ESPN's "Monday Night Football" Clobbers "The Jay Leno Show" -- And Shows Just How Beat Up Network TV Is

(MoneyWatch)  Let's combine two viewership statistics from Monday night and see what we get: ESPN's "Monday Night Football," featuring the Super Bowl champ Pittsburgh Steelers playing the Denver Broncos, had a 6.5 rating/17 share, and a total of 16 million viewers, making it the highest rated show on TV, broadcast or cable. NBC's "The Jay Leno Show", meanwhile, finished with a 1.2 rating in the 18-49 demographic; it had a total of just over 4 million viewers. The basic math is simple -- the football game had four times as many viewers -- but how you interpret this data isn't necessarily clear-cut.

What people are probably expecting me to say now is that "The Jay Leno Show" is a huge disaster, in performing so poorly against a mere cable football game. But in fact, this shows why NBC was basically right about its decision to rethink the 10 p.m. timeslot, even if the show it put there is looking a bit dodgy. While you could focus on the fact that, at a 1.2, the show is actually below the 1.5 rating in 18-49 that NBC has said was the benchmark for whether or not the show would be profitable, if it weren't for "Leno", the network probably would have had some struggling drama in the Monday night timeslot, have spent more money, and, therefore, been out more money at 10 p.m. Staying with the status quo wasn't exactly a winning proposition either.

The problem, of course, is that "Leno" wasn't supposed to be measured on how much less money it would lose compared to what had gone before; it was supposed to be measured by the profit margin the show was going to attain because it was cheaper to produce. On that score, NBC, if not wrong yet, doesn't look very right, either.

While we're discussing broadcast vs. cable, you could also make the case that since only advertisers, and not viewers, seem to still be making the distinction between cable and broadcast, ABC never should have let football move to its sibling network ESPN. It speaks to the perversity of the TV business model that advertisers pay much more for broadcast TV than they do for cable. While that's not a discussion for this post, it's one that the people with the money in the media industry should start having soon.

Previous coverage of "The Jay Leno Show" at BNET Media:

• Jay Leno Admits He Would've "Preferred" to Stay on "The Tonight Show"
• It's Officially Open Season on "The Jay Leno Show"
• How Patient Will NBC Be About "The Jay Leno Show"?
• Ratings for "The Jay Leno Show" Fall to Earth, But That's OK