Tuned In+Uncategorized | April 6, 2010

The Marriage Ref Is the Future of TV. Seriously!

By James Poniewozik
NBC
THE MARRIAGE REF -- 106 -- Pictured: (l-r) -- Photo by: Patrick Harbron/NBC

OK, not totally seriously. But a tiny bit.

Back when I wrote a cover story about Jay Leno coming to primetime on NBC, the big macro-point was that The Jay Leno Show was a dramatic example of how TV was changing in a time of fragmentation and decline. Big networks, to oversimplify, are becoming more like cable, looking for ways to program cheaply, and concentrating their big, blowout programming spending in a few timeslots. The cover line I suggested, which we ended up using in the inside spread of the print magazine instead, was “Jay Leno Is Shrinking Your TV.”

Now it’s The Marriage Ref‘s turn to shrink your TV.

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Tuned InComments closedUncategorized | February 10, 2010

Jay Leno Slips Out the Back Door

By James Poniewozik

The Jay Leno Show ended last night with an absolute minimum of fanfare—fittingly and deliberately, since NBC’s hope is to pretend that it, and Conan O’Brien’s Tonight Show, never happened. Come March 1, the idea is, we’ll all stretch and yawn, memories of Olympic figure skating ice-dancing in our heads, and watch Leno on the [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | January 19, 2010

Leno Speaks: I'm Taking the Tonight Show for My Staff's Sake

By James Poniewozik

Last night on The Jay Leno Show, Jay gave his side of the Tonight Show takeover in terms that were his most direct yet. The bit where he gave a pained sigh before deciding, “Yeah, I’ll take the show back”? [About 3:30 in.] Don’t think it was meant to be a laugh line. In a [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | January 8, 2010

Jaypocalypse Now: What Is NBC Thinking?

By James Poniewozik

If the reports are true—and it increasingly looks like it—that NBC is planning to send back Jay Leno to 11:30, it raises a lot of questions: Will Conan stay? What does NBC program in primetime? What about Carson Daly? For this post, I’ll stick to one: Why now? What’s most surprising about the move—again if [...]

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Tuned In+January 7, 2010

Report: NBC May Send Jay Walking

By James Poniewozik

[Update: TMZ is reporting that Jay will move back to 11:30. See my separate post above.] A TV-industry-news website, FTVLive.com (subscription required), is reporting that there are high-level talks going on at NBC over whether to drop The Jay Leno Show. The report is headlined “NBC to Pull the Plug on Leno,” and has been [...]

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Tuned In+Advertising | December 11, 2009

Jay Leno Is #1!

By James Poniewozik

…in product placement! From the get-go, The Jay Leno Show has been a business strategy first, an entertainment program second. And while its business success is debatable—it’s certainly cut costs for NBC, but often pulls no more viewers than Jay got at 11:30—Nielsen has released an interesting year-end list that finds the show has succeeded [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | November 11, 2009

Leno Show Removing Last Vestiges of Not-Tonight-Show-Ness

By James Poniewozik

When The Jay Leno Show premiered, the parlor game was guessing how well it would do against its big-network competition. Now it’s guessing which basic-cable show will beat it next. Jay’s been topped so far by Monday Night Football, Sons of Anarchy and SpongeBob (that last one not a direct competitor but still no badge [...]

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Tuned In+TV Ratings | October 22, 2009

SAMCRO Defeats Leno: FX Beats NBC, ABC in Ratings

By James Poniewozik

Thump-thump. Thump-thump. That was the sound of broadcast network television getting run over, twice, by FX’s biker drama, Sons of Anarchy, Tuesday night. For the first time, SoA defeated both NBC’s Jay Leno Show and ABC’s The Forgotten in the 18 to 49 ratings, which, as network programmers will tell you incessantly, is the only [...]

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Tuned In+October 13, 2009

NBC vs. Glee: Battle of the Network Stars

By James Poniewozik

What with all the singing and dancing and costumes, you would think that the cast of Glee and a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade float would go together like turkey and cranberries. But you would be forgetting that the Macy’s parade airs on NBC, which reportedly forced Macy’s to retract an offer to the kids from [...]

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Tuned In+TV Ratings | October 12, 2009

Can (and Should) DVRs Save Dollhouse?

By James Poniewozik

The Hollywood Reporter’s James Hibberd has a breakdown of the DVR-viewing figures for TV premiere week. Among other things they show that Dollhouse’s rating goes up 50% when you add in timeshifted DVR viewing. Mind you, that’s 50% of precious little, lifting it from an anemic 1.0 rating to a slightly less anemic 1.5. DVR [...]

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Tuned In+TV Ratings | October 12, 2009

Is Leno a Success or Failure? And How Do You Tell?

By James Poniewozik

A month into his run on the air, it’s about the time for observers to start weighing in on NBC’s Great Leno Experiment at 10 p.m. But as I alluded to the other day, the problem is determining what constitutes success and failure for The Jay Leno Show. Since it is a cost-containment measure before [...]

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Tuned In+TV Ratings | September 30, 2009

Leno TiVo-Proof? Not So, Says TiVo

By James Poniewozik

Now that the TV-cost-reduction experiment otherwise known as The Jay Leno Show is in its third week, the numbers are starting to accumulate. After a big debut, his average nightly take has been bouncing around 6 million or so—above, but not a lot above, the 5 million he averaged on Tonight—depending on the strength of [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | September 18, 2009

The Morning After: Community Organizing, Fringe Media

By James Poniewozik

I’ll have a post about last night’s The Office and Parks and Recreation up a bit later this morning. I’ve already weighed in on last night’s debut of Community, though, and while I enjoyed Fringe for its Walterliciousness—and the awesome sight of Olivia flying through the windshield—it stayed far enough away from the big reveal [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | September 17, 2009

The Morning After: Glee-peat

By James Poniewozik

Because I was out representin’ at the It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia  live show last night, I haven’t yet caught up with last night’s Glee (rats!) or The Jay Leno Show (not so much rats!). I’ve already seen Glee’s fourth episode (Fox skipped the third in the mailing to critics), so I hope to have [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | September 15, 2009

Jay Leno: It's Not the Tonight Show. It's, Um, the Ten-ight Show

By James Poniewozik

The Jay Leno Show, NBC has been telling us all summer, was “comedy at 10,” not simply a second Tonight Show. Instead, what we got was a monologue, a couple taped comedy bits, an interview, a musical act, another interview and Headlines. Somebody refresh my memory: what was The Tonight Show again? Because clearly I [...]

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Tuned In+September 14, 2009

It's Jay Day: Will Jayrun, Jaywalk, or Jaybomb?

By James Poniewozik

The Jay Leno Show debuts tonight at 10, and with it begins the biggest gamble in TV in years. In my cover story, I said he and his show would represent the (downsized, cheaper) future of TV whether it succeeded or failed.* Which is just as well, because I absolutely suck at predicting whether anything [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | September 11, 2009

My Jay Leno Interview: The Extended DVD Outtakes

By James Poniewozik

I did a long interview with Jay Leno for my cover story on him last week. As usual, a lot of it ended up covering material and going in directions that I just didn’t have a place for in the article. But I hate transcribing interviews for nothing, so you get to read it here! What [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | September 10, 2009

Meet the New Jay, Same As the Old Jay?

By James Poniewozik

When you write a TIME cover, people tend to react more to the cover than the story itself. So when my Jay Leno story ran with the cover line “the Future of Television,” some people said: What? Which was the idea. Even if you love Leno, he is not the guy you think of when [...]