Is Jay Walking?

NBC's affiliates are grumbling quite a bit about the dismal performance of Jay Leno's 10 pm show. Enough so that there are rumors the show is canceled. The show is hurting NBC, no doubt. And it doesn't look like things'll improve any time soon, even though Jay supposedly has an ironclad 2-year deal.

So what can NBC do? Any major changes would be admitting they screwed up, but I suppose they're beyond that. Worse is that paying off Jay would be expensive--the whole point of the five-nights-a-week concept was how cheap it would be. And the last thing they'd want to do is make Leno a free agent--in fact, his main value to NBC right now is he's not on against them in a late night slot.

So the rumor is they'll kick him back to late night--which would probably mean Conan is gone. (Hey, two birds, one stone.) But there are other ways to deal with this. Maybe they could cut his show back to three, then two, then one hour a week, as they replace it with real prime time shows. Or maybe they could make his show half an hour and put it on earlier.

No matter how bad things are, the good thing is TV fortunes can turn on a dime--there's no problem that a hit or two can't solve, as NBC learned years ago when The Cosby Show and Golden Girls put them on top. And as CBS, ABC and Fox learned not that long ago when they all passed NBC.