I've already written a bit about Jay Leno's move to 10PM.  It's a desperate move by NBC, which isn't the same thing as saying it won't work. 

Desperation sometimes clarifies the mind. 

But I'm not sure I understand why they moved him to 10PM.  That makes for three solid hours of talk, briefly interrupted by the local 11PM news.  It's not much of a platform.

The entire television business was built on the concept of "audience flow" -- how an audience grows and shifts throughout prime-time -- and that concept is built on the principle of "fat-assed laziness."

The giant office towers, the production studios, the string of local television studios -- all of the treasures of an old-tyme broadcast network were bought and paid for by the human tendency to stay put.  If you had to walk across the room to change the channel, you didn't.  You watched what came next.  Audience flow.

Later, the clicker came along.  Which makes it easy to flip around and see what else is on.  And then came 500 channels, so that flipping was an activity all by itself -- it's what a lot of people do with their TVs; they don't watch, they just flip around and then turn it off.   The remote control attached to a 500-channel device was killing network television slowly until the DVR came along. 

In the movie "Casino," at the end -- warning: spoiler! -- some seriously annoyed mobsters beat Joe Pesci almost to death, then one of them tosses him into an open grave, and they all start piling in the dirt.  They bury Joe Pesci alive, still twitching.

So it's like this: the clicker and the multiple-channel universe have beaten the broadcast networks almost to death and kicked them into an open grave.  And then the DVR comes along and buries them alive.  We're now in the dirt-shoveling phase.  If you look closely, you can see the networks still twitching, like Joe Pesci in "Casino."

So the key now is to go for big, broadly appealing platform shows -- "American Idol," football, the Olympics, things like that -- and use those as a promotional platform for your other shows.  Use the biggest tent you've got to channel your audience to other shows.  Remind them what's coming up next, tease them with coming attractions.

But it only really works for that night.  The "coming up next!" promo is the last, best hope for the broadcast networks to take back some of that audience flow, either to entice the viewer to stop flipping, or to set the DVR for "the all-new House next!"

So here's my question.  Why Leno at 10?  At 10 all he promotes are the local news, Conan, and (for a while, anyway) Jimmy Fallon.

Why not Leno at 8PM?  Kick of the night of prime-time programming, promote that night's shows, use the whole hour as a launching pad for the night?  It's not as if Leno is too risque or family-unfriendly for that hour.  And it might just hammock the primetime comedies and dramas -- and tease the reality shows, too -- instead of batting cleanup at 10PM.

All of this is a long way to say the obvious:  I'm a closet network executive.