That was it? That? A tedious hour of lame jokes, leftover unfunny comedy bits and asking Kanye West what his mom (deceased) would say about his rude antics?
The Jay Leno Show (Monday to Friday 10 p.m., NBC, CITY-TV) was so lame in its first outing that it gives "lame" a bad name. In fact the best part of the excruciating hour was the commercials. Watching in Canada, you got Iggy Ignatieff's turn as a woodland creature in that Liberal ad, and it was the highlight. All you gotta do is turn down the sound and imagine that Iggy, in his woodland-creature-blinking-in-the-sunshine mode, is saying, "Look, what we must do is forage for nuts and berries, like we used to do, and we'll be fine. Trust me, I'm a woodland creature from way back. On several continents too."
The viewing numbers are in - 17.7 million American viewers watched Leno's debut on Monday. All I gotta say is that probably amounts to 17 million seriously disappointed, underwhelmed people.
The numbers are superficially impressive. Leno's show has been promoted relentlessly and discussed to the point of exhaustion in the press. Anticipating a big Leno audience, competing networks got out of the way. At 10 p.m., CBS aired a repeat of CSI: Miami, drawing six million viewers and ABC showed the movie Dreamgirls, again, getting 4.3 million.
Right up until Monday, some pundits were predicting that if Leno's show was great and a smash hit, then U.S. network TV would change enormously and soon we'd see David Letterman, Conan O'Brien and Jimmy Kimmel in prime time, all the time. That notion is now funnier than anything that happened on Leno's first show.
Leno arrived and did the doziest monologue. Joe Biden jokes. There was a brutally unfunny spoof of reality show Cheaters . Band leader Kevin Eubanks was seeing a Leno-look-alike. The much-heralded (by Leno this summer) outside-the-studio bit was Dan Finnerty - a guy with the comedy chops of a 12-year-old class clown. He serenaded an embarrassed-looking woman at a car wash - it felt as long as Conrad Black's incarceration. Jerry Seinfeld arrived in a tuxedo and there ensued an arch conversation that featured Oprah by satellite. Leno did an excruciating bit that involved using footage of Barack Obama's 60 Minutes interview. Kanye West came and Leno tried to do a Barbara Walters on him, as if West had admitted to adultery, sex addiction and being a poor tipper. Leno invoking West's late mother was particularly, mortifyingly inane. Then West and some others did some song about wearing black clothes to look cool. Finally Leno did his "Headlines" bit, which involved making fun of the names of Chinese restaurants. Apparently, Leno and his studio audience found "House of Poon" hilarious.
"I'm just trying to grasp what's going on here," Seinfeld said at one point. Aren't we all, sunshine. Aren't we all?
You can safely ignore The Jay Leno Show. Whatever else is airing at 10 p.m., Monday to Friday, is better than this. Including the guy peddling the Birkenstock collection on the Shopping Channel. And you can safely bet that The Jay Leno Show will never see most of those 17.7 million viewers again.
The Beautiful Life: TBL (The CW, A, 10 p.m.) is a new drama about the fashion racket. It is brilliantly, stunningly funny. It's not meant to be, but it is.
The gist is that most people in the fashion racket are shallow, bitchy, predatory, drug-addled and probably anorexic. Except, that is, for some farm boy from Iowa. He's Chris (Ben Hollingsworth) and he's the character we're supposed to identify with, because he's nice and new to this racket. He also takes his clothes off anywhere and any time he's asked. He's kind of like the village idiot in the fashion world. But, wait, that's not all. So that young female viewers have someone to identify with, village idiot has a puppy-love thing with young model Raina (Sara Paxton), who has "a secret past."
Anyway, Raina's the new fashion star and this annoys fellow model Sonja (Mischa Barton), who has been out of the country "for mysterious reasons" and is trying to convince her agent (Elle Macpherson!) that she still has the skinny goods for the job. Or something. The clothes are so ugly they're comical, like everything about this overwrought, rinky-dink show.
Also airing
Gotti (HBO Canada, 9 p.m.) was made in 1996, right here in Toronna. A biopic about New York mobster John Gotti, it's a by-rote film about Mafia antics with heavyset hoodlums sitting around doing imitations of the cast of The Godfather . Armand Assante plays Gotti as a gangster who rose quickly through the ranks because he was feared for his viciousness. This is donkey work for Assante, who played a very similar role in Trial by Jury (1994). He looks good in a suit and can bellow with the best of them. Anthony Quinn is embarrassingly creaky as Dellacroce, the old-style mobster who protects Gotti. However, you do see several actors who would soon achieve immortality in The Sopranos , including Dominic Chianese, who went on to become Junior Soprano, Vincent Pastore who would be Salvatore (Big Pussy) Bonpensiero and Tony Sirico as Paulie Walnuts.
The Secret World of Haute Couture (Newsworld, 10 p.m.) is an interesting look at the high end of the fashion racket. Filmmaker Margy Kinmonth goes from Paris to New York and California to meet both couture designers and customers. The upshot is that traditional American customers are getting old and dying off, and fewer wealthy young women are taking their place. There are interviews with John Galliano, Dior's designer, veteran Italian designer Valentino and with Christian Lacroix. The archive footage is only gorgeous.