Jay Leno Update: How's It Going So Far?

We knew that the story of The Jay Leno Show would take a while to play out, and we only have the early data, but so far, it's gone just about as expected — complete with the fact that how the show is doing is a highly subjective question.

The first night's ratings were, to put it plainly, huge — more than 18 million people is a lot in the current broadcast environment. NBC could hardly have hoped for a more successful kickoff.

But there were two big asterisks next to that number. One was that the show featured Kanye West, then at the center of a an explosive but ephemeral controversy involving his behavior at the Video Music Awards. The other was that the regular season hadn't started yet, and the competition that Leno would eventually face at 10:00 p.m. on weeknights was lying dormant, waiting to see just how deep it could sink its fangs into him once the time came to wake up.

The giant awakens, after the jump.

 

The ratings have sagged since then, and last night was the first full night of real, regular-season competition. Among broadcast networks, Leno was on opposite ABC's Castle and CBS's CSI Miami, both returning with their season premieres. (Fox doesn't put on original programming at 10:00, remember.)

Leno was soundly smoked by both premieres. He wound up with 5.67 million total viewers, while the very popular CSI: Miami had 13.73 million and even Castle, hardly considered a giant hit, had 9.43 million. For people who would like to see the Leno experiment fail (not so much because of Leno himself as because watching all of prime-time turn into inexpensive variety and talk shows doesn't appeal), it looked like good news.

Among other things, for all the heavy promotion Leno's show has received and continues to receive, and for all of NBC's insistence that viewers want to watch comedy at 10:00 p.m., that's more than a million viewers down from NBC's weeknight average over the last year for the time slot, according to the network's own numbers as passed along by TV By The Numbers

On the other hand, the idea has never been for Leno to come in first. Or necessarily second. The idea has been for Leno to come in under budget and be so cheap to produce that it doesn't matter if the audience, relatively speaking, is small. Some commentators have taken issue with this entire approach as highly likely to backfire, but a small audience bought ultra-cheap is clearly what NBC intends.

One of the interesting questions is whether this is where Leno's ratings will settle, or if not, how far they might fall or rebound. On the one hand, both Castle and CSI Miami probably spark more interest when they premiere than they will on a typical night. But on the other hand, if interest is dropping and Leno is still benefiting from some sampling by the undecided ... you can see how it's still hard to tell.

So far, nobody who looked hard at the situation ahead of time is surprised, except perhaps by the fact that the premiere was even bigger, and the subsequent dropoff was even more dramatic, than some expected.So far, it doesn't look like NBC has been foiled (the show is presumably just as cheap as anticipated), but it also doesn't look like a masterstroke.

Tonight should see Leno tick back up, as he faces the pilots of two new shows: ABC's The Forgotten and CBS's The Good Wife.