On last night's episode of The Jay Leno Show, forever known now as the last night before NBC renewed the late-night wars, comedian Jim Norton appeared for another edition of his special correspondent segment, "Uninvited Guest." Norton aimed to teach golfing legend Tiger Woods a little something about how to leave a proper voice mail to his improper dalliances. I enjoyed Norton's rant more before NBC shortened it and watered it down for primetime -- Norton tried this riff out Monday night at the UCB Theatre's Whiplash show -- but still, having him on is one of the edgier, smarter things Leno has been doing lately. Anyhow. Roll it!
Speaking of Leno, what's new with him depends upon what rumors you want to listen to and read today. One thing's for certain after reading the reports from TMZ.com and the New York Times' Bill Carter (he who wrote about the Leno/Letterman late-night wars of the 1990s), is that NBC's programming lineup will look different after the Winter Olympics. But if they move Leno out of 10 p.m. and after the news, no matter what they do with Conan, Fallon and Carson Daly (yes, he's still on, too!), don't they still need to have something on the channel from 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. five nights a week? No matter how many pilots they produce this winter, no matter how many of those they like enough to put on the TV, they won't be ready to do that by March. Or am I missing something here?
In the meantime, Norton followed up his rant last night on voice mails by leaving a cruel one of his own this afternoon to address the Leno rumors.
Oh, you Internet. Silly, silly Internet. How silly? Silly enough that The Wrap can say a "random website" announced NBC would cancel Jay Leno's primetime show based upon speculation -- NBC has ordered more new TV pilots than it has in about seven years, plus NBC owned-and-operated affiliates ain't happy about their late-night news ratings following Leno, plus hey, look, the Winter Olympics start soon and you won't see Leno for a month anyhow, so why not just make it all go away? -- and then have the blogger who speculated this speculate that this morning on L.A.-area AM radio station KNX. AM radio. It's the future! But NBC lives in the future, and network TV execs have friends who are stuck in their cars listening to AM radio, so they put out a real-deal statement saying Leno was not cancelled, but hey, they know they got some fixin' to do over there at Burbank.
Here is that NBC statement on Leno, for you kids who like reading between lines:
“Jay Leno is one of the most compelling entertainers in the world today. As we have said all along, Jay’s show has performed exactly as we anticipated on the network. It has, however, presented some issues for our affiliates. Both Jay and the show are committed to working closely with them to find ways to improve the performance.”
Now settle down.
Because you need to know that a popular late-night TV guy really did announce today that he was calling it quits, as in Jonathan Ross and his Friday-night BBC chat show! Here he is making a statement about his statement -- six months left on the BBC (and BBC America), and then, who knows? Care for some tea?
Are you doing some last-minute gift shopping today? Then Donald Glover, from Derrick comedy (Mystery Team) and seen Thursday nights on NBC's Community, is here to help! He went out to an outdoor shopping mall in Los Angeles and shared some of his ideas with the people recently, including Zhu Zhu Pu Pu Platters, and a Little Lil Wayne doll. I found this on The Jay Leno Show's online pages, but it's labeled as a "Backstage With Bryan" exclusive Web clip. Wait. What? You mean to tell me this wasn't good enough to be seen on the TV, but some of Leno's other jokes were? Please tell me this is an error. Otherwise, no wonder Leno's in trouble. Enough about him, though. Let's get back to Donald Glover and his toy ideas. Enjoy. Roll it!
I'm not going to give you the ins and outs of every night's episode of The Jay Leno Show -- and especially not going to stoke the flames of sensationalistic speculation that the mainstream media is doing regarding Leno's fate at NBC (weren't we supposed to wait until all of the other networks went into reruns for that?). But I do feel a need to say something about his show's Laugh Squad. At first, I thought, hey, great idea giving more exposure to stand-up comedians. But the more I think, and the more I watch, I wonder, hey, wait a second. Why are Bob Read and Ross Mark asking random Internet watchers to tell them if they agree that certain up-and-coming comedians are ready for TV? I can do that, and I don't even have a job as a booker for a network TV show -- which is the job Bob and Ross have had for many years, including both Leno's current and former shows, as well as Last Comic Standing. If you think they're ready for TV, put them on the TV! That's your job, isn't it? Or we now focus-grouping stand-up comedy? My apologies in advance to the two comedians cited in this video, as this isn't meant to malign your potential abilities. (Note: Click on the link above if you cannot watch Hulu, foreigners!)
