"NBC mulls ending Jay Leno's prime-time experiment"--that's the brutal headline in the Washington Post "Style" section this morning. And I wonder if the Comcastians, now encamped in DC to lobby the federal government on its acquisition of NBC-Universal, will see it. I suspect they will--they'll even see the story at Comcast HQ in Philadelphia. And of course, they already know that NBC is in fourth place.
The article, by Posties Paul Farhi and Lisa de Moraes is full of tough commentary, on the complicated and costly shuffle that NBC engineered five years ago, when it humiliated Leno and elevated the permanently sophomoric Conan O'Brien. Here's a taste:
Dumping Leno from prime time would certify that NBC's closely watched experiment to rewrite the economic rules of broadcast TV has failed.
"Failed." Ouch! And these grafs were tough, too:
If Leno bumps O'Brien from "The Tonight Show," it would mark a dramatic reversal; Leno was forced to step down from his successful 17-year run on the program after the network brokered a deal with O'Brien to keep him from leaving NBC. O'Brien got Leno's job and Leno was moved to prime time to prevent him from walking.
But O'Brien has not been successful as the face of NBC's signature late-night program. Since taking over, he has lost more than half of Leno's former "Tonight Show" audience. In the fourth quarter, David Letterman was matching O'Brien among the younger viewers that NBC said was its only concern for late-night TV.
OK, so NBC is taking a beating. But there's a name missing from the story: Jeff Zucker. He has been the big cheese at NBC since 2004, and one of his first moves was to promise O'Brien that he could have "The Tonight Show" slot in 2009. Thus humiliating the incumbent "Tonight Show" host, Leno. Why was this done? Zucker talked a good game, about new blood, and younger auds, but it seems to The Cable Gamer that all that was just fluff, obscuring the real reason that Zucker wanted Leno out and O'Brien in.
The real reason, deep down, is that Zucker likes glamor--and Conan, a Harvard boy, like Zucker, only with hair, was glamorous. No doubt Conan was Zucker's ticket to the whole snarky Gawker-ish "Bright Lights Big City" crowd, so that Jeff could hang with the cool kids--finally.
And that's why, for example, Zucker clung on to Ben Silverman, his disastrous pick for a programming chief, for so long. As TCG recorded back in 2008, Zucker had an affection for Silverman that bordered on... well, I report some of Zucker's words in defense of his man, and you decide:
He's young, single, wealthy, and beautiful. There are a lot of reasons to be jealous of Ben before you even put him in this job.
That's Zucker speaking to Richard Siklos at Fortune. And it says a lot, doesn't it? "Beautiful...Jealous." Zucker kinda sounds like that professor in the novel Death in Venice, the one played by Dirk Bogarde in the Visconti movie.
Poor Jeff. Trapped in his multimillion-dollar life, always yearning and dreaming.
OK, but why does the Washington Post, for example, leave Zucker's name completely out of the story? Why does the article suggest that "NBC" makes all these mistakes--as if the company itself has a brain and makes decisions? And the answer seems to be that Zucker is a relentless and highly politicized networker, who has always steered NBC in a liberal direction--you can see his handiwork in the attitudes of Matt Lauer, the co-host of "The Today Show," which Zucker once produced, and which he still has a great interest in. Lauer, and another "Today" alum, Katie Couric, were and are reliable liberal voices. TCG figures that the Post, appreciates Zucker's service to the larger liberal cause, and so spares him a personal skewering.
But in the meantime, it's the GE shareholders who have been getting skewered. And if Zucker found the likes of Jeff Immelt and Bob Wright to be dull, well, Immelt at least didn't appreciate all the baggage GE had to carry--poltical as well as financial. (For his part, Wright didn't care, he was the Zucker of his time, back in the 90s.)
And now it's the Comcast shareholders who must make sense of NBC, and Zucker. And to see him clearly for what he is--and what he has done to NBC, taking it from first to fourth. A solid fourth, full of fiascoes, including the mishandling--mistreatment, really--of Leno.
Hence the illustration above. But don't worry, Jeff: White is a great color for you!
