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...Leno at 10 will be a memory. With that, NBC showed itself to be in the same boat as the rest of Big Media - caught between an old business model that is no longer working and a new one that hasn't yet been invented...
...drama producers and publicly shafted Conan O'Brien, who said he would quit Tonight rather than move so that NBC could shoehorn Leno in at 11:35. As I wrote in a TIME cover last year, Leno's show was a paradox: a radical experiment with TV's most old-fashioned, middle-of-the-road star. It proved to be an unsustainable contradiction. (See the top 10 Conan O'Brien moments...
Problem is, NBC still has to operate in the old system. That system depends on affiliates, the infrastructure of broadcast TV since Uncle Miltie's day. (Right now, those affiliates have great, if temporary, leverage, because NBC needs them to play nice while it's being sold to cable operator Comcast.) And it depends on pleasing an audience used to ER and Law & Order at 10, not Jaywalking. (See TIME's photo-essay "Behind the Scenes with Jay Leno...
...catch is that each adjustment to the new, cheap world risks losing people who liked the old, expensive one. Broadcast TV once thrived by pitching a big tent. But now the various poles of that tent - Jay fans, Conan fans, etc. - don't particularly want to share the same campsite, and they no longer have to. (See the top 10 late-night jokes...
...room for great new shows on NBC, but the basics of TV aren't going to revert back to the flush 20th century days. Instead, NBC will focus not on inventing TV's next business plan but on trying to be one of the networks left standing when the old plan finally craps out. Simple tooth-and-claw survival: it's the oldest business model...