The Late Shift Shifts to Newsstands

Jay Leno's prime-time show won't debut on NBC for another week, but the former Tonight Show host is going head to head with his CBS rival David Letterman this week—on the newsstand.

Time magazine has a rumpled, slump-shouldered Leno on its cover with the headline "Jay Leno Is the Future of TV. Seriously." Meanwhile, New York magazine has a grinning, arms-crossed Letterman under the headline "Leno Who?"

New York's story, written by Peter W. Kaplan, former editor of the New York Observer (and this blogger's old boss), puts the host on the couch and looks at the way Letterman has grown into himself and his role at CBS and in the culture.

Writes Kaplan: "When NBC and Carson Productions gave Letterman his show, they believed they were establishing another NBC star; they didn’t understand that they were laying the groundwork for a pervasive culture of irony. Letterman’s program created a sensibility that permeated TV, movies, literature, music, art, and magazines..." (For those interested, Kaplan also wrote about a younger, scrappier Letterman back in Rolling Stone in 1988, praising him for "reinventing the genre called found comedy, which casts a cold video eye on the conventions of the landscape—dumb ads, bad TV, stores that advertise things they don't have.")

Letterman's Late Show continues to beat The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien in the ratings. It stands to be seen how Leno's new show will do, but NBC is apparently keeping its expectations modest.

In Time, James Poniewozik explains what prompted NBC to scrap its 10 p.m. dramas in favor of a Leno show: "NBC has set the bar low enough for a sleeping man to clear. If Leno can just get the ratings he did in late night, some 5 million viewers (paltry by 10 p.m. standards), his show will be more profitable than what it replaced in that time slot, reps say."

Over at Deadline, Nikki Finke calls this type of thinking "Jeff Zucker managing for margins, not ratings."