By Lee Pfeiffer
The nation's long nightmare is finally over: after seemingly endless promotions, Jay Leno's new nightly prime-time show debuted on NBC. For my money, Leno is still the best of the comedic chat show hosts, barring Jon Stewart of
The Daily Show. NBC made a major blunder by forcing him into retirement despite the fact he was still the ratings king of the late night talk show circuit. The experiment to replace him with Conan O'Brien may turn out to be a major faux pas, as
The Tonight Show is now lagging in ratings behind David Letterman - something that rarely happened during Leno's reign. Leno had the last laugh, however, by negotiating a new contract that has him on the 10:00 PM time slot five nights a week. Three months after he hosted his final
Tonight Show, the affable Leno premiered his new show - and the only remarkable thing about it was how
unremarkable it was.
The show felt like any old edition of The Tonight Show. Leno entered to rapturous applause, high-fived the audience and gave a boiler plate monologue about current events. The laughs were adequate, but it was clear the writers didn't work up much extra sweat to make this monologue special in any way. The usual zany filmed sketches were peppered through the show. One featuring an unsuspecting young woman who is lured into a car wash where the staff perform extravagant musical numbers was clever for the first few minutes, but it dragged on far too long and the non-responsive demeanor of the "victim" did nothing to add to the laughs. There was a mildly funny homo-erotic sketch featuring band leader Kevin Eubanks and a Leno look-alike. More successful was Leno's dusting off of the tried-and-true gimmick of re-editing a legitimate news interview in a comedic vein. In this case, President Obama's 60 Minutes interview was tailored to make it appear as though he was giving absurd answers to questions posed by Leno.
The biggest disappointment was the appearance of Jerry Seinfeld, who was clad in a tuxedo to celebrate being Leno's inaugural guest. However, aside from some pleasant banter and a few mildly amusing quips, Seinfeld's segment added little merriment to the show - and a bit with Oprah Winfrey making a surprise appearance via satellite fell flat. Leno also made a major artistic mistake by putting rappers Kanye West and Jay-Z on his premiere show. West made sense from a ratings standpoint since he had just engaged in his latest bout of pretentious "scandalous behavior" designed to get him gigs like an appearance on the Leno show. In this case, he made a fool of himself on the Video Music Awards show, hogging the spotlight and insulting winner Taylor Swift by interrupting her acceptance speech by telling the audience the award should have gone to Beyonce. For anyone who believes West's actions were spontaneous, I have some great land in Florida I'd like to sell you. In any event, the incident gave West the opportunity to go on Leno's show to make the now customary "heartfelt" mea culpa that always gets thunderous applause from the audience. This left Leno in the awkward position of filling the Dr. Phil role and listening compassionately as the teary-eyed rapper apologized. (West pulled a similar stunt some years ago on an awards show when he suggested that the poor federal response to Hurricane Katrina proved that President Bush hated black people!) The West chat was followed by another rapper, Jay-Z who performed what allegedly was a musical number but sounded somewhat less gratifying than nails on a blackboard. If Leno thinks he's going to get a young crowd to stay in nights at 10:00 to watch his show, he'd better think again. His audience is still mainstream, middle-aged people who probably hit the "mute" button during the entire Jay-Z performance. The show slogged to a conclusion with the old reliable Headlines segment in which Leno makes quips about embarrassing typos in stories carried by the print media. As usual, it was genuinely hilarious and demonstrated once again how much better the Headlines segment is over Letterman's over-praised and consistently lame Top Ten lists. By moving Headlines to end of the show (virtually the only change in the format), Leno ensured the evening ended on a high note.Â
There was nothing intrinsically awful about Leno's show, but given the hype, one would have thought that the hardest working man in television would have infused a little more energy and life in his debut program. Much will ride on the quality of the shows that follow during the week. Leno might learn the hard way that what pleases audiences at 11:35 at night is substantially different than what prime time audiences expect.