Considering how much station branding goes to the weather team and how much of a draw the weather forecast is, they'll never do that. And again, even if the stories are repeated, the viewers who are watching more than one newscast are power viewers and are okay with it. Otherwise, it's new to everyone else.

People care a LOT more about their local news than national news. And the affiliates want a good lead in - they'd be better served by getting it from a scripted show earlier in the evening than more news.

I think that Alan is mistaken when he thinks that television in the past was a golden age when content mattered more than advertising. I think it was in the book The Making of Star Trek that someone tells the story of writing for television in the 1960s. The hero was being menaced by bad guys, and he was going to pick up a tire iron to defend himself. The advertisers didn't allow the scene to be broadcast like that, because it suggested a broken car. The writer had to change the tire iron to a brick.

I remember when network newscasters talked about the facts of the day, and then picked up a box of shampoo and said that it was the best.

Television has always been about the advertising first.

Don't worry. Once Alan passes away, somebody else will take up Alan's "logo bug cause" and rant about it constantly well into the future.

If not an actual real person, an AI avatar will be conjured up or designed where such an entity will last for eternity.

Then who's watching Fox News, CNN and MSNBC?

What I am saying is that it very much seems to me that NBC is saying, "We've got this valuable hour in prime time every night, but it is too expensive to program, so let's give it away to the local stations to squander."
Or NBC could see this as an opportunity to take their "serve the public interest" responsibility seriously and maybe do some fucking good with that hour.

From Dallas Texas, the Flash, apparently official, President Kennedy died at 1 PM central standard time, some 38 minutes ago. [pause] And speaking of dead, do you have dry, lifeless hair? Then you need to use Prell shampoo

Have you watched Jay Leno's recent videos? The man is old. He moves slowly when he gets into a car. I doubt that he could handle a five days a week television program anymore.

This. First television was used to sell and broadcast advertising. Then somebody came up with the idea of showing old movies in between the commercials. Then somebody had the idea of making original shows to put between the commercials.
The ads are a box of cereal. The show is the prize inside. The trick is to get people to buy a cereal they don't like just to get the prize inside. They've pull that trick off pretty well. The opposite is the Superbowl. People who never watch football just to see the ads.
Originally an advertiser would dictate what shows were on the schedule, on what day, at what time. Networks would sell a time slot to an advertiser and the advertiser would decide what show aired. Ford might own 8pm-9pm on NBC. Somebody makes a pilot and shows it to Ford. Ford likes it and tells NBC to put the show on at 8pm. Pilots were shopped around to the advertisers who owned the time slots, not the networks. That's why the products were actually mentioned in the shows. The networks would hold back a few time slots to show stuff they produced and sell advertising like it's done today.

It's like trading cards. They started as a premium with a pack of cigarettes. Topps is/was a bubble gum/candy company. They were not involved in any way with the manufacture of trading cards. They started giving cards away free with bubblegum. When you were buying a pack of Baseball or Star Wars cards the cards were free, you bought the bubblegum. TV is the same way.

This is a good analogy
Burger King is offering drinks in Star Wars character cups. You're paying for the drink, the cup is free. All you want is the cup. You go into Burger King and pay them the soft drink price for just the empty cup. You're buying what everybody else is getting for free. That's what you are doing if you pay to stream commercial tv shows ad free..

It's a joke, reminding people of NBC's previous genius plans for the 10 o'clock hour.

He gets around pretty good for 72. He still does stand up all the time - that's 90 minutes on stage standing/moving around. No reason why he couldn't host a show again. Except, of course, that he doesn't want to.

Well, I'm going to question the economics you are describing. When I was a child, you could buy an individual piece of good bubble gum for a penny, but a pack of baseball cards with one piece of shitty gum cost a dime. So it would be crazy to think that I was buying the gum and getting the cards for free. I was clearly buying the cards I wanted with a crappy piece of gum included.

I understand that Topps was originally a just a candy company, but they diversified and went into the baseball card selling business.

Jay Leno has Jay Leno's Garage on CNBC and he seems fine though he has been out of the talk show game for 8 years now.

Maybe we should have saw this coming when NBC has not aired any new shows and all repeats on Sun nights.

AGT, Voice, and American Ninja rerurns WTF?

I thought Sun was the most or one of the most valuable days of real estate when it came to TV ratings?

It is like when Sunday Night Football is over they don't care what airs on Sundays.

