NBC moves Leno back to 11:35 slot
Tuesday, January 12th, 2010
By: Tom MacDonald
tmacdonald@whyy.org
A major television experiment has failed, and a move has been made by one of the major broadcast networks to fix the problem.
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NBC has announced it's moving Jay Leno back to 11:35 week nights after his 10 o'clock slot failed to gain viewership. Chris Harper is a professor of mass media at Temple University. He says the sale of NBC Universal could have prompted the change.
Harper: I think that the recent merger with Comcast really put NBC on the firing line. Comcast clearly looked at the numbers told NBC you have to fix this and I think that merger really put pressure on Jeff Zucker, the head of NBC to come up with a fix and come up with one fast and that's what happened.
Ratings for Leno's ten o'clock timeslot were down by about 30% which hurt affiliates 11 o'clock newscasts. The change will mean later starts for the Conan O'Brien and Jimmy Fallon shows – after the network's Olympics coverage.