Monsters of Television

“I’m your host Jay Leno. At least for a while!”

Nick totally guilted me into writing about this. I compromised with myself, and did only the first 30 minutes of the show because staying up for Jamie Foxx just wasn’t an option.

So Jay’s second term as host of The Tonight Show (or is this episode 3,776 or volume 2 episode 1? I don’t even know) kicks off with a Wizard of Oz skit wherein Jay wakes up from the nightmare of having hosted another show at 10pm in a sepia-tinted world. He does the whole “You were there!” thing with Eubanks and the pudgy homosexual intern whose name I can’t remember and don’t really care enough to look up, but takes a jab at his announcer who didn’t go to The Jay Leno Show with him.

And then, probably in an effort to save the skit from being totally inane, Betty White shows up, commenting that NBC must’ve really cut his budget. I’m on the Betty White bandwagon as much as the next person who really hasn’t seen a Golden Girls episode in years, didn’t watch The Proposal but does love her work on Boston Legal, but subjecting her to embarrassment of being in that skit just isn’t kosher. She deserves better. (And so do we.) Read more »

We here at Monsters of Television have no love for Jay Leno’s comedy. The only thing staler than the stand-up’s jokes are jokes about the size of his chin, his denim fetish, and the unintelligible squealing people do when they do “impressions” of him. So news that NBC might be cancelling (or scaling back) Leno’s 10pm comedy wasteland, The Jay Leno Show, driven by the network ordering a number of new pilots of scripted programming (none produced by John Wells, to be sure), brought us considerable pleasure.

And then TMZ had to go ruin it: Leno was returning, significantly less than victorious (but having performed up to NBC’s incredibly low expectations and killing news affiliates’ ratings) to his old time slot, leaving Conan out in the cold (we remain convinced that Conan never really wanted the gig anyway, but nervous schoolboy Jimmy Fallon was already promised Conan’s desk).

And then the New York Times had to go and (more or less) confirm it. Read more »