problem when NBC executives woke up to the fact that they’d left their affiliate stations out of their dollars-and-cents reckoning.
What is less arguable is his failure to make anything new or interesting out of his prime-time opportunity. But Leno is a fundamentally conservative entertainer who relies heavily on his writers and researchers; he can tell a joke, can be funny in a scripted bit, and can capably interview any celebrity who already knows what they’re going to say. He is a solid enough host, practically speaking, but he is also an inert one, unable to inhabit the moment in any exciting way. He barely bothers to ad lib.
Leno’s final 9 p.m. broadcast Tuesday night was no different from his previous 9 p.m. shows; there was no sense of occasion, which, after all, seemed just about right. The opening monologue did contain a nod toward the moment (“The show was supposed to last two years but our sentence was reduced to five months for good behavior”) and a pretend “look back” at the last five months, whose unintended effect was to point out how little new he brought to the hour.
I happen to think that moving Leno was an interesting gamble; if it had been an unqualified success, it would have changed the shape of broadcast TV. And I would hate to think that its failure means that that its time slot will forever be off-limits to comedy, or to anything but doctor shows, cop shows and news programs that might as well be cop or doctor shows.
If Leno’s new “Tonight Show” is no better than his old “Tonight Show,” that will just be all right with many, though it is possible that some of his audience may have learned to love David Letterman in the interim, or remembered the pleasure of a good book before bed.
Still, it is a move backward that is hard to regard as any sort of move forward.
