On the series’ fourth night, NBC’s The Jay Leno Show hit its lowest ratings yet, drawing just 8.5 million viewers in the 10 p.m. timeslot — which is 53 percent down from the show’s Monday premiere and 36 off from Wednesday night’s airing. And for the first time since it premiered, The Jay Leno Show did not win its time period in total viewers — that accolade went to a rerun of CBS’s hot procedural The Mentalist. The first week of Leno has been up and down. Here’s a quick rundown of total viewership so far this week:
Monday: 18.4 million
Tuesday: 11.1 million
Wednesday: 13.4 million
Thursday: 8.5 million
I think the show should be cancelled. I must prefer the news shows being on at that hour (i.e. Dateline), or classic dramas like SVU.
Agreed! I’m so going to miss my SVU @ 10 pm on Tuesdays! That was a staple for so many years…NBC
8.5 million viewers is more than MOST NBC shows get.
The show is officially a disaster. I guarantee that Conan will be paid off and Jay will be put back in the 11:30 slot. If these are Jay’s ratings for the first week, imagine what they will look like in a month, they will be on life support.
Naw. This was all just a ruse to get rid of Leno. They wanted Conan to get the job and bring younger audiences, but they didn’t want Leno to compete with him. They knew this would be a disaster, but they’d have Leno stuck in a non-compete contract and they can say that they tried, since they gave the show prime property on the schedule and Leno can’t say they didn’t try to promote the heck out of it. I’m glad anyway. Now can we get our 5 hours worth of scripted shows back on NBC?
Good point!
this is great new!!! three cheers for real shows at 10 pm!
Agreed…and beaten by a RERUN no less. Hopefully once the new season starts the ratings will tank to non existance.
No kidding!
I can’t wait to see this experiment deservedly fail.
The problem is that the talk show is really cheap compared to developing new scripted shows (half of which get cancelled anyhow), so it’s going to have to really tank (<4 million viewers) to get cancelled.
The ratings aren’t too bad this week , but next week Leno will get obliterated by shows like csi , the mentalist , law&order . It’s only a matter of time before they pull the plug on Jay .
I’m sure that Jay won’t be obliterated by Law and Order since they are both broadcast on NBC.
How can Leno get obliterated by law&order. It is on the same network. The numbers are not bad. It is doing better than a lot of the old nbc dramas and it cost a lot less. NBC will stick with it.
The only reason his show on Thursday went down in the ratings is because he had Halle Berry on and i dont think she is relevant anymore and people dont care about her anymore to watch her.
Meow.
LOL…good one.
NBC would be thrilled if it stayed at 8.5 million. It is dirt cheap to produce and that would beat a lot of 10 p.m. shows. If it continues to decline, then they may have a problem.
Hell, NBC will be thrilled if it stays above 3 million. For a show this cheap, it really doesn’t need many viewers to make money for the network. That’s the entire point.
Yeah, but what are the demographics of those 8.5 million viewers? Is it anything an advertiser wants to pay for?
True, I bet SVU brought in younger views (contrary to what you may think, SVU is pretty big with twentysomethings)
This thing with Jay could work if they didn’t do it 5 nights a week. NBC was weak on Monday night, Friday night and (like everyone) Saturday night at 10pm. 3 nights of Jay on these nights might work and I bet he’d still draw good numbers on Saturday night. The burnout effect might be diminished.
BTW – I think the show has been pretty lame. But if you liked it at 11:30 you probably like it at 10.
I’m actually grateful to NBC! This Jay Leno show in prime time has simplified by television viewing experience–unlike the Wednesday at 9 pm scheduling nightmare–Ionly have to Tivo 2 networks at 10 pm.
The ratings will have to be consistently awful for NBC to cancel.The show is so cheap to produce that they will not want to go
back to doing risky scripted-shows.
i dont think people should look at it as a decline
each day think of it as another show so only compare mondays ep to next monday and tuesday to next tuesday and so on
you see this is because each day he has different competitions and different people will watch it in different days so ya its not a show where he’ll have a basic audience every single day
Jay’s ratings will go up and down depending on who his guests are. If people think they are in for a fun interview they’ll watch. If not they won’t. First week confirms it.
I like Jay Leno and think the show is good. People have been giving this show a hard time before it even started. Its a lot like the tonight show so it should do well…and its only in its first week.
can’t wait to see what Dave has to say after he gets back on Monday!! hoo-ha
Not good for Jay. He hasn’t had much competition yet in his time slot, but when all the other 10 pm shows really start gearing up…he’ll need another Kanye moment to regain momentum.