If the first edition of "The Olympic Tonight Show" is any indication, Jay Leno should have just come to Salt Lake City as originally planned. Dopey-looking snowflakes hanging in the Burbank, Calif., studio and fake snow just don't quite do it.
And having Ross the Intern in town giggling incessantly is going to get old. Fast.
Surprisingly, Leno made no jokes about either polygamy or the Osmonds — the only two topics of humor he's ever been able to come up with about Utah before. But his comment about a sequence in the opening ceremonies that featured the "child of light" being pursued by skaters in icicle costumes — "Why is the Klan chasing that kid?" — fell flat. And he wasn't any funnier when he said of the skater whose skates seemingly ignited the Olympic rings in the ice at Rice-Eccles Stadium, "Didn't we just arrest the shoe bomber for the same thing?"
And we shouldn't feel bad that he made Utahns — or at least people in Utah — look stupid during a taped "Jaywalking" bit. He does that to everyone.
At least he picked up a bit of the local culture on his visit here — when one woman answered a question, "Oh my heck," he said, "There's no reason for that kind of Salt Lake profanity."
Not that he isn't sometimes funny. "Should biathletes be allowed to compete the same as regular athletes in the Olympic Games?" Leno asked one apparent out-of-towner. "Yeah," the guy said, " 'cause gays can run fast and ski just as hard as anybody else."
But that's just the typical Jay Leno "Tonight Show" — an occasional laugh. It comes off feeling about as much like the Winter Olympics as Burbank itself.
THE RATING GAME: Overnight ratings indicate that Salt Lake's opening ceremonies were the highest-rated in Olympic history — Winter or Summer Games — drawing a 25.5 rating and 72 million viewers. That breaks a 42-year-old record of 24.2 set in 1960 for Squaw Valley's Games, and it's 49 percent higher than the 17.1 in Nagano four years ago.
Not surprisingly, Salt Lake City led the nation in watching the opening ceremonies. KSL drew a stunning 65.5 rating and 84 share. (A rating point equals 1 percent of the households in a market; one share point equals 1 percent of the households that are actually watching TV at a particular time.)
WHERE WE STAND: Before we get the idea that there's nothing more important in TV sports right now than the Olympics, perhaps we should reflect on the fact that NBC's afternoon coverage on Saturday began almost 10 minutes late because the qualifying for the Daytona 500 ran late.
PRIME ADVERTISING TIME: Just before NBC finally began that Saturday-afternoon coverage, Home Depot ran one of its ads featuring several of its employees who are also Olympians.
The last one in the spot was Derek Parra — who went on to a stunning silver medal in speedskating a bit later.
GOOD JOB: Over the years, it's become fashionable to criticize NBC's Olympic coverage, but any network that can actually pull me in and make me interested in who wins men's and women's cross country skiing medals — when Americans aren't even competitive — must be doing something right.
LAME LENO JOKE OF THE DAY: "Over a quarter of a million condoms are being handed out at the Olympics. What event is that for? Maybe they should call them the oh, oh, Olympics."
E-MAIL: pierce@desnews.com