I'm on Twitter. You may be on Twitter. Jim Norton uses the micro-blogging social network, too, but the comedian also has some issues with it, as he explained last night on The Jay Leno Show during his "Uninvited Guest" segment. It's a tricky rant to pull off, since Norton is trying to make us laugh by explaining how often people aren't funny on Twitter, and also because he doesn't always the service to deliver jokes (on Oct. 27 he wrote from his perch inside Opie & Anthony's radio studio: "Paranormal Activity stars in studio. I'm scared." With a link to a photo. Of them. In the studio. Not looking scary). Norton also uses Twitter to relay short audio messages from him to his fans and followers. Here's another short burst from Norton about going on FOX News:
And here is Norton's "Uninvited Guest" rant about Twitter. What do you kids think? I think this segment could have been funnier, but in a longer-term sense (if Leno's primetime show can be talked about in longer terms), it appears as though Norton is using this platform to show us how a younger, shaved-head, raunchier version of Andy Rooney would approach five minutes of primetime. If you play the "Andy Rooney game," you get this: "I want to talk this week about Twitter, because like most 14-year-old girls, I have a Twitter account and I never understood how boring my friends' lives were until I started reading their Twitter updates...Larry cut me on the lunch line this afternoon, so I broke a gasoline balloon over his head and set him on fire, LOL!"
So, remember way back when, this morning, when I posted about ladies who want to be stand-up comedians and would they be worried more about their bodies than their jokey jokes? They were dealing with the possibilities. Chelsea Handler is living in the reality, as she is the new cover girl on Playboy magazine for December 2009; or, rather, someone resembling Chelsea Handler is on the cover.
This is the Playboy cover. Someone doesn't have to call the Airbrush Police, because Handler called herself out.
This is what she looked like on TV last night on The Jay Leno Show, where Leno unveiled a giant cutout of the cover after interviewing Handler and firing several jokes at her about her older boyfriend, Ted, who just so happens to be the same Ted Harbert who runs Comcast Entertainment Group -- which means not only does he also just so happen to be Handler's boss, but potentially Leno's new boss, should a rumored sale of NBC Universal to Comcast go through later this year. That was a long sentence, but...
It's that time of year again, people. What time is it? Miller Time? Stop. Hammertime?! Nope. Almost time to fall back from Daylight Savings Time to Standard Time. Comedian Nick Thune has something to say -- nay, to sing -- about that, and sing he did on last night's episode of The Jay Leno Show.
If you visit the site mentioned in Thune's song, Daylight Spending Time, you'll find he has more to the campaign with a few PSAs and a petition for you to sign. Will you "Just Say No" when everyone else in America (outside of Arizona) moves the clocks back an hour early Sunday morning on Nov. 1, 2009?
My friends at the Huffington Post know how the Internets work, and today they posted this click-and-click-some-more slideshow on what they call the seven most infamous comedy feuds. All seven selections are from modern times, and they added a voting feature, too. As I type this, Jay Leno and David Letterman only ranked #3? Maybe it's because the photos they used are from when the feud began?
But about The Jay Leno Show? When Oprah asked him how he was coping with the increased scrutiny, Leno defended himself, noting that "numbers that make you number one now would have gotten you cancelled 10 or 15 years ago," and accurately pointed out that his second week was also the debut week for ABC and CBS, making this "probably the hardest week of the whole year for us."
The numbers bore that out. His first week at 10 p.m. E/P (9 p.m. C/M) earned him plenty of eyeballs, while the second week revealed a steep drop-off. In millions of viewers, Monday-Friday, it looked like this:
Week One: 18.4, 11.1, 13.4, 8.8, 7.6
Week Two: 5.7, 6.8, 6.4, 5.0
Why worry, though? "I'm 59 years old. I'm in a young person's game. I have a lot of fun with this. I'm just glad to come to work and tell jokes," Leno told Oprah. "My goal is to make show-business money and lead a normal life..."If it's a hit, that would be great. If not, oh well, I did the Tonight Show for 17 years. And that's that. Any other attitude and you go crazy."
He said he'd like to eventually rank second among the three networks at 10 p.m. (Fox airs local news), and score some number ones "when the other shows are all in repeats."
That said, Leno clearly has a lot of work ahead of him and seriously should consider retooling his primetime show to be, well, a little bit more enjoyable to watch. The live and taped pieces from his many comedy correspondents are all over the map, quality-wise, and a lot of that seems to result from a lack of quality control from the top. The funnier comics who have experience with producing their own segments and sketches are coming off a lot better than those who don't. And Leno's show, for all of its new gimmicks, still comes off like an even tamer (if that was possible) and lamer version of his Tonight Show. It's not all bad. But it's not all good, either. The New Yorker weighed in with its own scathing review this week. The other day, I saw an episode that seemed to get the idea of putting "more comedy" into the variety hour, with Christina Applegate telling a story about the Emmys, a guy chipping golf balls into another guy's helmet, Vince Vaughn presiding over a quiz with audience members tossing coconuts, a product-placement gimmick, and audience members cheering, screaming and dancing. Yes. I watched Ellen DeGeneres. Would Ellen's syndicated daytime show get anywhere near the viewers Leno attracts? I don't know that answer. I'm not Nostradamus. Or am I? The point is, she has figured out how to host and present five hours of comedy/variety every week. There's no reason why Leno cannot find his own way to do it at night.
