Copious Notes

Jerry Seinfeld was the life of The Jay Leno Show's opening night party. Photo by Justin Lubin | NBC.

Almost half-way through the first episode of The Jay Leno Show, Jerry Seinfeld sat down and cracked a joke about how in the 1990s, when Seinfeld went off the air, people actually retired. But now, in the Brett Favre ’00s, people retire, take a three-day weekend and come back.

It didn’t feel quite like a compliment.

After all, though Favre had a good first game as a Minnesota Viking yesterday, he hasn’t exactly come out of retirement and won Super Bowls.

And really, the initial episode of The Jay Leno Show felt more like the product of a three-day weekend than a three-month break. At half time of Sunday Night Football, Leno joked that NBC was throwing a big Hail Mary pass with his new prime time comedy/variety/talk show that will run at 10 p.m. five-nights a week.

Even if it fails to achieve, Law & Order- or ER-like ratings, the Leno show reportedly could be a success because a whole week of the show costs less than an hour of a scripted drama.

But the debut episode felt like a pass that went through the receiver’s hands and fell to the ground. And despite all the chatter about this being different from The Tonight Show, Leno’s gig until May, the only things that seemed to differentiate The Jay Leno Show were changing the order of some Tonight Show staples and taking away Leno’s desk.

The show opened with a title sequence that looked like something out of the first few years of Saturday Night Live. Then Leno emerged on a set that looked smaller than his old Tonight Show digs — or Conan O’Brien’s new Tonight Show digs, for that matter — though it is reportedly a bigger studio.

Leno came out and delivered a mildly amusing, topical monologue which led into two taped bits. In the big spotlight piece, Hangover actor Dan Finnerty sang to a car wash customer who seemed as uncomfortable experiencing this as it was to watch it.

Seinfeld finally sparked the show to life, including a short Oprah Winfrey interview in which he asked all the questions before a faux flummoxed Leno.

The most compelling moment of the show wasn’t humor, but actually Kanye West coming out to discuss his classless hijacking of Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech on Sunday night’s MTV Video Music Awards. Leno clearly hit a nerve with West by asking what his late mother would have thought of his behavior. Then West joined Jay-Z and Rhianna for a solid performance of Run This Town.

But Leno’s first show was far from solid — a routine Tonight Show at best. Of course, Leno’s Tonight Show is proof you can’t count the man with the anvil chin out early. He struggled early, only to dominate his time slot for most of his 17-year late night run.

But there, he was facing news and other talk shows. At 10, he’ll contend with scripted dramas and other standard network fare. And it’s first night out, The Jay Leno Show was a not ready for prime time player.

Note: 35-minutes later, on The Tonight Show, O’Brien welcomed viewers to NBC’s “night of a thousand monologues,” and proceeded to deliver a much funnier one than Leno’s, covering many of the same topics.

Some other views:

• Newark Star-Ledger’s Alan Sepinwall.
• Atlanta Constitution’s Rodney Ho.
• Ed Bark of Uncle Barky’s Bytes.
• Alessandra Stanley of The New York Times.
• Time Magazine’s James Poniewozik. (Interesting here that several commenters seem to be people who never stayed awake for the musical guests on The Tonight Show.)

If you miss the fact that the Kentucky Derby is on Saturday, maybe you just aren’t watching enough NBC and its universe of networks.

Real Housewives of New York City star Bethenny Frankel, daughter of Hall of Fame trainer Bobby Frankel, will be part of Bravo

This week, the Peacock is proving that while healthy advertising budgets are nice, nothing beats having a whole bunch of networks on which you can air tied-in programming. And that is why, as Sharon Thompson alerts us, Bravo will be live from Churchill Downs at the Oaks at 5 p.m. Friday. Ladies First: Bravo at the Kentucky Derby will look at Derby food, fashion and celebrities with Bob Costas, Access Hollywood’s Nancy O’Dell, The Real Housewives of New York City’s Bethenny Frankel (daughter of Hall of Fame trainer Bobby Frankel), and Tiki Barber, who will be in the infield with the last two winners of Top Chef.

