The Jay Leno Show Sucked

The original title of this post was "The Jay Leno Show Sucks". Now that it's been officially canned from the 10pm timeslot, I have to use the past tense.

This story is interesting. The Jay Leno Show was getting lousy ratings. There were rumors circulating of its cancellation, which are finally official.

I noticed that "X Sucks" posts tend to do pretty well, especially when the criticism is justified, like with Ruby on Rails or StackOverflow.

That link had an interesting point. Affiliates were forced to go along with the Jay Leno experiment. That illustrates the fallacy of owning a franchise. Technically, affiliates are their own independent business, but they have to do what NBC parent executives demand.

During the Olympic, which are on NBC, The "Jay Leno Show" will be shortened to a half hour and will be after the Olympics. The Tonight Sow with Conan O'Brien will be moved back an extra half hour. Allegedly this change will be permanent.

Conan O'Brien's contract specifies that he is the host of the Tonight Show and that he gets the 11:30 PM timeslot. However, Conan O'Brien's contract allows the Tonight show to be pushed back to 12:05pm. Jay Leno also has a huge multiyear guaranteed contract.

It seems that NBC will have to dump either Conan O'Brien or Jay Leno. It's a waste to pay a huge salary to both of them.

NBC really should move Conan O'Brien to 10pm! I bet he'd get better ratings than Jay Leno did!

In all my wage slave job, I was an "at will employee". It seems that guaranteed employment contracts are abused by parasites who want to coast instead of doing a good job.

I only watched a few minutes of the Jay Leno Show twice. It was lousy enough to make me realize that it's a waste of time. The first episode was heavily hyped and got great ratings. The ratings rapidly tanked because the show sucks.

The problem is not "A 10PM talk show was a mistake." or "A primetime comedy/variety show is a mistake." The problem is that the actual show was lousy.

I could tell by the attitude of Jay Leno during promos that the show would be a complete failure. Jay Leno had the air of someone coasting off his past success, rather than someone really motivated to make a great show.

When Jay Leno was first promoted to Tonight Show host, he had to prove "I'm better than David Letterman!" Now, his attitude is "I'm Jay Leno! Of course my show is awesome!" It doesn't work that way. You have to actually make a good product. Jay Leno is coasting off his past success, rather than making a good show in the present.

When I see garbage like The Jay Leno Show, my attitude is "I could do better than that!" I really should attempt "promote agorism via standup comedy".

I read an article by Ira Glass that said "The key is having good taste. If you can tell the difference between good content and bad content, then you'll eventually succeed. If you're persistent, your performance will match your taste. However, it takes 10 years to become an expert." If you count my time spent blogging, plus analysis of economics I did before that, I'm probably one of the top experts on really free markets.

I shouldn't be concerned about hecklers while performing standup, especially when you see what people post Anonymously on a blog. Being in-person, plus the ability of the audience to read body language, should limit hecklers. I won't know for sure until I try. I doubt a heckler would make a stupid pro-State troll point that I haven't heard before.

Following Ira Glass' example, I try to write a blog that I'd like to have read myself, as I was cracking my pro-State brainwashing. I figured out a lot of things the hard way. It's much easier to have someone else explain something to you than to figure it out yourself.

That's the whole point of science and writing. You benefit from the work of others. That's the value of the Internet. The Internet enables people to communicate directly and bypass State censorship.

State censorship isn't just the mainstream media. It's also schools. The choice to not present Lysander Spooner or Bastiat as required reading in school introduces a huge bias. Nobody notices this bias, because they never heard of Lysander Spooner or Bastiat. Nobody heard of them, because they're never read in State schools/brainwashing centers!

It's a vicious circle that the Internet helps break. "Taxation is theft! Government is a scam!" is not a new idea. The difference is that the Internet allows intelligent people to share information directly. Without the Internet, an intelligent person is dominated by the pro-State troll parasites around them. With the Internet, intelligent people can compare notes. I wouldn't have been able to figure out as much, if I wasn't able to read bits of the truth that other people have discovered. I'm good at filtering the hidden truths from the nonsense.

Censorship occurs in what professors at universities choose to write about. A professor's salary is paid directly or indirectly via the State. Censorship occurs in what politicians choose to discuss.

For example, when politicians discuss healthcare "reform", none of them discuss the damaging effect of the AMA licensing cartel. They're so pro-State brainwashed that they never considered the issue.

Whenever I see garbage like "The Jay Leno Show", my attitude is "I could do much better than that!" Vlogging and standup comedy are on my list of things to try, but it might take 1-3 years. If I vlog or perform under my real name, my wage slave employer might choose to fire me.

The risk is not so much "State thugs will jail me for telling the truth." If that was a real risk, they would have done it when I first started blogging. Besides, it'd be awkward when I started explaining "taxation is theft" to my jailers during my interrogation. The parasitic/bad cop wouldn't listen. It would be a problem if I convinced the productive/good cop! (That's the reason policemen and cultists always travel in pairs. The parasite needs to keep the productive person focused in an evil mental state. The parasite needs the productive person to do his thinking for him.

When I see garbage like "The Jay Leno Show", my attitude is "I could do better than that!" Live performances and the Internet are a way to bypass mainstream media censorship. Vlogging and standup comedy are on my list of things to do, but I can wait a year or two. I'm still making progress on cracking my pro-State brainwashing.

Just because I'm not an overwhelming success yet, as a blogger or agorist, doesn't mean my ideas are stupid! As Ira Glass pointed out, it will take persistence over years to succeed. In the meantime, I have to support myself with a wage slave job, which limits my options. I'm not so much concerned that a State thug will arrest/kidnap/assault/murder me based on my blog. It'd be a problem if my wage slave employer fired me for my free market beliefs.

Moving Jay Leno to 11:30pm and Conan O'Brien to 10pm probably is a decent idea, but executives at NBC probably will be too risk-averse to try it. They're in full CYA mode now for their dumbass move. To hedge, they could give Conan O'Brien the 10pm timeslot only 2-3 days a week. The problem was not "A primetime talk show is stupid!" The problem is that Jay Leno was coasting off his past success rather than focused on making a good show in the present.