Leno Should Go

Wow, NBC has really made a mess of its late night schedule, and now no one there is happy.

There's no easy way out of this for the Peacock. However, the right thing to do is to ditch Jay Leno.

Leno is, unfortunately, the primary source of the problem. When NBC decided to move Leno to the 10:00 pm prime time slot, it was not a stupid idea, although it was risky.

Leno's show was supposed to be a comedy hour. When Leno hosted the Tonight Show, we enjoyed it, on those rare nights we could afford to stay up that late. But his show in the 10:00 pm slot was simply NOT FUNNY. Indeed, it was about as lame as could be. We had an inkling of this when NBC was pro-mo'ing the show during the summer--even the ads were lame. Like a movie preview for a comedy, where not even the jokes in the preview are funny. DOA.

We have to assume that it was Leno, not the NBC suits, who managed to screw up his own show.

It was also Leno's refusal, in the first place, to move on as he had agreed five years earlier, that created this whole conundrum in the first place.

So don't penalize Conan, whose own Tonight Show gig was hurt by Leno's poor lead-in. Give Leno the boot. Yes, he'll whine and complain, and probably show up on some other network with a show--but it won't last long, because he's clearly lost his edge and most of his audience. So, NBC, take your medicine, clean house and get on with life as part of Comcast.