Incremental progress, they say, is always a good thing. And so it was on Tuesday night that the second episode of The Jay Leno Show offered some actual comedy for the live studio audience (and those watching on their TVs), courtesy of one of Leno's many comedy correspondents. Sort of. Leno gave stand-up Jim Norton a nice introduction (presumably, we're guessing Leno is going to do this once a night for all of the correspondents, although we're hoping that once the show settles in, he'll be willing to double up on correspondent pieces during the show to double the chances of creative comedic choices). And Norton delivered in his first installment of his segment, "Uninvited Guest." It feels like his version of what Lewis Black was doing a decade ago on The Daily Show, offering up scripted rants on society. We had heard parts of this before as Norton tried out material about airline travel on an unsuspecting UCB crowd a few weeks ago, and he told us then that Leno wanted him to perform live on the set to interact with the audience. And now we see why. Somehow, Leno's show decided to add some unneccessary production imagery to Norton's stand-up (at least one of which, Norton was able to mock on the spot because of its poor timing, although most of the images did amuse the studio audience). But Norton did manage to get a free ad for his Opie & Anthony radio show on the set, courtesy of a WOW sticker prominently displayed behind him.
Why don't I let Norton himself explain how he thought he did, courtesy of this NSFW SayNow.com message he broadcasted immediately after taping last night?
And here is Jim Norton's debut performance on the new Jay Leno show:
When a new movie comes out, it's a fully realized vision and product, and therefore easy to be consumed, talked about and critiqued. A nightly TV talk show is different. It takes time to get its legs and figure out what exactly it's going to be -- even when all of the people have done this before and merely moved to a new time slot and/or station (See: O'Brien, Conan; Letterman, David). And yet we expect -- nay, we demand -- an immediate and final judgment on a new TV talk show. Especially when it's taking up valuable primetime TV programming real estate.
So. The Jay Leno Show. Meet the new Leno. Same as the old Leno. With a couple of tweaks. Are you ready for this? Ready or not, The Jay Leno Show debuted Monday night, with lots of outside expectations hyped even more by the fact that Leno already had Kanye West booked as a musical guest, and would therefore have our full attention as West could face Leno and address his behavior at Sunday night's MTV Video Music Awards.
But first. OK. What was with the muted opening theme song? Were Kevin Eubanks and "the Primetime Band" told to take their old Tonight Show theme and dial it all the way down? This theme sounds less exciting than the opening to The Doctors. Is this what we're to expect with Leno in primetime, that it's really more like Leno in daytime? The images of Leno over the decades also seems like What Would Daytime TV Do? Kinda, sorta, yeah. More on that in a minute.
But first. Leno has to come out and shake the hands of audience members. The Laying of the Leno hands. This is meant to show that he is the people's talk show host, right? Like how Ellen DeGeneres does her little dance up and down and across the audience aisles. Leno will not dance, and we will at least thank him for that. But the Laying of the Leno Hands is a carryover from Leno's Tonight Show, as is the monologue (even on opening night, it's your basic monologue; some jokes worked, some did not, and some were supplemented with lame videos -- MORE COMEDY! YOU DEMANDED IT!), and for reasons best left unexplained, Leno has decided to allow Eubanks to interrupt the monologue and participate in inane banter. Eubanks wanted to add to Leno's joke about the hapless Detroit Lions by noting that the Philadelphia Eagles had won, but Leno could have cared less. Not even a word. When David Letterman and Paul Shaffer banter, you not only can tell that there's a longterm friendship there, but also a clear rule that Shaffer will be tolerated but also mocked. As for Leno and Eubanks, they tried to cement their relationship with a "spoof" of the TV show "Cheaters." Leno will not try to convince you that he is known for his acting skills, and perhaps the only thing that prompted a laugh in this bit was Leno cracking up when he suggested that Eubanks was frequenting gay bars without him.
Note: Even NBC could not handle showing us the full monologue again.
Back from the first commercial break, and Leno is still standing front and center. Not behind a desk. This. Is. Different. (OK, not that different) Leno tells the audience that he spent his summer going to comedy clubs and saying "get me that guy" in terms of recruiting more comedy, as way to introduce Dan Finnerty and The Dan Band, who have taped a sketch, "Everything is Better with Music," and launch their premise at a Los Angeles car wash. It starts promising, as Finnerty gets rejected by a couple of customers and has to convince the third, before breaking into song. Vacuum dance = sexual innuendo. Who knew? Everybody knew. That's why the studio audience was laughing. It has its moments, but overall, it's rather hit and miss and you begin to think, how long does it take to wash that car?
