CBS entertainment president Nina Tassler told the TV writers in Pasadena that the Leno Experiment was great for CBS, giving them a bigger piece of the ad dollar at 10:00 pm, but of course she is all about the hungry artist and worries about its effect on those who work on scripted dramas (* http://tinyurl.com/ycrqbst*)
Tassler also announced that Dave and Craig are about to re-up through 2012. She makes the important, though perhaps obvious point, that "there's no substitute for just developing and producing and launching great shows." - of course what is meant by "great" here is somewhat elastic, but this is the heat of what was wrong with NBC's approach. I actually thought that the Jay Leno Show would work financially, because I assumed he had to get more viewers at 10:00 than he was getting at 11:35 (of course, he didn't). But I always thought this idea was fundamentally flawed from a longer term point of view. A movie theatre might make more money from selling overpriced soda and popcorn than it does from movie tickets, but that does not mean it would be a good idea to stop trying to show good movies, and just exhibit crappy but cheap straight to DVD films so they can make money on concessions. Even if you could make a profit that way, A) the volume of your business would go down that you would not be making very much money and B) you would be putting yourself out of the movie business. Developing 60 minute dramas is expensive and risky - but that is where the long term money is, and you can't hit home runs if you are afraid to take any swings. CBS is propping up most of its schedule with CSI and NCIS spin-offs or step-children (shows nurtured with the huge lead-in audiences of one of the motherships). NBC had something similar going with the L&Os, but it stopped trying to find another tent pole. The AP story says that Leno averaged 5.7M viewers per night. This is only true if you include the first 2 weeks, when his audience was absurdly high, and do not include his week on reruns. If you only count from week 4 (when his audience began to level off from initial curiosity) through week 17 (but do not include the week of reruns) he averaged 5.1M viewers per night.
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