Leno every night at 10 PM?

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on December 9th, 2008

On NBC. That’s what Nikki Finke is saying.

NBC head Jeff Zucker is ratcheting down expectations among stockholders and other observers by saying that maybe NBC can’t program 22 hours of network per day and maybe they’ll hafta do other things to survive and not go the way of the newspapers and the auto manufacturers and other industries that are sliding inexorably toward obscurity.

He’s wrong, of course. If he’s only now getting around to “innovative” moves like scaling back programming and stripping Jay Leno at 10 PM or questioning whether it’s wise to program 22 hours a day, then he’s way too late to make any significant changes that will enable the network to survive, let alone thrive.

Fox may survive and thrive– they’ve almost always done things differently from The Big Three, so they already don’t have an institutional inertia when it comes to all the conventions of network programming.

Will it work? Probably not. (Finke has all sorts of speculation and scenarios, but she’s blowing smoke.)

Stay tuned.

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