Critic: NBC Has Given Up on Being a Mass Network

NBC's decision to give Jay Leno a nightly talk show during primetime was clearly a watershed moment in one way or another. But what did it mean, exactly? To television critic Alan Sepinwall of the Newark Star-Ledger, it signaled the end of broadcast exceptionalism. "As the audience shrinks and the networks increasingly program for niches instead of the general public, they resemble cable channels more and more," Sepinwall writes in a New York Times op-ed.

Calling the move "as inevitable as it is sad," he says that the big networks -- but especially NBC, with its "depraved indifference to the idea of program development" -- have all but given up on the possibility of minting new mass-audience hits, and now find themselves emulating cablers like Bravo and AMC, churning out shows aimed at specific niches or intended as counter-programming.

Sepinwall concludes:

To use a pop culture metaphor that everyone should (I hope) understand, the networks are Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff. So long as they pump their legs and assume there's solid ground beneath their feet, they get to keep moving. But as soon as one of them gives up and looks at where it is, as NBC has with the Jay Leno deal, there's nowhere to go but way, way down.

Related: MediaPost's Diane Mermigas thinks there's a serious chance that one of the Big Four networks will cease to exist in the coming year, at least in its present form. She calls CBS "the most likely candidate to collapse or convert into a general entertainment cable network."