Team Daredevil

When the Jay Leno-Conan O'Brien situation imploded the other day, my first thought had nothing to do with the specifics of where Jay would go or what would happen to Conan. It wasn't about whether I was on Team Conan or Team Jay (is anyone on Team Jay?). And it wasn't about how much of a disaster the whole Jay-at-10 move had turned out to be. No, it was that this bad move is going to make taking even good risks with programming a lot harder. Again.

I'm like everyone else in being entertained by the spectacle of a television network melting down before our very eyes, but I'm also concerned that Leno's abject failure will be used as another excuse for media companies not to take risks. Look at the radio business: Taking chances on programming is something radio on the whole doesn't like to do. Innovators aren't always encouraged, unless doing the same old format with fewer commercials and a new slogan is "innovation." And doing something that hasn't been proven elsewhere, why, that's crazy talk.

You know what I mean. Most radio executives are, where programming is concerned, risk-averse. Give them the same 10-in-a-row-no-repeat-Thursdays most-variety eighties-nineties-and-today format and they're happy, until the ratings suffer, and then they want a change, only to something that's worked someplace else. Someone else has to take the risk. And those someone-elses tend to get scorned and laughed at and dismissed as failures... unless they manage to succeed, in which case everyone else immediately copies them. Even so, if something is tried but not properly executed (say, like "Free FM"), the experts are quick to pronounce that such a format will never ever in a million years work, even if there's a chance that, done right, it'll be a massive success. The industry's quick to declare failure.

TV's like that, too. Shows, schedule changes, ideas... they usually don't get a lot of time to find their way. That's not to say that NBC's Leno risk was smart, especially since, while the ratings were what everyone thought they'd be, the network seems to have ignored how badly it would hurt the affiliates. But does Leno's failure mean that a show like that in prime time CAN'T work? Was it the entire idea of a talk show at 10 pm (9 Central!) that failed, or a Jay Leno talk show that failed? Maybe it was a case of wrong guy, wrong content, wrong time slot. Maybe someone else with a different sensibility would work better there. (Remember Letterman in the morning? That didn't mean someone else -- Regis, Oprah, Ellen -- couldn't pull it off, and it didn't mean Letterman couldn't succeed in a more compatible format and time slot) We'll probably never know, because the experiment's been declared a failure and no network will dare try something as audacious. Same for radio: David Lee Roth didn't work, so "that kind of talk" won't work. Someone took a run at an idea and didn't get it right, so the whole idea gets wiped off the board. If at first you don't succeed, try, try again, unless you're in radio, in which case you'll never succeed.

And because the first digital music players didn't sell, perhaps Apple should never have rolled out the iPod. See? You CAN build a better mousetrap. In an increasingly competitive and fragmented media world, radio, like everyone else, has to innovate. That's generally not encouraged. It's time to change that.

=================================

I'm running a little late today, so I don't have time for the usual recap of items from Talk Topics, the show prep resource at All Access News-Talk-Sports, but you know where to find it and you know what's there, a lot of news items and unusual stories and ideas to kick-start your brain when you're trying to come up with a show. While you're there, read "10 Questions With..." KSET/Beaumont, TX Executive Producer Tom Clay, who's in the process of launching a brand-new, mostly local talk station from scratch, and visit the rest of All Access with all the news, ratings, job listings, and resources you've come to expect, plus the new Forums section.

=================================

I have no witty comment or joke left in me right now (save the sarcasm, please), so I'll just go now. Have a great week.

Perry Michael Simon
Editor
All Access News-Talk-Sports
psimon@allaccess.com
www.facebook.com/pmsimon
www.twitter.com/pmsimon