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Leno won’t be the first TV star to try to recapture the magic

By Mark Caro / Chicago Tribune

Published: February 01. 2010 4:00AM PST

Jay Leno is far from the only entertainment figure to go back to the well, reheat the souffle, reclaim the magic, recapture lightning in a bottle or pull off any other mixed metaphor you can think of.

Leno, as you may have heard, will return to his “Tonight Show” duties March 1, little more than nine months after he vacated his seat following a masses-pleasing 17-year run.

Like Season 8 of “Dallas,” Leno’s intervening, failed venture into prime time is now being dismissed as just a bad dream.

But reclaiming past glories can be a tricky task, even for those who haven’t been ridiculed by their peers on a nightly basis.

If Leno is seeking positive examples, he couldn’t do much better than Seth MacFarlane’s “Family Guy,” which Fox announced it was canceling at the end of its second season in 2000, brought back for a third season anyway, canceled more definitively and then revived once more in 2005, after the show took off on DVD and the Cartoon Network’s “Adult Swim” block. The controversial animated series is now in its eighth season and received an Emmy nomination for outstanding comedy series last year.

“Family Guy,” though, seems to be a case of the times having caught up to its particular, crude brand of humor, whereas Leno was No. 1 for the bulk of his “Tonight Show” run and only began showing weakness after “The Jay Leno Show” launched nightly in the 10 p.m. slot on NBC last fall.

Another show that managed a winning return is the British comedy series “Absolutely Fabulous,” which ran from 1991 through 1996 and then picked up the ball for another three years starting in 2001.

With many entertainment personalities, the question is how much they should tweak the formula to stay relevant.

Tim Brooks, a former Lifetime, USA Network and NBC executive who co-authored “The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV shows, 1946-Present,” pointed out that Raymond Burr was synonymous with his TV lawyer Perry Mason before he reinvented himself as the wheelchair-using detective in “Ironside.”

Likewise, Buddy Ebsen made the transition from the comedy “The Beverly Hillbillies” to the detective series “Barnaby Jones,” Andy Griffith applied his folksy “Andy Griffith Show” persona to the title defense attorney of “Matlock,” and Bob Newhart thrived as a psychologist on “The Bob Newhart Show” and a similarly deadpan innkeeper on “Newhart” — though not as a car-toonist on “Bob” or Judd Hirsch’s fellow in-law on “George & Leo.”

“I think the key is to do one of two things: Either go back real quick so people forget that you were somewhere else for a few months, which is the case with Leno, or, if you were gone way longer, come back having changed your program in some way,” Brooks said.

As far as change goes, sometimes you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. “The Carol Burnett Show” had a great CBS run from 1967 through 1978, but the beloved host couldn’t gain traction for a half-hour repertory comedy series, “Carol & Company” (1990-1991), or a new version of “The Carol Burnett Show” (1991).

“The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,” which CBS famously canceled after objecting to the show’s countercultural content, came back in 1975 on NBC and in 1988 on CBS to little avail.

Brooks said Leno’s primetime ratings failure has been overstated. And neither expects Leno to have much trouble reclaiming his former standing.

He argued that Leno will have an easier time than displaced “Tonight Show” host Conan O’Brien, whose separation agree- ment with NBC requires him to remain off the air until September.

“That means that when (O’Brien) comes back, he has to come back with a splash,” Brooks said, “not just the same thing he was doing.”

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