• Advertising Age, Sunday, September 20, 2009 10:20 PM

NBC's "The Jay Leno Show" symbolizes the new and heartbreaking reality of broadcast-network. NBC and its rivals may no longer be able to garner the audiences that allowed them to create hours of dramas that cost tens of millions of dollars to produce each week.

The Leno show is the first sign that TV going forward will be decidedly less grand. In place of special effects, highly paid celebrities and cliffhanger plots, broadcast TV could become a venue for newsy shows that play off the headlines and live telecasts of important events to see as they happen, not hours or days later.

Media buyers don't expect Leno's ratings to be very impressive up against "The Mentalist," "Private Practice" or "CSI: Miami." Non-"Leno" viewers are probably less likely to become converts -- his vanilla demeanor is well-known, so it's not like his dynamic presence will retain a truly new demographic once competitive programming counters it at 10," says Don Seaman, MPG director of communications analysis. But that may not matter because the talk show is so cheap to produce, compared to the competition.

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