On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 8:06 PM, Tom Wolper <[email protected]> wrote:
> Even though the outcome of Comcast's move was to restore the Tonight > Show budget to its pre-prime time level it had to be an ugly > negotiation. For a star performer in any profession a pay cut is a > slap in the face. Leno's monolog joke is telling - he is delivering > NBC the top rated talk show in the time slot and they are showing him > no respect. From Carter's books, Leno sees himself as a straight > shooter and negotiates his own contract extensions with the network. > During the Conan debacle Jay told Carter, Oprah, and anybody else who > talked to him that he just wanted to tell jokes and he was happy with > whatever the network decided, contrasting himself with Conan, whose > dealings with the network were filled with stress and conflict. Now > that attitude of getting along is gone and he's taking shots at > Comcast. > I see the point about the signal a performer's salary sends about how much his employer values and respects him, but here I think Leno's own (what I see as) rigid denial is a big part of the problem. Leno does see himself (or at least portray himself in public) as the straight shooter among a nest of Hollywood assholes and neurotics, but the truth is he purposely negotiated a contract for his primetime show that would make it prohibitively expensive for NBC to get rid of him even if the primetime show failed. Despite his mantra in the wake of the Conan drama that "if you get good ratings you get paid, if you don't you get fired", he insisted on a deal that would pay him, big time, regardless of how badly his ratings failed in the primetime show. Since the whole mess was the creation of his then GE bosses, they had to eat it. But I don't blame Comcast for not wanting to eat up the rest of another guy's shit sandwich. There is an ironic symmetry brewing here. The argument has been made that NBC won the battle but lost the first late night talk show war - in the sense that even though Leno gets better ratings than Dave, Dave gave CBS a huge chunk of the late night audience and profits - a chunk that would likely have been significantly smaller, at least for a longer period of time, had NBC gone with Dave and let Leno try to establish a beachhead in CBS latenight. Now in the second late night war it looks like NBC is about to repeat itself; Leno is still beating Dave, maybe by a larger margin that Conan would have (though Conan almost certainly would have improved after a couple of years); but now NBC is stuck with an older, more expensive show for at least the medium term. I think the Leno camp is disingenuous or paranoid if they really are suggesting that NBC is going to force out Leno and replace him with Fallon any time soon - not this close to Late Night War II. But the time is coming, if it is not already here, when Comcast is going to at least wish it had a younger, cheaper host at the help of the Tonight Show, and maybe what is happening now is an attempt to make him feel unwanted enough that he will walk away on his own. In any case, Comcast is about to understand why Zucker made the Tonight Show deal with Conan in the first place, and wish that he had had the balls/integrity to stick with his plan. I think it is very likely that if they had stuck with Conan and made Leno do 4 Bob Hope like prime time specials and a bunch of affiliate ass kissing and various corporate gigs for his $30M/year, NBC would be in the driver's seat right now. CBS would have the aging host with the CSI-like Demo, ABC would be late to the 11:35 party with a younger host, and the TBS competitor would still be George Lopez - or reruns of Friends. Screwing Dave left NBC with a split market, and screwing Conan has left them with an even more split market, and an older, more expensive, and hard to get rid of host. -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en
