Jay Leno Not the Only Prime-Time Loser

Face it, O'Brien's ratings weren't great

(NEWSER) - Conan O’Brien joins the ranks of the unemployed today, so the ousted Tonight Show host now has plenty of time to track the backlash and second-guessing about the TV shell game. Jay Leno remains the villain of the piece, but the hard truth is that O’Brien never drew the numbers of young viewers to his time slot that NBC had hoped for. “The 18-to-34 group is so difficult to attract and the lower half, 18 to 25, is the hardest of all,” a strategist told the New York Times. More»

It's probably going be more like a cable network

(NEWSER) - Monday was a milestone for NBC’s misbegotten Leno experiment: only 4.6 million tuned in, the worst Monday of the year, writes Matthew Greenberg. This is getting so bad it may signal the beginning of the end of NBC as we know it. The network’s rationale for putting Leno at 10pm was that the show would be cheap to produce, attract younger viewers, and stay topical when dramas go into re-runs. But on Monday, 11.2 million watched CSI: Miami—even though it was a re-run. More»

(NEWSER) - After months of promoting Jay Leno's move to 10pm, NBC may shake up its prime-time schedule again, moving its late local news to 10 and Leno to 10:30, the network's onetime programming head speculates. Garth Ancier, now chief of BBC America, shared his speculation with critics at the summer press tour this week in Los Angeles, Washington Post TV columnist Lisa de Moraes reports. More»

This year's network pilots include four with non-white stars

(NEWSER) - The upcoming crop of pilots for network TV offers hope that the industry taboo against minority leads in dramas can finally be put to rest. Four of the most high-profile projects in the works feature non-white actors, notes the Hollywood Reporter , including Forest Whitaker in a spinoff of Criminal Minds for CBS. More»

Network to produce 20 pilots next season

(NEWSER) - Now that NBC is nearly past the Jay Leno-Conan O'Brien fiasco, the network is refocusing on the job at hand: correcting a 5-year slide in ratings. The Leno gambit, which CEO Jeff Zucker described as an experiment in the "economics" of network television, represented the network's hope that Leno could draw viewers with a show that cost much less than scripted programming. Now NBC is taking the opposite approach. More»