Jay Leno: Helping To Kill Scripted Television

Posted at 2:30 PM Dec 09, 2008

By Kenny Herzog



Jay Leno, you bastard. We could sense your seething contempt for quality scripted entertainment by watching your show all these years, and by constantly revisiting Collision Course on cable. Not to mention doubling over with laughter from your soon-to-be-replacement, Conan O'Brien, and his endless parade of avant-garde skits and asides.

But alas, now your beloved peacock network has announced that your 2009 exit from The Tonight Show seat will serve as a soft transition into prime time, and more specifically a 10 p.m. talk show. Not a variety show. Not a sketch show that you gracefully host as a platform for talented young creative performers. Another dull, witless chatfest that will clog up the pores of NBC's latter-night, once-perennially fictionalized programming schedule.

We understand it's not your fault that primetime dramas' day has come and gone, and that NBC at least is trying to approach the situation with some integrity rather than hand another 60 minutes over to some faux-reality program about dogs competing with aliens and MILFs for 100,000 and a year subscription to National Geographic. But I shall curse you when I turn on my Sony picture screen on Thursday nights and see you (literally) jawing with some neandrethal sitcom sap rather than the bleeding, beautiful hands of Maura Tierney.