Pluggers

Speaking of Jay Leno, Time has posted James Poniewozik’s excellent cover story on NBC’s experiment/gamble/cost-cutting measure. (It includes quotes from Fred Silverman, who says that if the show succeeds, t will be the most significant thing to happen in broadcast television in the last decade.” And attention must be paid to anything Fred Silverman says, now that he’s no longer the most ineffective Silverman in NBC history.) But the thing that’s really striking, and that doesn’t bode well for the watchability of the show, is that Leno appears to be taking his regular-Joe, death-of-common schtick to an even higher level than I had previously thought possible. His opening quote is a classic of the genre: