Jay, Jimmy, Conan and the Late-Night Shuffle

NBC's challenge: keep the new guy from becoming the bad guy. / NBC

I've been linking to NBC's various press-tour announcements about its late-night changes next year, but they add up to an interesting enough big-picture of NBC's various gambles that they deserve their own post:

* First, where is Jay Leno going, when and how will NBC send him off? The first and biggest question is still unresolved, but NBC offered answers to the other two: he'll end his Tonight Show reign on May 29, and NBC promises he'll have a big, fitting send-off, as long as Jay wants it. The touchy issue, of course, is that Jay is not shuffling off to retirement: he may well be striking a deal for a competing talk show on a rival network.

So would it be weirder for NBC to spend a week puffing up a rival network's new star, or not to do it? (NBC faced a similar question when Katie Couric went to CBS, of course, but at least there she was not going to directly compete against the Today show.) Putting a popular host out to pasture and bringing in a new guy is a delicate act to begin with—hey kids, here's your new daddy!—and any perceived slighting of Jay risks making Conan O'Brien appear the bad guy by association.

* Meanwhile, Conan will slide into Jay's still-warm chair on June 1, and Jimmy Fallon will take over Late Night at an unspecified time thereafter. But the curious—and slightly bizarre—news is how Lorne Michaels', Fallon's benefactor, plans to help break him in to the job. Fallon will start doing a nightly mini-sized show online this fall.

Good idea or bad idea? Well, it does seem prudent to give Fallon a chance to work out the kinks before he goes live, although that argument makes more sense if you're coming at it from the I-can't-believe-Jimmy-Fallon-is-actually-going-to-host-Late-Night standpoint. More bizarre is one of Michaels' stated reasons for doing the webcasts, which he says he plans to post at 12:30 E.T. every night: to accustom the audience to seeing Fallon perform on-screen at that time. This seems to misunderstand the nature of web video, which is all about time-shifting and downloading. I mean, if you're actually sitting down with your laptop at half past midnight waiting for a Jimmy Fallon video to post, and you are not yourself Jimmy Fallon, is this not good evidence that there is a hole in your life?

In the end, the greatest potential benefit will not be for Fallon or for NBC Online's coffers, but rather for Fallon's producers, who can use the tryout as an extended feedback period. They'd just better hope that that feedback isn't mainly: Find a new host.