NBC WANTS LENO TO REMAIN IN ITS STABLE

NBC wants Jay Leno to stick around after he hands over the Tonight show to Jimmy Fallon early next year. Speaking to members of the Television Critics Association on Saturday, the network’s entertainment chief Robert Greenblatt said, “Nothing would make us happier than to have him, a la Bob Hope, stay at the network.” Hope, […]

KIMMEL ON LENO: “F*** HIM!”

The late-night wars may become more heated in January when ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel goes head-to-head against NBC’s Jay Leno at 11:35 p.m. nightly. Interviewed by the New York Times‘s media writer Bill Carter at a public forum in New York Monday night, Kimmel said that the proudest moment of his career came when he appeared […]

PHYLLIS DILLER DEAD AT 95

Veteran comedian Phyllis Diller, a onetime housewife who made her TV debut as a contestant on Groucho Marx’s quiz show in the early 1950s and went on to make dozens, if not hundreds, of TV and film appearances over more than half a century, has died in Los Angeles at the age of 95. The […]

LENO AND TONIGHT: BACK TO 2009

For Jay Leno and the Tonight show, it must have seemed like 2009 all over again. That was the year that NBC decided to move him into primetime as it turned Tonight over to Conan O’Brien. Leno reportedly got a hefty raise — to $25 million — when that occurred, and he also was able […]

ABC’S NIGHTLINE REMAINS NO. 1 IN LATE-NIGHT

Among the late-night shows, ABC’s Nightline remained the top-rated show for the third week in a row among both total viewers and those 25-54, the key demographic group for advertisers during the late-night periods. Nightline counted 3.80 million total viewers of which 1.49 million were in the 25-54 age group. NBC’s The Tonight Show was […]

LENO AND LETTERMAN TAKE BIG RATINGS HITS

It was not an auspicious start-of-the-season week for either Jay Leno or David Letterman. With DVR use way up and more and more viewers watching shows via cable’s on-demand technology or via Netflix, Hulu and other streaming services, or catching hipper, less restricted hosts on cable, like Jon Stewart and Conan O’Brien, the two late-night […]

ABC’S NIGHTLINE BEATS RIVALS IN ALL CATEGORIES

It was a week when both The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and Late Night with David Letterman were both airing reruns — allowing ABC’s Nightline to take over as the late-night ratings champ. The network said Thursday that Nightline ranked No. 1 among total viewers, adults 25-54 and adults 18-49. “This is the first […]

THE VOICE PROMO TO DELAY TONIGHT AND SNL

Hoping to give its new singing competition series The Voice an unusual promotional treatment, NBC is planning to delay the start of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno some 12 minutes tonight (Thursday) for a preview look at the Mark Burnett-produced series. Likewise Saturday Night Live will be delayed two minutes on Saturday for the […]

CONAN HASN’T HEARD FROM JAY — DOESN’T EXPECT TO

Conan O’Brien says that he has not heard directly from Jay Leno since he was told by NBC officials that they intended to move The Jay Leno Show to 11:35 p.m. and The Tonight Show to midnight (a proposal that O’Brien rejected, opening the way for Leno to resume hosting Tonight). In recent interviews, O’Brien […]

JAY BEATS DAVE — BUT CONAN’S RATINGS WERE HIGHER

NBC boasted on Thursday that The Tonight Show with Jay Leno has beaten CBS’s Late Show with David Letterman over the first 11 weeks of the current season by an average of 7 percent among the key demographic group of adults 18-49. Among that group, Tonight has averaged 1.26 million viewers, while Late Show has […]

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