I admit to being a fan of Jay Leno. By fan I mean I have been recording his program for years and watching when I feel like watching some television. I don’t watch much TV, other than sports. While eating dinner, I like to watch something for an hour that will not piss me off or make me crazy. Leno is the perfect choice. His brand of humor is broad based and well within the bounds of common decency and middle-class respectability.
Leno’s jokes are PG-13, his political humor sticks to the obvious from the headlines and it is not particularly ideological. He makes fun of whoever is in the news, regardless of party or status. His bits after his monologue are similarly tame, mostly letting regular people do silly things for the camera. The first 30 minutes make for a good dinner time show. I rarely watch his guests as I don’t follow pop culture.
All that said, I therefore took note of the fact he was being forced out by his employers in favor of a person named Jimmy Fallon. A quick search tells me Leno was dominating his counterparts, including the man-boy favorite, Jimmy Kimmel. The old Marxist David Letterman stagers on in third place. As Leno’s forced exit grew closer, his rating soared to the point where he was becoming a cultural phenomenon.
His final show scored huge numbers. According to the people who care about these things, his final show was one of the most watched in decades. As an empirically minded person, 14 million viewers in a nation of 300 million looks tiny to me, but people who make millions to know about this stuff say otherwise. It is just a reminder that culture is not rational in the linear sense of the term.
If a major company decided to retire its top selling and most profitable product, for a new product that is obviously inferior, it could be excusable. Even the best and brightest get wild ideas in their head about what lies around the corner. Front running, or attempts at it, is what gets investors in the most trouble. Sticking with the tried and true is boring, especially for young people, so change for the sake of change is common.
Television is a different thing, in that the nature is short term. The whole point is to get a hit, ride it until it dies and then jump out the window with a suitcase and the cigar box full of cash. NBC tried this a few years back and it was a costly and embarrassing disaster. To do it again when Leno is riding even higher than the last time raises the question. Why does NBC hate him?
What we’re see is the work of fanatics. I first bumped into this when I was a kid working in Washington. I worked for a Congressman doing nonsense work. Back in the old days, this was common. I’m sure it is a rigid process these days, but three decades ago it was not, so you got a fun mix of personalities. The law student in charge of the young staff was a nice girl, but a hard thumping liberal feminist.
Inevitably she set her sights on me as someone who had to be run out of the office as a trouble maker. Her reason, which she told me when I confronted her, was that I was not “very liberal.” That’s all that mattered to her. So much so she did not note that I was the favorite of the congressman’s wife, driving her around town. The result was they found a new person to supervise the kids and volunteers.
It was my first experience with a fanatic. The second experience was talking with an Iranian exile. He was a student when the Shah fell, but he was not a fanatic or even religious, as far as I could tell. He thought the Islamists were nuts and was one of the first people I heard talk about the danger of Islamic fundamentalism. He told me a story about his time in the army during the Iraq war to illustrate his point.
His unit was near the front lines and they were preparing for an offensive. Between them and the Iraqi army was a minefield. Saddam’s army was trained and developed by Soviet advisers, so it relied about Soviet tactics. That mean they used a lot of mine fields. The Iranian commander asked for volunteers to clear a minefield. About two dozen Revolutionary Guards volunteered for the job.
After some prayer, they ran across the minefield, blowing up the mines with their feet. A second wave of volunteers followed showing that the mines had been cleared. That’s the definition of a fanatic. The object of their fanaticism changes, but everything else is the same. The true believer gives up his identity for that of the group, so sacrifice is the ultimate expression of faith. The act counts for more than the result.
The point of this diversion is that NBC is run by fanatics. A night watching MSNBC, for example, is a descent into madness. Within living memory, liberal members of the press would have mocked these people as the aluminum foil hat crowd. Today they run the news division of NBC. Inside the building is a daily competition between fanatics to see who is the most committed to the cause. Leno is not one of them.
In such an asylum, a non-believer like Leno would be suspect. In a weird way, his popularity is confirmation of his heresy. Because normal people like him and he gets along with normal people, it is assumed he is an enemy of the cause, so they will do what must be done to run him off. That’s not to say his replacement is a fanatic. He’s just not the guy they see as the enemy. So, the change will be made.