The Chris Moeller Archives

NBC-- "Our Pride is Showing"

My prepared blog entry for Monday was about NBC's clusterfuck in their prime-time and late night programming schedules, but the piece was preempted in favor of our ongoing coverage of steroid use run amok in Major League Baseball.

That delayed blog entry is printed now in its entirety, followed by some imperative updates on the ongoing saga...

The Jay Leno Show is terrible, and so Conan O'Brien gets screwed. The host of the Jay Leno Show, a lasting human symbol of our national mediocrity, left the Tonight Show last spring as part of a transition that was announced in 2004. Then he was inexplicably promoted to a nightly prime-time slot on NBC's schedule permitted to do essentially the same show he'd been doing after General Electric saw an opportunity to cut its prime-time production costs to the bone. Conan inherited Leno's audience an hour earlier-- comprised mostly of the parents of his former show-- and so gone were the Vomiting Kermit and the Masturbating Bear. And gone on the network were all of the prime-time dramas except for the one involving these two Massachusetts-born comics.

Reports now are that Leno will be moved back to his 11:35 (eastern) start time for a half-hour program that will follow your late local news and what has always been the comedian's tailor-made lead-in of consultant-approved news anchor haircuts and investigative stories about kitchen pantry items that could kill your children. O'Brien gets his choice of a later start time (12:05) or the door.

Conan needs to "man up" (not that he hasn't behaved as a man of maturity previously) and walk out. He would take a financial hit, no doubt. His contract with NBC says that the network can move his show to 12:05, although no later, without the risk of substantial penalties and they're prepared to now do that. Conan needs to be willing then to stand firm and step away from a two-year agreement that would have averaged $14 million a year.

The Tonight Show host uprooted his entire show, his staff, and his family and moved them from New York to Los Angeles to go up against the greatest broadcaster in television history with Jay Leno as his prime-time lead-in each and every night. Now his network is pulling out the rug on him after only seven months. "This level of shittiness was not expected," one source told the New York Post, although the newspaper censured the word "shittiness" in its publication and stopped identifying its news sources around 1994 so we can't be sure that it was actually even said.

It was David Letterman that established the yardstick on this one. He told NBC to shove it after a similar display of disrespect and disloyalty by the network 17 years ago. Conan has walked behind Letterman, figuratively, ever since he took over NBC's "Late Night" and now he really needs to do as Dave did or risk looking like the network doormat, which is Leno's job title.

Well, Conan did "man up." He issued a public statement on Tuesday-- he writes a mean letter, incidentally-- stating that he did not know what his future would hold, but that he would not agree to having his show moved to 12:05. It's an extraordinary letter, though Letterman, discussing the matter on his show, seems to think that Conan would be playing into NBC's hands by walking away the money. He and ABC's Jimmy Kimmel each had some fun at NBC's expense Tuesday night.

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Quote of the day: Ninety-year-old Ralph Houk, Roger Maris' Yankees manager in 1961, to ESPN on Monday, "I think (Mark McGwire) broke (Maris') record fairly. I wouldn't be concerned about it. (McGwire) was a good hitter that deserved everything he got."

Houk also had some instructive comments in reference to rampant amphetamine use by players during Maris' era. Those statements finished as narrow runners-up in the Quote of the Day voting.

posted by CM @ 6:57 PM