Jay Leno

In show-business, since when does going with the bean-counters ever work out?

If we listened to the bean-counters, there would have been no green-lights for Titanic, or Lord of the Rings, or Avitar. The bean-counters have given us 500 stations with Ryan Seacrest and only two television news teams in Erie.

Yet it was solely a bottom-line decision to take number-one rated Jay Leno off of The Tonight Show, and give him a prime-time strip, so that GE wouldn’t have to fork over $3M an episode for an hour long drama like ER.

Who was watching, and now squandering the “Bottom Line”? None other than NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker. The one-time wonder-kid of The Today Show proved that he was toxic to NBC’s once-revered prime time. I almost never agree with Maureen Dowd, but she got it right in her scathing NY Times editorial earlier in the week. It’s time for Zucker to go.

Conan O'Brien

I doubt that its going to happen, as the network wagons circle around Jeff and Jay leaving Conan O’Brien as the odd man out, and it looks like to Fox.

It’s gotten so nasty at 30 Rock to the point that Dick Ebersol totally called out Conan in yesterday’s NY Times, saying that he was unwilling to change his shtick for 11:35, and skewed too young for the marquee placement of The Tonight Show. That O’Brien is consistently second to The Late Show with David Letterman is definitely a problem, and now it seems the network just wants to do a System Restore back to May 2009, except with Jimmy Fallon on Late Night.

All of this drama is fascinating to watch from the media observer perspective, but I gotta think that average Joe is plain disgusted and screaming at their HD sets “I told ya so!”