'The Jay Leno Show' Experiment Starts Monday; Will it Last?

Jay Leno's new primetime variety program, The Jay Leno Show, makes its debut on Monday, September 14, on NBC at 10 p.m. Jerry Seinfeld is his first guest, and Jay-Z, Rihanna, and Kanye West will perform as his musical guests.

The novelty of The Jay Leno Show is guaranteed to work in its first week, especially with stunt guest booking, along with the fact that the fall television season has not officially begun yet. Leno will be going against some expiring summer shows.

However, once the fall season kicks into high gear, Leno will be competing against scripted television. While Fox waves the white flag ten o'clock for local news, ABC and CBS have a combination of hit shows with a built-in audience and highly buzzed new shows.

ABC's 10 o'clock Monday-Friday schedule is as follows: Castle, The Forgotten, Eastwick, Private Practice, 20/20. CBS has a murderers' row of scripted television: CSI: Miami, The Good Wife, CSI: New York, The Mentalist, Numb3rs.

Leno has an advantage during programming lulls, such as summer doldrums, the entire month of December (when network television hibernates), and the non-sweeps months. However, these are not the marquee ratings periods. It will be hard for Leno to compete with the 10 o'clock procedural.

Leno's show format is still a mystery. Jay Leno has promised it won't be the same show as his Tonight Show. Heavily promoted during the Steelers-Titans NFL game on Thursday night, the previews look like a heavy dose of his tried-and-true Tonight Show bits: Jaywalking, Headlines, Battle of the Jaywalk All-Stars. Combined with a marquee guest and a musical act, it does feel like he is re-creating The Tonight Show.

Leno using his safety blanket may sound like a good idea, but a large part of his success on The Tonight Show is the viewers who did not care for David Letterman or Jimmy Kimmel. When he's going head-to-head with a variety of franchise procedurals, there's more variety.

Additionally, his Tonight Show fanbase skewed more on the older demographic side, and this older demographic has been CBS's bread and butter. Will grandma watch CSI: New York or The Jay Leno Show? Leno's replacement, Conan O'Brien, carried a younger demographic with him to The Tonight Show. Will this younger demographic devote two hours per night to topical monologues and standard comedy bits?

Along with Conan O'Brien, Leno has to compete with a plethora of topical comedy shows. The Daily Show and The Colbert Report on Comedy Central, Letterman and Ferguson on CBS, O'Brien, Fallon, and Daly on NBC, Jimmy Kimmel on ABC, and newcomers Wanda Sykes on Fox and George Lopez on TBS. With Leno's show, that makes over nine hours of topical talk show per night. Additionally, NBC also shoots itself in the foot by airing a half-hour Saturday Night Live Weekend Update Thursday every week in the 8 o'clock hour.

While programming live shows costs a lot less for NBC to produce than scripted dramas, it does leave NBC's pants down. If the Jay Leno variety program is an outright failure, NBC will have to grin and bear it while they scramble for five replacements. It's a bold experiment in an industry not known for coloring outside the lines, but this move does not look promising if NBC wants to get itself out of the cellar.