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NBC continues its long, Marshall-Plan-like rebuilding process today with the announcement of three new series pickups for next season. Two of them are series I’ve heard entertainment chief Angela Bromstad talk up in the past: Love Bites, a kind of 21st-century Love, American Style from Sex and the City writer Cindy Chupack, and …
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Coming back from a vacation is a pain in the ass, isn’t it? It is for NBC, which, its second week back from its blissful Canadian Olympics idyll, is now back in the soggy late-winter reality of its usual shows and its normal ratings. (Indications are that Jay Leno’s high return ratings may also be coming back to reality, though as I …
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The New York Times’ Richard Sandomir takes exception to the way NBC covered the upset U.S. victory over Canada in hockey Sunday night. Which is to say: it hardly covered it at all, breaking briefly into coverage for the end of the game, which played in full on cable channel MSNBC. (Where it drew over 8 million viewers, huge numbers for …
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Tonight, there will likely not be a dry eye in the house, as America says goodbye to Jay Leno. Again. This time for three whole weeks.
After The Jay Leno Show ends tonight, Jay will head back to the Tonight show beginning March 1. And what can you do in the meantime, while Tonight is on hiatus …
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Because of the NBC Nightly News’ bizarre obsession with prioritizing actual important news, the segment I taped yesterday on that network’s late-night wars was shuffled off to the Web. For those of you still interested, you can see me holding forth for about five seconds, in front of the giant books in the fake library I retire to …
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NBC and Conan O’Brien have finally signed the deal making the host’s split from the Tonight Show after this week official. You can read the details here. The question I want to ask this morning—and there are a lot of questions going forward from here—is: was shafting O’Brien on the Tonight …
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Taiwanese Animated Hulk-Conan smash!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJ9m1an-pQ8]
[h/t The Awl.]
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Last night on The Jay Leno Show, Jay gave his side of the Tonight Show takeover in terms that were his most direct yet.
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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 nutshell: NBC …
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Because it’s been making the rounds, here’s an unusual Funny or Die clip. It’s not “funny because it’s true,” it’s just, well, true. It’s simply a verbatim Jay Leno talk, from 2004, on how he didn’t want an ugly fight over the Tonight Show, would graciously hand over the desk to Conan in 2009, and did not want to try keeping the show …
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You had to figure that NBC, the Sanjaya of broadcast TV networks, would not emerge un-roasted from its own presentation of the Golden Globes last night. But you might not have expected that the roughest stretch of the broadcast would come not during the monologue or the acceptance speeches, but on the pre-show red carpet.
First the …
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And so begins the long, grim task of rebuilding NBC’s schedule after The Jay Leno Show rips off its mask and admits it was really The Tonight Show all along. (If you needed further evidence that that was the endgame, People reports that next week is likely to be the last for Conan O’Brien’s Tonight Show.)
So what does NBC have in the …
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My print TIME column this week, it should surprise no one, is also about the Jaypocalypse at NBC. Since it needed to close on deadline—and who knew who was going to be working where by the time it came off the presses—I used the column to big-picture the issue.
Namely: NBC’s problem is pretty much the problem of newspapers, or …
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Can NBC be publicly shamed into keeping Conan O’Brien at the Tonight Show?
No, probably not. Let’s get that out of the way. These are TV-businesspeople we’re talking about.
Still, the level of public mockery and pressure that NBC has come in for in the last few days has been impressive—and it could have benefits for O’Brien, even …
