Dredging It All Up Again

Over at www.newsfromme.com, Mark Evanier writes yet again about the late night wars. He makes a very important point, one that is at the heart of why I was screaming at the TV earlier this year when Andy Richter was on Regis and Kelly. Richter said that The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien had good ratings during the summer before Jay Leno came on at 10:00. That's a bald-faced lie, and one that once again leads the audience away from the fact of the matter: Conan was failing in his time slot even during the summer. I was so angry when the audience of Regis and Kelly wildly applauded Richer's statement.

The truth is that Conan O'Brien was failing and then Jay Leno came on at 10:00 and he failed and so surrounding the 11:00 news was a bunch of failure. Leno never, ever impacted O'Brien's ratings. He impacted the ad revenue for the 11:00 affiliates. I'm not saying Leno wasn't a failure. At 10:00 p.m., he was.

(I do, however, disagree that he failed because his show was too much like his old Tonight Show. I thought The Jay Leno Show was trying too hard to have humor like The Office and all of these droll, dry sketch shows we see popping up. The younger comedians he brought on want so badly to be as deadpan as Colbert or outraged as Jon Stewart - which if you think about it, are just rehashes of how Letterman was [deadpan] and Leno was [outraged] during the glorious Late Night with David Letterman years.)

I don't watch any of these shows anymore but I still, deep down, root for Jay Leno. I don't understand what decision he was supposed to make in 2004. The only decision anyone would have accepted, truly, was if he retired and left television altogether. If he had said, "No, I won't give up The Tonight Show in 2009," he would have been called a bully who wouldn't let anyone else play with his toys (although, according to Bill Carter's new book, Leno didn't have a choice in the matter anyway - NBC told him Conan was getting the show instead of negotiating with him like previously thought). The media, that hated him anyway, was not going to accept any situation other than Leno going away, out of sight out of mind. When it was announced he would do a 10:00 p.m. show, everyone was waiting for him to fail which, in my opinion, was really unfair.

It's just like the book, the bane of my existence, That Book (not it's real title), wherein the editors tell aspiring writers that when they (the editors, who work for book publishers) get a manuscript, they go into reading it looking for a reason to reject it. You know, just no. That's a horrible mindset. Then these editors go on to show examples of how writers who took their advice were published (by them) and writers who didn't weren't published (by them). Then - THEN! - they take excerpts from The Great Gatsby and rewrite it to show how following their advice could make even a classic all the better. I think I may have written about this before, but it's a really sore subject with me.

Anyway, I just think it was unfair of basically the entire television and media world to be waiting for Leno to fail. And then he did, and I'm not saying I don't agree that he did, but part of me wonders if the media might not have poisoned a few viewer's minds. I just feel like it's hard to succeed when what seems like the entire world is rooting against you.