The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [134]
CHAPTER NINE
THE POWER OF TEN
In the outrageously overacted scene, a cold open to a new TV show, a fake college professor, looking more like a used-car salesman in a local TV commercial, was giving a class full of girls with big hair and guys in mullets some rigorous instruction in the intricacies of network television.
One student stood up to offer his intentionally pretentious analysis of an article on how “the temporality of physical sexual attraction necessarily undermines one’s prime-time viability—and the descent into cable is inevitable.”
Though fraught with potential meaning for the program’s host, who was seated in the back row of the class during the first moments of The Jay Leno Show, that supposedly funny line was not precisely predictive of the course of his career.
The entertainment that followed turned out to be a strange mix of taped segments, awkward interviews with the audience, a truncated monologue, “angry-Jay” rants, guest appearances from a lineup that included Vanna White and Doug Llewelyn, and a brief cameo from a guy in high-waisted jeans and golf shirt, ostensibly coming on to this trying-much-too-hard romp to make his “dramatic debut” in a scene from The Glass Menagerie.
That would be David Letterman. But he wasn’t around for long. Dave walked out onstage, he greeted Jay, the lights went black, a shot rang out, and when the dust cleared, there was Letterman, stretched out onstage, allegedly shot dead. The faux-irritated but too-busy-to-care Jay made light of the moment, declaring they needed to “get this stiff out of here.”
Between ultrastrained moments like Llewelyn—the onetime “court reporter” for The People’s Court—covering a “real trial” between a creationist and an evolutionist (something having to do with a pet monkey) and Jay unaccountably (and unfunnily) breaking a parked car’s window with a sledgehammer because it had a “Baby on Board” sign and he didn’t see any baby inside, Leno went around finding “clues” about the Letterman “murder” in the audience. These consisted of random letters of the alphabet, which he handed to Vanna to post on a board in some kind of Wheel of Fortune code meant to spell out the name of the Letterman killer.
Actually, though, right after the shooting moment, Jay had told viewers—those “at home with VCRsʺ—to tape the show and play back the blackout scene “really slow” to see who the real killer was. If they did, they would have seen that it was in fact Jay himself who knocked Dave off—and, yes, that was the predictive highlight of The Jay Leno Show.
But it was not the Jay Leno show that premiered on NBC at ten p.m. in September 2009. This was a much earlier Jay Leno Show, also on NBC, but one that aired in 1986. At that time NBC had already cast its eye on Jay as a potential late-night talent, mainly thanks to his many killer (in a different sense of that word) appearances with Letterman on Late Night. The network agreed to set Jay up in a pilot, his second for NBC. (The first, also an embarrassing miss, had been intended specifically to be considered for prime time.) This one was designed to showcase Jay’s varied comedy talents for possible use as part of what NBC viewed as its “late-night wheel” on Saturday nights—Saturday Night Live and shows they could use on the weeks when SNL was dark.
That was the plan until they got a look at The Jay Leno Show. Shot, for obscure reasons, on a pier under the Ben Franklin Bridge in Philadelphia, the concept and the material impressed no one. Jay did do a monologue, but it was the furthest thing imaginable from the topical Leno joke fests he would come to be famous for. Wearing what was then his signature hip-guy gear—black pants, reddish blazer, sleeves rolled a quarter up—Jay told jokes about bad air travel and railed about corporations. But the laughs he got from an audience spread out around tables to create an ersatz nightclub