About Last Night

Jay Leno's new 10 p.m. show doesn't look much different than his old late-night show. Case-in-point: the politically-pointed monologue still opens the show.

Image: NBC

"I apologize for being all over the place," Jay Leno said a little sheepishly at the start of his first monologue of his 10 p.m. NBC show last night. The host was referring to the $10 million in advertising his network reportedly employed to get the word out about his show, but he might as well have been referring to the show itself, which managed to be both slick and sloppy, a mishmash of dated jokes and one fortuitously timed guest.

In his opening monologue Leno threw everything at the audience: Cialis jokes, musical numbers, a parody of the lowbrow reality show Cheaters, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush jokes (still), and a bad field segment featuring a neutered version of frat musical-comedy group The Dan Band, whose entire shtick of adding curse words into well-known wedding songs doesn't really play without the curse words.

After a listless Jerry Seinfeld interview (featuring Oprah Winfrey awkwardly beamed—and phoned in), Leno relied on a pretaped fake interview with Barack Obama made up of outtakes from CBS's 60 Minutes interview with the president featuring a very silly tort reform joke involving a fruit torte.

The only highlight was Leno's interview with Kanye West, this week's poster boy for obnoxious celebrity entitlement for his MTV VMA outburst. Leno's producers clearly hoped getting West to apologize on air would be a replay of the host's famous "What were you thinking" interview with a post-hooker-bust Hugh Grant from 1995 (an interview many think shifted the late-night war in Leno's favor), but while West proved genuine, he was also entirely unfunny. When Leno wasn't blindsiding him by asking what his deceased mother would've made of his VMA behavior (yikes!), he seemed to talk down to the rapper-producer, talking to him like a naughty child.

Before the segment could even take off, it was onto the next. Much of the show felt rushed, as in Leno's signature "headlines" segment, which the host ran through hurriedly and joylessly. Also, using an intentionally humorous photo from the August 3 New Yorker story about Siberia as a bit of found comedy is a little disingenuous.

The ratings for last night's show have not been released yet, but it's a good guess that a lot of first night looky-loos probably tuned in despite NBC's low expectations. If the first episode is any indication, Leno's not a threat to Conan or Letterman or scripted 10 p.m. dramas: He's only dangerous to people driving and operating heavy machinery.