Jay Leno doing his Stan Laurel impression. (AP Photo/Dan
Steinberg)
Jay Leno launched his new NBC prime time comedy show The Jay Leno Show on Monday night. Although the numbers aren't yet in as to how many viewers he lured, I'm sure the show did okay. With so many options on cable, at last count there were over seven gazillion channels, you don't need as many viewers as you used to to be considered a "hit."
The whole point of this new prime time Leno concept is to produce a week's worth of shows for less that the cost of producing one episode of CSI Poughkeepsie or whatever. It's not going to be easy going up against the former Big Three networks, all of the major cable networks and Project Runway, but NBC is optimistic.
Even though Leno's production costs are much less than producing a drama series, if NBC had paid for all of the ads they ran to promote the show they'd be millions in debt. But, on with the show.
When the show opened Monday night, the announcer sounded as if he were ready for a nap. New show, big deal, you'd think he'd find a little excitement in his voice. Luckily, the energy level went way up when Leno took the stage.
Jay's opening monologue was strong. Of course his writers had three months worth of news to cover and plenty of time to write during the three month hiatus after Leno passed on the reigns of the Tonight Show to Conan O'Brien.
For the most part, the new Jay Leno Show will feature one main guest, lots of comedy sketches with a growing cast of regular contributors and a musical guest. The new show will also feature some of Jay's trademark bits. He did a headline segment on last night's show, and I'm sure "Jay Walking" isn't far behind. The show also featured a very funny video segment with rising musical/comedy star Dan Finnerty and his Dan Band. See it here:
Jay has given up the desk for a couple of comfy chairs, not unlike Ellen DeGeneres on the Ellen DeGeneres Show. He did however resort back to a desk for the headline segment, so he had a place to put the cards. Apparently they don't have any easels at NBC.
Jerry Seinfeld was a good choice as a first guest. He was relaxed and spontaneous and also seized the opportunity to deliver some prepared sit-down comedy bits.
His scheduled musical guest was Jay-Z with Rihanna and Kanye West. Since his story was so hot, West agreed to sit down briefly with Jay and talk about his inappropriate rudeness at the MTV Video Music Awards the previous night. Kanye seemed sincerely sorry in an awkward and inarticulate manner. Even so I'm not ever going to buy another Kanye CD. Oh wait, I've never have before. I was hoping that Leno would get even more edgy and interview Rihanna about being beaten up by former boyfriend Chris Brown, but that didn't happen.
I think the key to the success of this show is going to be the strength of the bits from the new comedy cast Jay hopes to create and the quality of his sole guests. I guess maybe I can miss Project Runway once in a while.
Watch the entire Jay Leno Show episode here:
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