Say what you will, NBC has done a great job of suddenly making late night television fascinating.

• This piece by Alan Sepinwall is a great overview of the whole situation and Conan’s standpoint as the wronged party in his contract with NBC.
• The Hollywood Reporter’s legal blog takes a more direct look at the specific legal implications of changing The Tonight Show‘s airtime. Apparently unlike Letterman and Leno, Conan’s deal doesn’t include careful language about the time his show will appear, which gives NBC more wiggle room than it would have had with Leno. While the blog post doesn’t comment on the argument that a Tonight show which doesn’t air until tomorrow is an essentially different show, it suggests that the timeslot argument has more to do with the show’s position relative to nightly local news.
• NBC has released its post-Jay Leno Show, post-Olympics primetime schedule. It looks like it will rely heavily on the Law and Order franchise, whip up a few reality shows, and then plug the gaps with repeats, the Jerry Seinfeld project The Marriage Ref, and the much-delayed, Maura Tierney Lauren Graham show Parenthood. Best news of the schedule is a solid return date for Friday Night Lights.

Couldn’t care less about this debacle? Please to enjoy this musical clip from the 100th episode of How I Met Your Mother. (It’s mirrored, but you get the idea).

I am definitely not a journalist and this is really not a TV news blog, but it’s hard to ignore the craziness that’s swirling around right now. There were rumors flying around the internet willy-nilly yesterday, and twitter lit up like a Christmas tree, and the result of it all seems to be that NBC is admitting defeat on the Jay Leno Show experiment. Although the exact nature of the new schedule is either still undecided or unconfirmed, the majority opinion is that Leno will move back to 11:35, do a half-hour show, and then Conan will start at 12:05.

The problems have been building for a while now, with complaints most notably coming from local NBC network affiliates. Local news programs have had seriously anemic ratings with Leno as an 11 o’clock lead in (as opposed to such stirring 10pm programming as Law and Order and CSI reruns), and have been bemoaning the lost eyeballs. Add to this the NBC-Comcast deal and NBC’s weakness in almost every other timeslot, and it’s not hard to see the pressure building to make some changes.

Sitting on my couch yesterday and flipping back and forth between my computer and Vanity Fair, it’s hard to know what the final straw was. Still, a few blogs posted stories about how NBC has ordered a whopping 18 pilot episodes for next season, and wondered when they could possibly be planning to schedule those new shows with Jay Leno clogging up every 10pm weeknight. All of a sudden everyone was wondering about Leno and NBC. Jay actually did a few jokes about it last night, including the somewhat lame line that he’ll now have time to do some travelling and that he hears Fox is nice this time of year.

I feel some schadenfreude toward NBC. Cost and changing landscape and personality battles aside, from a purely good vs. bad television standpoint, The Jay Leno Show at 10pm was creatively empty TV pabulum. Not that my opinion has much do to with anything, but I’ll admit to some small feelings of pleasure that a network that chooses to replace Southland with a daily reading of stupid newspaper headlines is now in trouble. So little bad TV is punished; at least this decision seems to be headed toward the crash and burn it deserves.

At the same time, it’s easy to see that Conan O’Brien has been seriously shafted, and it looks like nothing good for him can come out of this network implosion. He’s got more as a comic than just floppy hair and oddly long limbs, and NBC and Leno seem to be doing their best to keep that secret under wraps. I also can’t help but hope NBC manages to keep its head up somehow. Whatever other disasters they’re currently airing, they are also the home to shows like Chuck, so somebody over there has got to have his or her head on straight. (Have I mentioned yet that Chuck is coming back on Sunday night? Because it is. And I am psyched. Do people still say that, “psyched”? Anyway.) So please deal with this terrible Jay Leno show idea, NBC, and then get back on the horse. Just don’t do it again.

• Is TV actually better, or do we just think it’s better because twitter says so?

• Thanks to Sunday night’s premiere of Amazing Race, I now realize it’s not that easy to herd ducks.

