NBC's "Tonight"mare

There's an old saying, "you can't have your cake and eat it too."

NBC should have listened to that sage advice when they decided to put Jay Leno on prime time television.  The network announced this weekend that Jay Leno will be moved back into a late night time slot (11:35PM in most markets) when the Winter Olympics conclude at the end of February.

As a result of this, the status of Conan O'Brien remains in limbo, although his contract (worth a reported $28 Million a year) states that he is to have a talk show that wil start no later than 12:05AM.  This means NBCs choices are:

• give Leno a half hour show, then let Conan on at 12:05AM (presumably as "The Tonight Show").
• give Leno an hour long show, and see if Conan get's p.o.'d and jumps to a competing network.
• put two desks on The Tonight Show, one on either end of a sofa, and let Jay and Conan battle it out.  Two hosts enter, one host leaves.

All of this drama is the result of Conan O'Brien's contract negotiations a few years back, when NBC agreed to give him "The Tonight Show" at the end of his current contract term with NBC for "Late Night".  Unfortunately, since that time, Jay Leno had been doing remarkably well in the ratings as host of "Tonight", regularly beating David Letterman's "Late Show" on CBS.  NBC decided that they couldn't afford to risk Leno leaving their network and setting up shop at Fox or ABC, so in order to try and placate everyone, they gave "Tonight" to O'Brien and gave Leno a prime time talk show five nights a week.  MMMmmm...this cake sure is delicious, I'm glad I'm eating it and saving it for later.

In order to make room for Leno's show, the network pulled all their scripted shows out of the 10:00PM time slot, and ratings went into a free-fall (big winner, CBS).

NBC insists that they have been happy with the ratings of Leno's show, as it is so much cheaper to produce than scripted dramas.  Of course, that doesn't take into account the feelings of the network's affiliates, who's nightly newscasts were getting destroyed by competitors with stronger lead-ins.  Thus we have NBC's obviously hasty decision from this weekend.

The fallout from this could get really interesting over the coming weeks, as the late night television landscape will undoubtedly change.  Letterman's Late Show should have lots of fodder for jokes, and I'm sure the media attention will cause a slight bump in both Leno and O'Brien's ratings, but nobody out there seems to be asking the real question...what about poor Jimmy Fallon and "Late Night"?  Is he about to get bumped into Carson Daly's old dead of the night time slot (and what about Carson, is he fired because he now overlaps with early morning newscasts?).

This whole situation could not have played out much worse for NBC.  They've lost viewers, and potentially at least one high profile talk show host.  Even if they haven't, they've eroded viewer and affiliate trust.  NBC as a network needs to get back to basics, program good shows, give them time slots where they can breathe, and make some real bets instead of constantly trying to hedge everything.  Otherwise, they'll be stuck in fourth place until they finally go broke (or worse, get bought out up Comcast - oh wait...too late).

On the plus side, this is easily the best drama NBC has had on their network in years.  Beats the hell out of "Trauma".