rubinville

I may or may not have used this image before. If I have, take it up with the legal department...

NBC announced today that it will cutting about 600-800 jobs due to poor performance of the television division. Let me be the first (or zillionth) to say how utterly absurd this is. Yes, you could probably fire 50-60 percent of the people in the TV biz and things wouldn't operate any slower. Actually, in many cases, things would operate a lot better. The problem here though is that the people about to get fired were only doing, or not doing, exactly what they were told to by their higher-ups. Thus, the guy who needs to get canned, who's salary probably isn't far off than most of those people's combined, is Jeff Zucker, the head of entertainment.

Dave, what kind of lame-brain comic would go on record calling for the firing of a major television powerhouse? And, come to think of it, didn't you call for his firing over a year ago?

The answers to those rather insightful questions are that I am just lame-brained enough to do it, and yes, I already did it over a year ago when NBC was in slightly less of a mess than it is in now.

This all reminds me of a time a few months back when I was standing next to Jeff Zucker at an undisclosed location and was tempted to introduce myself. I never made my move, partly because I didn't have anything nice to say, though moreso because he had a lot of neck hair and some of it was coming out of the collar of his shirt. It was a very disturbing sight, one which begs for another question to be answered...

If you can't control the hair coming out of your shirt, how can you control an entire prime-time lineup?

Tonight Show here I come...