Late Shift

I remember following the so-called late-night talk-show wars back in the day, when Leno and Letterman were jockeying for Carson's throne. Since I watched Letterman pretty regularly at the time, the inside-baseball aspect of it was interesting. Occasionally I'll catch a bit now and then, but not so much these days.

Still, as Goodman points out, this impending Leno move to a nightly 10PM show is strange and short-sighted. It smells like a panic move on NBC's part. That's not a swipe at Leno (while not my particular cup of tea, he's affable enough and good at what he does), it's just bizarre that the network would not only stake a significant chunk of their prime-time fortunes on this, at the expense of developing scripted material, but also risk undermining Conan O'Brien's shift to Leno's seat.

More than anything, it's an admission that they got nothin', which was getting more and more obvious with endless stunt-casting resusciation of the ER corpse, and the endless iterations of the Law & Order franchise. Instead of trying to find a fresh take on the procedural format, or even develop an entirely different kind of show, the network hands a full third of its money programming over to one person, in an already cluttered talk market.

As the Great One might have said: Weird, wild stuff.