What say you, Examiner readers?  What can be done to save NBC? (photo: hzfm.com)

"The Jay Leno Show" has, as we all know by now, been given the sort of treatment that Ned Beatty received in "Deliverance" by critics all over the country.  The ratings battle that NBC was so eager to fight when the show went to air has, effectively, been lost.  As the ratings continue to dwindle, a new milestone has been reached: "The Jay Leno Show" just lost to basic-cable programming.  Where did all of Jay's ratings go?  The Comedy Examiner investigates.  Read on, gentle Examiner readers...

Defamer/Gawker is running one of their magically snarky articles right now about NBC, its programming, and the head of the network's attempts to convince everyone that "NBC's goal isn't to get bad ratings".  One has to wonder how it all came to this, and the simple answer is: Ben Silverman.

The recently ousted head of the network was pretty cavalier about claiming that he didn't "manage for ratings", instead saying he "manages for margins".  Because the Comedy Examiner does not understand business-speak, it was good that Defamer provided the explanation: Silverman was more concerned about running a tight ship financially than he was putting out a great series of products that viewers would want to watch every week.  In other words: who cares about quality programming when ya got low overhead?

The Defamer article also points out the Tuesday night ratings of "The Jay Leno Show"-- which have been somewhat (read: very) embarrassing for NBC since it went on the air about 6 weeks ago-- and they aren't pretty: the show pulled a 1.8 share.  This was in-line with the show's Tuesday night performance last week (but down a half share from the week prior to that, and so on) and notable for having lost in the ratings war to "Sons of Anarchy", which Defamer makes a point to mention is "basic-cable programming". 

Here's Defamer on this topic:

In the latest round of stats, NBC's avant-garde experiment, The Jay Leno Show has fallen behind cable programming in viewership among the all important 18 - 49 year old demographic. As Movieline points out, on this Tuesday night Leno was murdered in the demo by FX's Son's of Anarchy, which drew a 2.0 rating to Leno's brutal 1.8. 

This is just the latest report on the relative failure of "The Jay Leno Show" (relative to, say: expectations, the performance Jay turned in on "The Tonight Show", some other new shows, etc), and still no word has been released by the network that would indicate that a change is a-comin' to the show.  We're still dumbfounded at this: how do you not try and bail out a sinking ship-- even if that ship does have a 2 year contract-- when you know that it's already leaking (viewers) by the week, and not in small numbers?  One has to wonder if Leno isn't frantically jumping up and down somewhere, screaming that he needs new writers, only to have his pleas fall on deaf ears.

Nah, that ain't happening.  Leno's been doing the same material for awhile now, and-- in our opinion-- it's far more likely that he's just convinced that things will turn around.  After all, Leno's an optimist, so why wouldn't he?  It'll be interesting to see if NBC, Leno, or disgruntled NBC affiliates start putting the pressure on themselves/the network to get some changes made on the show.

As for the rest of NBC:  Good luck, guy who took over after Silverman.  You've got a lot of work ahead of you.  Or, as Defamer put it in their report:

As long as you are sitting on that little toxic waste dump, maybe saying that you're trying for low ratings isn't such a bad idea after all?

What do you think, Examiner readers?  Sound off in the comments section below; we wanna know what you think about NBC's programming, "The Jay Leno Show", and what can be done to turn the network's ratings around! 

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