Jay Leno Takes It On The Chin

Jay Leno snagged mostly negative reviews with his entry into primetime as he stuck to familiar ground -- just 90 minutes earlier.

Monday's premiere of "The Jay Leno Show," which transports the longtime "Tonight Show" host to 10 p.m. EDT weekdays on NBC, was slammed as a "cut-rate, snooze-inducing, rehashed bore" by Robert Bianco of USA Today. And that was even with the presence of Leno's much-buzzed-about guest Kanye West.

The Associated Press' Frazier Moore identified "the biggest difference between Leno's new show and his old one: With his fade-out at 11 p.m., the local news began."

Of course, Leno has never been the critics' darling.

Viewers gave it the biggest audience for an entertainment show since the "American Idol" finale in May. What's next is anybody's guess.

An estimated 18.4 million viewers sampled the first night of "The Jay Leno Show" Monday, Nielsen Media Research said. But the most hyped debut of the fall season had the added advantage of being piggybacked onto one of the country's biggest stories. Leno interviewed Kanye West about why he had interrupted Taylor Swift the night before on the MTV Video Music Awards.

The challenge will be holding on to viewers. Leno's variety show will air five nights a week at 10 p.m., a grand experiment for network television to see if NBC can build a profitable business competing with dramas on its network rivals.

"It's great to launch this innovative new show with such strong initial sampling, but we realize this is just one night and that we're going to build our business in this time period with ratings that will level out over time," said Jeff Gaspin, chairman of NBC Universal Television Entertainment. "Our focus is on developing a consistent comedy viewing habit at 10 p.m. over the long haul."

NBC executives had other reasons to be cautious in their reaction. When Conan O'Brien debuted on the "Tonight" show last spring, NBC described him as the new king of late-night after one week of ratings, only to be embarrassed when O'Brien subsequently slipped behind David Letterman.

It's tough to gauge how much impact West's appearance had on the ratings. The show peaked in viewership during its second quarter-hour, during Jerry Seinfeld's appearance, Nielsen said. Only two other shows have drawn a larger prime-time audience since the summer months, NFL games that aired this past week, Nielsen said.

During his last season hosting "The Tonight Show," Leno averaged 5.2 million viewers to claim the No.1 spot in late-night.

But audience numbers aren't likely to sway The Los Angeles Times' Mary McNamara, who called the show "a strange, shallow puddle of comedy."

"This is the future of television?" she wrote. "This wasn't even a good rendition of television past."

"The future of 'The Jay Leno Show' is likely to look almost exactly like 'The Tonight Show' past," complained Alessandra Stanley of The New York Times. "So much ink has been devoted to describing how Mr. Leno's new show would depart from his old one that it was startling to see how little difference there was."

Indeed, much ink has been devoted to "The Jay Leno Show" since NBC's announcement last December.

And many questions have swirled: Will a cost-cutting comedy show stripped across weeknights imperil more expensive weekly scripted drama shows? Will the audience embrace this NBC alternative to fictional docs, cops and lawyers? Has fourth-rated NBC found a strategy that not only will improve its fortunes, but also alter the programming landscape on rival networks?

Or will this prove to be NBC's biggest flop yet?

These are questions likely to remain unresolved for months.

The premiere was relentlessly hyped by NBC all summer, even prompting Leno to crack when he arrived on stage, "This isn't another annoying promo. This is the actual show!"

For his debut, he had booked a relatively big name, Jerry Seinfeld, besides lucking into TV's biggest get, Kanye West, who was not only able to perform a song ("Run This Town," along with Jay-Z and Rihanna), but also apologize lugubriously for his bad behavior on an MTV awards show Sunday night.

Giving curious viewers yet more reason to sample Jay's first night was the fact that ABC and CBS were airing retreads during his time slot: the final hour of the 2006 film "Dreamgirls" and a rerun of "CSI: Miami," respectively.