The 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. segment of the Today show — the portion of the show Saturday Night Live just loves — will also look at Derby fashion today, and Friday, it’s Derby cooking.

Meanwhile, financial network CNBC is looking at the monetary side  of the event with Run for the Roses: The Kentucky Derby and the Business of Horse Racing hosted by The Call’s Melissa Francis at 9 tonight, and repeating several times through Saturday.

With Paris Hilton on the guest list, you can bet the paparazzi will be out in force, and NBC’s own Access Hollywood will be in town for bashes like the Barnstable-Brown Gala and providing red carpet coverage at Churchill Downs with O’Dell and Barber during the Derby broadcast from 4 to 7 p.m. Saturday.

Tina Fey and Jimmy Fallon on the second episode of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. Photo by Dana Edelson | NBC.

I can honestly tell you that I watched the very first Late Night with Conan O’Brien episodes. I cannot honestly tell you I remember much about them. In fact, watching Conan’s grand finale was a reminder the show started with a very different look and feel from how it ended.

If I remember anything, it was that Conan was a little awkward and you didn’t quite know what to make of the show after the first few nights.

Considering how things turned out for Conan — he’s now off to take the reigns of the The Tonight Show from Jay Leno, completing the succession David Letterman had wished for 16 years ago — that must mean Jimmy Fallon is off to a decent start.

The biggest thing to like about Late Night with Jimmy Fallon out of the gate is the tone. Yes, Jimmy made some bad-to-middlin’ movies, but we met him and know him for Saturday Night Live, where his chief accomplishment was creating, with Tina Fey, the best Weekend Update team since Jane Curtin and Dan Aykroyd (and until Amy Poehler and Seth Meyers who had a brief but glorious run). From the title sequence to the set, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon echoes SNL cool without overtly referencing it. And The Roots may have in a couple of nights become the best house band on late night TV, not only able to provide cool bumper music, but also able to be part of the jokes, starting right away with “slow jam the news.”

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Twilight star Robert Pattison chats with Jay Leno on The Tonight Show. Is this the sort of thing viewers want to see at 10 p.m.? Copyrighted NBC/Universal photo by Paul Drinkwater.

When Jay Leno’s prime time deal with NBC was announced Tuesday, I did some math — which is really rare for me.
Jay + Conan + Jimmy = 3 hours of talk TV every night, + 35 minutes of local news thrown in at 11 o’clock.

That’s a lot of yakking.

Oh, I forgot Last Call With Carson Daly — 31/2 hours of yakking.

There are some things that are obviously smart about NBC’s decision to re-sign The Tonight Show’s outgoing host for a 10 p.m. prime-time show, slated to start next fall.

Leno is still enjoying a 13-year reign as the king of late-night chat, so if the Peacock had allowed him to walk, he probably would have taken a substantial audience with him, potentially making life miserable for his successor, Conan O’Brien.

Jay Leno and Jeff Zucker, president and chief executive officer, NBC Universal. Copyrighted NBC/Universal photo.

And with the move, NBC gets more of what chief Jeff Zucker has been going for: cheap programming.

This was the man who in 2006 declared that the 8-to-9 p.m. block would be all reality and game shows, because those were cheaper to produce, though that has clearly changed.

According to Business Week, Leno’s show will cost $2 million a week to produce versus $15 million to fill the 10-to-11 p.m. slot with dramas.

And something Leno’s show will have over reality and game shows is a truly time-tested formula. Since the reality craze took hold nearly a decade ago, there are scads of concepts that have hit big and fizzled as viewers got tired of them — anyone seen Queer Eye for the Straight Guy lately?

But that monologue-sketch-celebrity-guests-musical-act-and-out format has endured for decades.

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