“Jay Leno pulls in almost 18 million viewers in primetime debut”
17.7M says the LA Times:
Jay Leno opened big in prime time, drawing 17.7 million viewers and easily winning every demographic race. Of course, with Jerry Seinfeld and Kanye West as guests, millions of dollars spent on hype and light competition, it would’ve been hard for “The Jay Leno Show” not to score a big audience on his first night at 10.
Could this be the death knell for scripted dramas on broadcast networks at 10PM? Uh, maybe not:
Curiosity no doubt played a huge factor, as evidenced by the show’s first half-hour, which drew just over 18 million viewers — in the second half-hour, nearly a million viewers jumped ship. Leno also had a strong “America’s Got Talent” lead-in that averaged almost 15 million viewers. On the downside, 60% of the audience for Leno was over the age of 50, which is not what advertisers covet.
One night’s numbers does not a story make and while the early results will have NBC brass smiling and spinning (after all, Leno’s numbers more than doubled what NBC averaged in the 10–11 p.m. hour last season), keep in mind that other than football on ESPN, the rest of the industry pretty much gave Leno a pass on Day 1.
The real challenge will be in the days and weeks ahead when he is squaring off against original programming and the novelty of a prime-time talk/variety show starts to fade. Once the viewers vote, it will be up to the bean counters at NBC to determine whether the bet pays off financially.
60% of the viewers over the age of 50? Gawd, don’t Baby Boomers have anything better to do at 10PM than watch Jay Leno? Get your freak on, you old hippies!
Look, it’s simple. Back in the good old days, when everybody was making money, NBC used to have scripted 1-hour dramas at 10PM Mon-Fri. Then they slipped in Dateline — but at least that still had writers on staff.
With Jay Leno stripped at 10PM, that’s one show with one set of writers. As opposed to five shows (Mon / Tue / Wed / Thu / Fri) with five sets of writers.
Which translates into less jobs for TV writers.
If the Leno experiment works — the show is probably one-third the cost of a scripted series so the economics are on its side — then can ABC or CBS be far behind?
Which will make this even worse:
Hollywood scribes are feeling the double-whammy of the recession and pre-strike stockpiling.
The Writers Guild of America West, in its annual report to members, disclosed that earnings plunged nearly 18% to $801.4 million for the fiscal year ended March 31. Guild-covered earnings had set a record in the previous year at $976.3 million.
The WGA noted the number of writers reporting income declined 9.7% to 4,163. TV employment declined 11.2% to 2,929 slots while earnings for TV scribes declined 3.1% to $437.5 million. Feature film employment declined 14% to 1,716 slots. Film earnings, which had surged 19.5% in the prior fiscal year, declined a whopping 30.7% to $361 million.
It’s tough out there, people. The only positive is that the studios have to make movies to survive and the networks have to make TV series to survive.
And they still need writers…
For now.
Comment Archive