NYMag Takes a Hit at Leno, Zucker, and NBC

Last week New York Magazine printed a pretty scathing article on NBC, entitled "Why NBC Deserves Better Than Leno". The article is focused on what it considers to be the network's biggest problems, Leno, Jeff Zucker, and potentially Comcast. Rather than give you a synopsis I'm just going to post a few of my favorite quotes, because honestly, NYMag pretty much hit the nail on the head.

On why it's clear NBC is in trouble: It’s easy to enumerate how dire things are for the network: The fourth-place finishes, night after night, in both total viewers and the 18-to-49-year-old demographic that still serves as TV’s gold standard. The absence—for the third year running—of any new hit show.

This is about a company that has lately seemed to hold in contempt the very idea of a broadcast network, and that has become a symbol of the death of ambition in an industry that, in its glory days, attempted to program for both mass and class. Without that goal, a network is nothing but a basic-cable channel with a gloomier business plan and an uglier balance sheet.

On Jeff Zucker: If you don’t really believe in network television as a workable model anymore, why run a network? Broadcast TV, even in an age of infinite options, is still an institution with heft and force, but Zucker has often behaved like the grudging caretaker of a dying giant. His spin on falling numbers? The whole system is broken!

On Leno and the NBC brand: The face of the network, by virtue of sheer omnipresence, is Jay Leno, who, at 59, is not any network’s demographic ideal. He may not be killing NBC, as TV Guide recently speculated, but it’s beginning to feel like he’s participating in an assisted suicide. One thing’s already clear: Remaking an entire prime-time lineup in his familiarly peevish image was a Hail Mary pass, not a long-term business strategy. And one suspects the network knows it.