The media insider website Newsblues made mention of an interesting rumor about NBC and its struggling Jay Leno Show: some of the network’s affiliates may have a “trigger clause” that would allow them to run their local news at 10pm and tape-delay Leno, presumably at 10:30pm or 10:35pm.

Though no affiliate managers would specifically confirm this, some managers claim they’d be ready to look for other options if Leno’s rating drop below a 1.0. According to the site, Leno is averaging a 1.5, which is pretty much what the Peacock network told affiliates to expect, and that magic rating at which NBC is presumably satisfied because the show is still in a position to make money.

The trouble for local stations is that those low ratings at 10pm mean a bigger struggle getting viewers to switch to the NBC station at 11pm from higher rated programs elsewhere on the dial.

Years ago, I worked for a CBS station that decided that tape-delaying The Late Show with David Letterman would be a great idea. The station would air Letterman one half-hour later, which meant that the poor master control operators would have to roll multiple video tapes to record segment by segment so that they would have time to recue the tapes and roll them on time.

(Imagine trying to record a program as it’s being broadcast but then playing it a half-hour after it started without missing anything and without the magic of Tivo. Yeah, not a pretty picture.)

Unfortunately for those NBC stations, that’s pretty much their only option if Leno’s numbers “trigger” that agreement; they can’t do an hour-long newscast at 10 because then they’d have to tape delay NBC’s Tonight Show by a half-hour.  I would not want to be a master control operator caught up in the middle of that!