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Edited on Wed Dec-10-08 03:53 AM by tomreedtoon
But Jay Leno is too big to appear on the little girl's show. That's politics inside NBC, and probably unavoidable.
Maddow is supposed to be the more hip, culturally aware person, whose show is supposed to include entertainment critiques. But they wanted Olbelmann, whose audience is still bigger and more impressive.
Anyway...it is a big story. Basically, NBC has had horrible luck with its hour dramas. Most of the new crop from this year has died horribly (and so have shows at ABC). They have to put something else on the air, and they don't have the money to create another army of bad dramas that will curdle and die.
Like it or not, NBC has revived and updated a genre that America hasn't supported since the 1960's - the variety show. I remember when Garry Moore, Carol Burnett, Ed Sullivan, Red Skelton, Andy Williams and (yes, even!) the Smothers Brothers occupied hour blocks of TV.
Although you probably didn't see him that way (I didn't either, until I thought about it) Leno is running a variety show. He talks a bit, it's a bit stagey and New Yorkish, but he features lots of different kinds of entertainers and guests. They have to interact with each other, in other words they have to be human.
But I think Leno will improve the prime-time environment. For example, Britney Spears normally appears on her music videos and dumbass concerts just lip-syncing her songs. Outside projecting that one crappy, slutty image, she doesn't have to talk, interact with other people, or even wear underwear. That's because she wasn't on variety shows where everyone was expected to be human beings and "well-rounded." (In the Garry Moore days she'd have to hold her own as a comic actress in a sketch. Might have taught her something about humanity.)
When Spears shows up on Leno's show - before a prime-time, mainstream audience - she's going to have to wear panties and learn how to talk like a human being. This will improve her, and us. Imagine Spears and, say, Hillary Clinton or Jesse Jackson having to be civil to one another. They might all learn something.
This might be exactly what broadcast TV needs, in a time when most of its fiction programming is lousy and subject to poaching from cable TV and DVD sales.
Yeah, it's not politics. And putting it on Olbelmann is probably wrong. But it is a huge story.
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