It’s not on message for me to depart from talking about tech and rant about TV but the travesty the NBC is committing right now begs a response. To start let me make it clear that while I think Conan is funnier than Jay Leno, I’m agnostic about The Tonight Show. I don’t watch it. No, my concern is with NBC’s behavior and what it says about how it runs its business.
Some months ago I ranted about NBC’s choice to play musical chairs with Kings, a modern-day David and Goliath drama that I felt was one of the best things to hit television waves in some years. Obviously millions of Americans disagreed with me electing instead to watch American Idol, Extreme Makeover:Home Edition, or pretty much anything else they could find that wasn’t Kings.
What’s a network to do when ratings go south? I can’t fault NBC for canceling it. But that’s not what they did. First they moved it to a new night, Sunday, looking to give it more steam. To review the logic, NBC felt that a show with low ratings would perform better if stacked against Extreme Makeover:Home Edition, Desperate Housewives and Fox’s Sunday Night lineup. They did it for one week then quickly gave up, moving it to Saturday to run it out. In one week.
Meanwhile I was telling everyone I know to watch Kings on Thursday, Sunday, I mean Saturday night. How is a show to grow if it moves days every week? Sure, ratings were low but shuffling a show twice in two weeks doesn’t help rescue it.
So here we are. NBC made a fear-based knee-jerk reaction in offering Leno a 10pm spot. They committed to a 52 week run with the new Leno/Conan schedule then caved 45 weeks early to pressure from local affiliates whose local news ratings are apparently suffering, not because local news programs are crap, but because people get their funny fix at 10 and head to bed.
Their solution, move Leno to 11:30 and The Tonight Show to midnight? It might make sense to shift in the long-run, but so soon, so quickly? After all, what are the affiliates going to do, change affiliation?
I don’t question NBC’s choice to cancel Kings or play musical chairs with Leno and Conan. I challenge NBC to give a plan a shot. It’s America, we overreact and scream but over time we adapt to change and start to love life again. It just takes time.