It's also always better to book your flights ahead of time. On *ahem* Travelocity!

• Last week on Project Runway, I discovered that my fantasy of seeing Dune stillsuits walk down the runway might not be that far off. Sadly, this designer was eliminated, but hope lives on.

This is the sketch for his dress - Borg! Scifi!

• The Show That Must Not Be Named will now have a slightly different name. That will continue to go Unnamed.

• On the Jay Leno Show last night, Julia Louis-Dreyfuss dealt with the problematic embargo against cross-network primetime guest appearances by figuring out how to advertise for CBS while appearing on NBC.

She also had "The New Adventures of Old Christine" printed on the bottom of her shoe

This week, NBC begins its new fall lineup, and however much Joel McHale has tried to make everyone pay attention to the premiere of his new comedy Community, the topic du jour is the new 10pm topical comedy talk show The Jay Leno Show. Did you miss the premiere last night? No worries, it’s on again tonight! And tomorrow night!

The Jay Leno Show - like The Tonight Show, but with chairs where the couches were

Sigh. I have nothing against Jay Leno. I have never found him particularly funny, but I know a lot of people do and that’s fine. My problems with The Jay Leno Show are bigger, more general issues.

For one, it’s not as though this show is filling any gap on network television. There are already plenty of shows where a man stands up, tells some jokes, plays some clips, interviews some celebrities, and looks generally uncomfortable while wearing a suit. We call them “late-night television shows.” Not only do they already exist on NBC’s major competitor networks, there’s already one on NBC! It’s called The Tonight Show – it’s pretty famous! Every weeknight, then, NBC is providing viewers with a form of programming already amply available, with the only added bonus being that it happens an hour and a half earlier. Sure, this doesn’t seem like a major objection. Television is full of programming that essentially copies more popular, effective shows (see, for example, every single crime procedural out there). But in the case of The Jay Leno Show, the process of replicating something already available is taking up a full hour of primetime network TV slots, Monday through Friday. Those five hours could have been five thoughtful dramas, or primetime soaps, or even stupid reality shows. From my perspective, that’s a loss.

Jay Leno did make Kanye cry, but in a month no one will remember why

My other significant reservation about the whole Jay Leno Show project is its focus on topicality. NBC is attempting to create DVR-proof programming by marketing The Jay Leno Show as being so current and of the moment that you will have to watch it every night at 10, and by the time you flip on your DVR the next day, you might as well just wait and watch the new one. (Whohoo, says NBC, we will force you to watch our advertising.) But topical television is throwaway television. For example, in last night’s episode, Kanye West talks to Jay Leno about his misbehavior during the weekend’s Video Music Awards, and describes his embarrassment over interrupting Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech. Leno introduces him by explaining Kanye wants to say a few things, and then they go through the entire interview without ever mentioning Taylor Swift’s full name or describing anything about what happened. A few months from now, that interview will be gibberish, based entirely around a reference no one even explains. It’s like producing a newspaper every night at 10pm, and it’s already out of date by the time it airs.

Topical works for programs like The Daily Show because the editorial content is separate from reporting on events, and Jon Stewart’s opinion about the Senate race may still be interesting a day later. While many people clearly find Leno hysterically funny, his humor strives to be as entirely devoid of personal opinion as possible. It works by distilling the accepted wisdom of the day and feeding it back to you with a silly sex joke. There’s not much point in watching someone repeat what everyone was thinking yesterday, even less what happened last week or last year. It’s unlikely that years from now, someone will come back to episodes of The Jay Leno Show and feel connected to them, or moved by their humor.

Obviously there are advantages to programming like The Jay Leno Show. For one, it’s much cheaper to produce than five separate hour-long shows. It’s generally inoffensive. Jay Leno seems like a cheerful, good-natured guy. Ultimately, though, The Jay Leno Show is lazy television, filling time where more thoughtful shows used to be, meant to be watched and then forgotten. Is that the most we can ask of media, of entertainment? Apparently for NBC on weeknights at 10pm, it is.