Isn't that just during summer that they show reruns on Sunday night? I expect they'll have original programming on Sundays after football ends. I know they used to run Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist on Sundays but that was a few seasons ago now.

They typically program Sun-Fri, so 12 hours.

L&O and Chicago Shows would take up half of these slots.

NBC will probably just do 10/13 episode season shows like La Brea, and not do the 22 unless its studio owned or they can heavily sell it.

Broadcast just doesn't matter anymore. They would rather drive the consumers to their respective streamers where all the other expensive content is, waiting to get paid for. NBC got out of the Hulu deal a year early for a reason, and dumping 10pm next season makes sense. They already trained the Hulu filks to head to Peacock.

That was the only original show and Good Girls but other than those shows it was and still all repeats on the Sun night primetime block.

A piece of Bazooka (made by Topps) sells for a penny. How do they get more people to buy a penny piece of bubblegum? They license baseball players, pay to have the cards printed, and included 5 cards with a piece of gum for a nickel. The extra four cents covers the cost of the cards. Everytime a pack of cards sells, they've sold another penny piece of gum.

When a fast food place has movie tie in soft drink cups they don't raise the price. They just want to sell the drinks.

Pepsi bought Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and KFC in order to sell pop. They don't give a shit about the food. They break even on that. The food is to lure people in to buy Pepsi products. They are not in the food business. They exist to sell Pepsi products and nothing else.

He hosts the daily reboot of "You Bet Your Life" in syndication, but likely tapes an entire week's worth in one day.

Those are networks with a global reach. Per capita, local news trounces them.

NBC would be better served giving that time to affiliates. They won't be able to program news that draws as much as the primetime content they are ditching and that will hurt the affiliates who depend on the network for a good lead-in to their 10/11PM news.

So, if I want a piece of bubble gum, I'm not going to do the obvious thing and buy a piece of gum for a penny, I'm going to buy a pack of baseball cards for a nickel?

I don't know what was going through the minds of Topps executives 70 years ago when they started down this road, but pretty quickly and fairly obviously, they put themselves in the business of selling baseball cards ALONG WITH running a separate business that sells gum and candy.

For example, Pepsi is in the business of selling soda. Pepsi is also in the business of selling water. Pepsi is also in the business of selling fried chicken. Pepsi is also in the business of selling tacos. Pepsi is also in the business of selling pizza.


Actually, they want to draw people into their restaurants to buy meals (food and drinks) to get the cups. It's been decades since I bought any of this stuff, but I remember (if you asked) they would give you your drink in a regular cup and give you a pristine promo cup separately.[/quote]

That's not true.

If it was true, then Pepsi would not be in the pizza delivery business, where relatively few customers buy drinks.

Also, since Pepsi makes billions of dollars in profits selling their drinks in stores, going to all the trouble to own and run restaurants all over the world JUST to sell more drinks is economic insanity. It is true that soft drinks have the highest price to cost ratio, but for example, the price to cost ratio of potatoes boiled in soybean oil is also very high.

So a better lead-in to the 10/11 local news is more local news before that?

If the arrangement ends up being that the affiliates get that primetime hour, but The Tonight Show now starts at 10/11, then I get it. Otherwise NBC is just creating (IMO) a 90 minute programming wasteland between the end of primetime programming and the start of late night programming.

Or maybe this is just the first obvious step in what will be the process of broadcast television completely abandoning scripted programming all together.

I'd much rather see Jimmy Fallon bumped up to 10pm than cutting an hour of primetime.
NBC has already given up the slot after Seth Meyers. Heck, they could then bump up Seth Meyers
an hour earlier and ditch his old slot too...

That absolutely seems like something to do. If people watch Fallon at 11;30/10:30, wouldn't more people watch it at 10/9? Except NBC would be terrified to try that after the Jay Leno Show failure.

It could be a good idea but could they also fill the current Seth Meyers with a new host so maybe you could have 3 1 hr talk shows back to back to back?

Maybe talk shows are less expensive to produce?

Woah woah woah. People still watch the talk shows at night? What's the age demographic on that? It must be cheap enough (or the local syndicators don't see value in those slots).

Here in Austin, after Seth Meyers, it's a Friends rerun, a replay of an earlier NBC news show, Dr Phil, and then the Today branded programming starts at 3 am.
If NBC doesn't want to be bothered with programming an hour of primetime, no reason to think they'd bother to do another original hour after Midnight.