Dear James Poniewozik,
I hope you’re happy. And by that I mean, was it really necessary to ruin my holiday weekend by reminding me — on the cover of the the new issue of TIME Magazine no less — that Jay Leno is the future of television.
I mean we’re talking about NBC here. Of course Jay Leno is the future of television. This is after-all the perennial fourth place network that is so desperate for a win, they took it upon themselves to crown Conan O’Brien the new king of late night two weeks into his tenure. The network that we’re fairly confident will import any show from any country in an effort to find the next OFFICE. Heck, over a decade later, NBC President Jeff Zucker, Kevin Reilly, Ben Silverman, Andrea Bromstad is still searching for the next FRIENDS.
That, and you said it yourself, “NBC has set the bar low enough for a sleeping man to clear. If Leno can just get the ratings he did in late night, some 5 million viewers (paltry by 10 p.m. standards), his show will be more profitable than what it replaced in that time slot.”
So yeah, there is pretty much no denying it. Jay Leno is the future of television, at least where NBC is concerned. But to quote Valerie Cherish (Lisa Kudrow’s unforgettable HBO character that would never find a home on the now homogenized NBC) “I don’t need to see that!” 
