NBC may once again be trying to politely shovel koala bear night show host Jay Leno into the dustbin of yesteryear, according to two “high-level industry sources.” The rumor, which NBC has categorically denied, is that the 2013-14 television season will be the last for Leno, who reportedly took a steep pay cut from his reported $30 million salary last August when NBC parent company Comcast imposed layoffs at Tonight. The network will then install the younger, hipper, more demographic-friendly Late Night host Jimmy Fallon in Leno’s coveted 11:35 time slot “with a soft launch during the summer of 2014 before a formal fall kickoff.” The rumored switch-up comes at a time when NBC execs are biting their fingernails to the quick over ABC nocturnal jokemaker Jimmy Kimmel‘s popularity among younger viewers:
Sources believe the network will bring in Fallon partly out of concern about the competition on ABC, which moved younger-skewing Jimmy Kimmel to the 11:35 time slot in January. “The more time Jimmy Kimmel is in that slot, the more the young audience goes that way, the harder it is for Jimmy [Fallon] to keep that audience,” says a source familiar with the network’s thinking.
Are we all about to watch Jimmy Fallon’s night show career go the way of Conan O’Brien when Jay Leno refuses to relax his vise grip on the 11:35 time slot? More importantly, if Jimmy Fallon gets ejected from NBC altogether, does that mean more Capital One commercials? Because there really ought to be a better place for Jimmy Fallon’s sundry impressions. [THR]
- Madonna will present Anderson Cooper with a GLAAD award for openly gay media professionals. She will then pull him aside and whisper the secret to eternal life into his silver-maned ear. [CBS]
- Modern Family actors Julie Bowen, Eric Stonestreet, and Jesse Tyler Ferguson visited Kansas City and were promptly trapped in an elevator with 12 other people for one full hour. Unfortunately, surveillance cameras from inside the elevator didn’t record the actors instigating a premature end-of-days orgy. [KC Star]
- Jamie Lynn Spears, of the prematurely marrying Spears, announced that she is engaged to Jamie Watson, her boyfriend of three years, despite the obvious difficulty the couple will probably have ordering monogrammed towels. [E!]
- Believing he shares a “kinship” with Lindsay Lohan, Charlie Sheen has offered her his mentor services because there’s no way that could possibly go wrong. [TMZ]
- Noted shell of his former acting self Val Kilmer is being sued for $128,000 by a company that tried to help him deal with being too broke to pay off a $500,000 tax lien. [TMZ]
- Beyoncé has posted new daguerreotypes of herself on Instagram and Tumblr. [ONTD]
- Former Guts referee Moira Quirk pulled back the curtain on your third-favorite Nickelodeon game show after Family Double Dare (or, The Mark Summers Stress Test) and Legends of the Hidden Temple during an interview with ESPNU. Spoiler alert: Mo swears a lot and the AstroCragg is, like, five feet tall. [Buzzfeed]
- Daniel Day-Lewis‘ older half-brother Sean says that he and the celebrated actor/cobbler have not spoken to each other in a very long time. [Telegraph]
- Rosie Huntington-Whiteley helped a poodle make its way through rough surf back to shore without bothering to ask the poodle if maybe it had wandered out to sea to make friends with a pod of dolphins. [Mirror]
- Just in case the Internet has not met your adorability quota this week, here’s Quvenzhané Wallis being super cute on the cover of Italian Vanity Fair. [Twitter]