Jay Leno Show: "The saddest of carnivals"

The New Yorker's Nancy Franklin watched the first several episodes of "The Jay Leno Show" and penned a scathing review. "NBC’s attitude toward 'The Jay Leno Show' signals a whole new level of indifference, resignation, and laziness," writes Franklin. "Leno calls himself 'a big-tent guy,' but this isn’t big-tent show business; this is the saddest of carnivals."

Meanwhile, a company called Empower MediaMarketing commissioned a study to find out what the people, as opposed to those snooty East Coast media elites, think of Leno's program: "Reviewing a sample of 500 tweets mentioning Leno during the first week of his show makes it clear that, for the most part, consumers on Twitter do not like 'The Jay Leno Show.' While 18 percent of the sample offered an opinion of the show, 75 percent of the Twitter-based reviews were negative." (Of course, a bunch of those Twitterers may have been TV critics.) In the offline world, "Sixty-five percent of adult viewers say they expect to watch the show at least twice a week in the future, while 27 percent of viewers say they expect to watch four or more shows a week," according to a public opinion study of 1,000 adults 18 and older.

An important audience, NBC affiliates, is cautiously optimistic about the show's performance so far. "Affiliates board chairman Michael Fiorile says reaction was 'mixed,'" writes Broadcasting and Cable's Michael Malone. "'Some like it, and some would like to see changes,' he says. 'It's early on, and a lot will change as the network fine-tunes the show.'"