TVSquad

If you were one of the dozens of people who were watching The Jay Leno show on Monday, you might have been wondering why the "Headlines" segment came right after Jay's monologue instead of right before the local news. Were you stumbling upon a rerun of the old Tonight Show that was airing by mistake? Nope. It seems that, because of the low-and-sinking ratings Leno has been getting at ten, the producers have decided to "shake up" the format ... to make it look like the old Tonight Show.

Of course, changing a pretty moribund format back to a format that's even older isn't exactly a radical shift. But the producers are likely betting that returning to the successful Tonight formula is the way to go.

Here's the problem: people don't have the same ingrained expectations of a 10 PM talk show that they have of an 11:30 show. Instead of tuning into Leno as a reliable way to get them to sleep late at night, they're now tuning to him because nothing's on and their DVRs are empty. There are no expectations on their part.

A lot of us over here at the Squad are fans of VH1's Best Week Ever. We're either fans of the comedians who are asked to be pop-culture wise-asses, or we just like the format in general. Heck, we even like the website, mainly because it has the same attitude as the show.

However, the network has decided that the multiple talking-head format needs a change, so they've named Paul F. Tompkins as the show's sole host. Tompkins (aka "That comedian in the suits"), of course, was one of the best of those talking heads, and his surreal takes on pop culture's funnier bits were always among each episode's highlights. So it's not like the producers are going "outside the family" in order to find a host.