When they cut back to the studio afterward, why does Leno seem so uncomfortable? Wasn't this all his idea?
If you have had your television tuned to any station owned or operated by NBC Universal, then I do not need to remind you that The Jay Leno Show debuts tonight. They're clobbering that news into our heads so we cannot escape it. But what they haven't really let you in on just yet is much about all of the new comedy correspondents that Leno will be employing and deploying across America. Despite debuting a cleaner design for the show's online home, you can see in the credits who'll be writing and producing the show, but so far, no page for the correspondents? Hmmm. I guess you'll have to settle for my recap of everyone known to be a comedy correspondent for The Jay Leno Show.
But the show does have a new section online called Laugh Squad. What is that, you ask? The first entry reveals it'll be a place where the show's bookers, Bob Read and Ross Mark, share comedy and comedians they enjoy with us. They also remind everyone that in addition to booking stand-ups for Leno when he was at the Tonight Show, they were the original audition judges for NBC's Last Comic Standing. Is this also a ploy to get aspiring comedians to submit their tapes for Leno? While we ponder that, let's hear them talk about wanting to introduce us to comedians, with this first installment, featuring footage of Tig Notaro. Notaro has a recurring role on The Sarah Silverman Program, appeared this summer on Showtime's Live Nude Comedy series (explained previously), and had her own Comedy Central Presents half-hour. So it's not as if she's not known, though many more people could stand to know her. Which is where the Laugh Squad comes in? And if Read and Mark show a comedian online, is that as good as booking him/her on TV? Some of these questions are rhetorical. Roll the clip!
Perhaps you have seen the incessant NBC promotions for The Jay Leno Show, promising unprecedented comedy in the 10 o'clock hour for American TV viewers? (If you have a TV, then of course you have, and I wonder if the people in the Central and Mountain time zones get their own ads that say 9 p.m., or if they're just confused? That last part may be rhetorical) Leno has done a lot of press to promote it this summer, from the official TCA "tour," to traveling to various NBC affiliates for promos and interviews, to a conference call earlier this week. We've gotten the message. And the conventional wisdom has been NBC is willing to bet on five hours of comedy as a cheaper option without the promise of big ratings. But. Wait. Just. One. Second.
Five hours of comedy. Much of it stand-up, or taped segments produced and starring stand-up comedians. In primetime! This is a much bigger deal. Jerry Seinfeld, tapped to be Leno's first guest on Monday's debut, has been taking it seriously enough that he has rehearsed his stand-up material several times this week in New York City comedy clubs.
After all, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in the late 1960s only aired once a week. So was Sid Caesar's Caesar's Hour;Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In;The Milton Berle Show; even The Jack Paar Program that some have compared Leno's move most closely to, only aired one night a week. Which means Leno will need to fill a lot of airtime, and he has enlisted a cadre of comedians to help him do so. NBC so far has announced that Leno will be airing contributions from D.L. Hughley, Jim Norton, Rachael Harris, Mikey Day, Dan Finnerty and the Dan Band, Liz Feldman, Brian Unger, Nick Thune, Owen Benjamin, Marina Franklin, Sebastian Maniscalco and former Leno intern Ross Matthews. UPDATED: Also Dwayne Perkins, who wasn't listed on the NBC press release, but was showing up on the TV ads for Leno during Thursday night's NFL coverage. And here is video of Time magazine photographing Leno on the new set.
In some interviews, Leno has said he's not looking to do what The Daily Show does, (except for the fact that he'll have NBC's own news anchor, Brian Williams presenting funny news) which is true only in that he already had been sending out comedians into the world to file their own takes on the news -- as this NBC clip package shows:
From what I have learned talking to the comedians who are participating on the show, as well as looking at what these people were bringing to the table already, I think I'm safe in telling you what we can expect from the part of Leno's hour that does not include celebrity car races, Headlines, Jaywalking or Jay's monologue.
Ellen DeGeneres getting hired by American Idol might have been the biggest news you heard overnight, but it wasn't the only thing happening in the past week in comedy news. To wit:
Mandi Bierly at EW's PopWatch talked to Bruce McCulloch about the new Kids in the Hall miniseries, Death Comes to Town, which has been filming in Canada. It'll air in January on CBC in Canada (and most likely sometime in 2010 on U.S. cable TV, once they get a deal done). Related: Mark McKinney has been blogging about it all on the Kids in the Hall Facebook page. Slightly related? Dave Foley has a series called "The Sensible Traveler with Bobby Fargo" that you can watch on Babelgum.
And if you'd like to hear me talk out of Alison Rosen's phone, and have two of New York's Funniest Reporters chit the chat, then tune in to the latest installment of The Daily Alison.
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