Jay Leno’s 10/9pm show had horrible ratings. As a Leno anti-fan, it gives me pleasure to type that. It gives me no real pleasure or displeasure to type the next line, though: Conan’s ratings were also pretty bad. And then a funny thing happened (the funniness sure wasn’t in Leno’s show): both shows experienced ratings spikes when cancelled because of the public airing of all the dirty laundry.

I pose that if we want to understand what went wrong with the Jay Leno Show and what NBC might learn from it, we shouldn’t just ask what Leno’s failure says – we should also ask what the combination of the failure and the momentary ratings spike says.

As Amanda Lotz has already pointed out here at Antenna, at least we could say that NBC tried something. But that something showed itself incapable of beating even poor and poorly advertised new shows that have since been cancelled and forgotten. Jeffrey Jones also noted here at Antenna that NBC just didn’t get the art of programming different dayparts.

What interests me, though, is how many people decided to watch Leno or O’Brien or Letterman or Kimmel when it finally seemed to matter. There was an event, and with it, a reason to watch. And events have done well this year – V is really quite bad indeed, and yet it premiered to great numbers. AMC’s The Prisoner notched a fairly admirable sized audience. Millions will watch an event on Feb 7 when the Colts battle the Saints, even though many won’t care about football. Jersey Shore seems to have been an event, too, as all manner of reality shows have continued to do well by being events with yet more events (tribal council, the merger, Hollywood week, the trip to Japan, etc.) built into them.

I’m not sure how much I believe this next idea, but I’m trying it on for size, so tell me if I should put it back on the rack: perhaps we’ve reached a point of televisual ubiquity and of the medium’s general “wallpaperness,” that many viewers yearn for and/or need some kind of external reason to tune in. Sure, a lot of shows are still getting great audiences, so the day of reckoning is hardly upon series television, nor do I believe it’s coming. But if NBC wants to shake things up a bit, how about some more events (other than the Olympics)? How about the British system of shorter shows? Greenlight small projects, and if some do very well, sure, make ‘em into longer series. But otherwise, become the channel with new stuff, the channel that’s got a new show on tonight (did you hear about it?), not yet another rerun of a tired procedural that nobody really cares that much about anyways, or night 5648 of Jay’s late night reign of terror.

Maybe it’s an awful idea. But it’s certainly no worse than the idea of giving Jay Leno a third of prime time.

The reasons it will survive are numerous, including the fact that with the exception of Comedy Central, the cable nets aren’t providing anything in the way of serious competition to network talk shows. More importantly is history. Even for younger generations (especially as they grow older and become less cool conscious and more boring in their routines), NBC and CBS are simply where one turns for this form of entertainment.

And that, of course, is the point that NBC seemed to miss with this failed experiment–the very particular role that talk shows play in viewers’ lives. With notable exceptions, the late night talk show has been a tremendously stable form of television entertainment, with changes coming very gradually and more reflective of cultural sensibility than artistic creativity.  Simply put, audiences have historically tuned in for two reasons. The first is content–a regular diet of 1) a host-persona they are attracted to (this being most important), 2) a steady diet of celebrities and people in the news as guests, 3) some music, and 4) an occasional comedy sketch or public oddity. That’s it. But while that is also what “The Jay Leno Show” and “The Tonight Show” continued to offer during NBC’s juggling act, NBC violated the second component: daypart. When it comes to cable nets, dayparts are really irrelevant (think Comedy Central or HBO, for instance). But for most viewers, dayparts are what defines broadcast networks. We know where to look and when for a very particular form of routinized pleasure. And when that changes, we often don’t like it (this can even include our finickyness when the networks move a Sunday night drama to Tuesday night).

But it is the interrelationship between these two central components of late-night talk–the hosts/content and the time-slot/routine–that was violated in the NBC decision. Leno simply isn’t prime time, just as Conan isn’t early late-night (not to mention that Conan is New York, not L.A.). Perhaps NBC just didn’t run this through enough focus groups, or failed to do so properly. But one would hope that with such a dominant role the network has played in creating this relationship to viewers to being with, it would “understand” both itself and its viewers better by this point in the history of television.