Peter Kafka

Recent Posts by Peter Kafka

At NBC’s Upfronts, Jimmy Fallon and Jay Leno Sing (Well, Lip-Sync) Again

Network TV upfronts are big, expensive productions where broadcasters show off the programs they want advertisers to buy next fall. They kicked off today, with struggling NBC, at Radio City Music Hall.

The network TV guys are really, really good at making the stuff they’re going to cancel in a few months look great right now. But the presentations still drag on, so all of the networks attempt to use a bit of comedy to liven things up during the event.

In the past, NBC has brought on its late-night talent to do live comedy bits, but we didn’t get that today. Instead, it used Jimmy Fallon and Jay Leno in a pre-taped video, which references both “Les Miserables” and a video the two men had made a couple months ago, when the network was handing the “The Tonight Show” from Leno to Fallon.

Weirdly, the old video doesn’t seem to be online anymore. And I can’t show you today’s video, because NBC doesn’t usually show the public the stuff it shows to advertisers. Which is a bummer.*

But I do have audio!

It’s not great, because it comes via an iPhone that was parked way back in Radio City’s cheap seats. But if you’re a fan of Fallon, or Leno, or maybe just “Les Mis,” then, well … here you go:

* The one that would be really great to see again would be Alec Baldwin’s awesomely profane Jack Donaghy performance from 2010.

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald