Word: leno
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
They're baa-ack. After a vacation for NBC's Olympic fortnight, Jay Leno returns to The Tonight Show to find his competition with late-night rival Arsenio Hall fiercer than any jock grudge match. Consider the events. The javelin backstab. The 100-m bad-mouth. Synchronized sniping. Follyball. And -- given Leno's 33% ratings advantage over Hall -- the uneven parallel talk shows. Who needs Barcelona? These are the games of summer...
Suddenly the midnight air is hot and stormy. Hall, whose syndicated show brought a young, mixed-race audience to late night, disses Leno for unspecified crimes against him. The two shows' staffs charge each other with demanding first dibs on the most desirable stars. Dennis Miller, whose talk show was canceled after six months of low ratings and C-list guests, blames The Tonight Show for strong-arm booking tactics. David Letterman, NBC's later- night wit who couldn't conceal his chagrin at being snubbed for Johnny Carson's job, now has other networks and syndicators strewing his restless...
...infotainment press is busy stoking the one-way feud. In April, just before Leno replaced Carson, Entertainment Weekly ran a cover story with Hall proclaiming, "I'm gonna kick Leno's ass"; this week the cover copy blares LENO GETS EVEN, and the Gibraltar-jawed comic stares out in a Raging Bull pose. The Washington Post's Tom Shales rags Leno for going "all ponderous and ! stony" and, bizarrely, for overloading his opening monologue with political humor. (Memo to Jay: Better do more 7-Eleven jokes. Memo to Tom: Pssst, it's an election year...
...this is mainly material for political cartoonists and Jay Leno. Despite the media's tendency to jump on casual statements and treat them as the key to the speaker's character flaws, few blunderers have been so shamed by their own brief lapses of self-revelation that they changed their whole image...
...Leno's guests on Wednesday night were Geena Davis, Jackson Browne and Northern Exposure's Darren Burrows. "And," the Tonight Show host announced with pride in a network promo, "no presidential candidates...