There's been a ton of great writing on this whole "Leno in Primetime Land" thing -- Alan Sepinwall's scathing analysis for the NJ Star-Ledger, Bill Zehme's claustrophobically weird yet undeniably insightful essay on Leno for The Daily Beast -- but the most interesting thing we've read about the effects of Leno's move to 10 p.m. comes from the LA Times' business section, which notes that when this goes down, NBC will have 17 1/2 hours of nightly talkshows a week, as compared to only 17 primetime hours of everything else - reality shows, sitcoms, dramas, Deal or No Deal. As a consequence, the going's gonna be real tough on every talk-show host not named Leno to book guests. Jay, of course, dismisses any potential effect this might have on The Tonight Show With Conan O'Brien:
That won't be any problem. I mean, it's less of a problem than if we were on competing networks. . . . I would rather fight with my family than the other networks.
Well, yeah, you say that; you're the guy in primetime.
O'Brien, of course, is still keeping on his happy face, but another question remains: what the hell will everybody talk about for seventeen and a half hours on NBC? The fact that no one watches anything else on the network? Are we not getting into chicken/egg territory here?