Christmas, through a comedian's dark lens

By macleans.ca - Thursday, December 9, 2010 at 12:00 PM - 0 Comments

Stand-up comic Lewis Black sneaks something truly shocking into his rant on Christmas—honesty about his own loneliness | Librado Romero/The New York Times

I’M DREAMING OF A BLACK CHRISTMAS
Lewis Black

For Black, a stand-up comedian who’s carved out a healthy chunk of fame with his angry rants, Christmas might seem an odd choice of topic for his third book of humour. Odder still for a Jewish comic who’s not overly sentimental about the holiday season: “we Jews [at Christmastime] . . . are like the spectators who stand outside the fence and watch those idiots who have chosen to run with the bulls.”

Not to worry, though; Black offers a thorough explanation of how the book came to be (mainly due to needling by his editor, whom he calls “a crack dealer for my self-esteem”). He also includes a cautionary note for those to whom Christmas is sacred: Black Christmas will offer little in the way of holiday cheer and is unlikely to make them “s–t fruitcakes and gingerbread men.” His book, he warns, is “for the rest of us.”

Then he gets down to work, doing what Lewis Black fans expect. He rails against such injustices as kids at seaside resorts (“Why is he screaming? Is the perfection that surrounds him not enough?”), the earthquake in Haiti (“a hideous cosmic joke”), and the tree erected every holiday season in Manhattan (“the hooker at Rockefeller Center”). The funniest material in the book—an account of a USO Holiday Tour in the Middle East with Robin Williams, Lance Armstrong and Kid Rock—is unfortunately tacked on in an appendix.

But among all the wisecracking, Black sneaks in something truly shocking: honesty. As he takes us through how he’s spent his last 10 Christmases—writing cheques to charity and consuming copious food and drink at the homes of two of his closest friends—he opens up about a topic most comics won’t touch with a 10-foot candy cane: loneliness. Black, 62, with a disastrous marriage far behind him (there was DNA testing involved, which revealed that he had been cuckolded), admits that being alone at Christmas “pounds relentlessly on my psyche.” But he’s done the baby math generally reserved for women of a certain age, and knows a family isn’t likely in the cards. By book’s end, he makes a sort of peace with his life, and has a renewed appreciation for his friends. Peace and gratitude. Sounds like a bit of the Christmas spirit.
- Jen Cutts

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Leno and His Joke Obsession

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, November 17, 2010 at 5:47 PM - 6 Comments

I’ll have more to say later about Bill Carter’s The War For Late Night (aka Late Shift 2: The Shiftening), but one thing I wanted to remark on quickly is that although the book doesn’t do much to delve into the mysteries of why these people are the way they are — Carter got to talk to everybody, but the price for that is that he’s too close to provide a really hard-hitting portrayal of anybody — there are some bits that help clarify the mystery of why Jay Leno, a comedian whose talent no one doubts, has been such a creatively mediocre host. The book keeps repeating his mantra that what he wants to do is “tell jokes at 11:35 at night”; every time he talks about what he does, he says that his job is to “tell jokes.” Carter reminds us that Leno said, comparing himself and Letterman, “I’m a comedian, I’m not a talk-show host. I think Dave as a broadcaster is as good as there has ever been. I would say Dave is the better broadcaster and I am the better stand-up comedian.” That sounds about right. As I said,  the people who disrespect Leno don’t deny that he was a good stand-up — even Bill Hicks’ vicious routine about Leno’s Tonight Show was premised on the idea that Leno used to be funny and chose to stop being funny.

The thing is, though, that there’s not a great deal of qualitative difference between Leno’s monologue and anybody else’s. Nearly all talk-show monologues fall into the same joke rhythms, same joke constructions. It’s the only way you can provide a large supply of new jokes every night. (A stand up comedian’s club act features many jokes that can be repeated several times, until they become tired or televised. A late-night joke is once and gone.) Conan O’Brien’s topical jokes are kind of lame, and the fact that he tosses them off as if he’s ashamed of them doesn’t make them any better. Letterman’s have marginally more edge, but are usually nothing very special. Carson, Cavett, the greats of the past, had lots of corny or cheesy monologue jokes. The only way to avoid the tired feel of the monologue is to replace it with something else, the way Craig Ferguson often chooses to talk about what’s personally on his mind — and he does this, as the book explains, because monologue jokes are so predictable in their rhythm. This is just the first monologue that came up in a YouTube search, but you could plug in different names in many of the jokes, and have them told by different comedians, and they’d be about the same. Carson got by with it more because his persona was more appealing than Leno’s, and he didn’t have the band playing loud music after every punchline. But the jokes themselves can never be much more than what they are: quick topical punchlines.

So Jay Leno’s monologue is not exactly lamer than his competitors, or at least the others are on a comparable level of lameness that cannot be distinguished by known science. But the topical stand-up jokes, the weakest part of almost any talk show, are the parts Leno cares the most about. It’s well-known, and mentioned in the book, that the monologue takes up most of his time. NBC knew he’d be willing to accept the offer of a half-hour at 11:35 because it would mean that he could continue doing his monologue. And of course during the Writers’ Guild strike he did whatever he could to make sure he would always have his topical stand-up routine. Once he sits down at the desk, the show is almost over for him. For most other hosts, sitting down is where the fun begins: depending on their particular strengths, it can lead to a good interview, or a funny new comedy bit, or just doing the famous Carson thumbs-up to a new stand-up comedian who pleased him.

In a way, Leno’s strength as a stand-up explains his weakness as a host. (Creative weakness, I emphasize again. He’s undeniably popular, even now, and one of the many mistakes NBC made was not realizing that his success on Tonight was more due to him than to any inherent strength the franchise still had — his audience and Conan’s audiences were very different, and there wasn’t a core group of viewers that would stick around and watch Tonight no matter who was in charge.) The only thing he really enjoys is standing in front of an audience and delivering jokes. Even if the jokes aren’t very good, and on any given night many of them won’t be, that’s the part he likes. O’Brien’s contempt for his monologue jokes is really no better than Leno’s smarmy style, but because he’s not a stand-up, he wants to get past those jokes as quickly as possible and get to something that could theoretically, surprise us. But Leno defines himself entirely as a stand-up comic, so he seems to define The Tonight Show as twenty minutes of stand-up followed by a bunch of filler. The part he lives to do is the part that is least likely to be good, in anyone’s hands.

Conan in exile

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, November 8, 2010 at 3:00 PM - 1 Comment

Photo Illustration by Adam Cholewa

Is Conan O’Brien reinventing the talk show, or is he just the latest washed-up network star to be exiled to cable? Less than a year after the tall, red-haired host was forced out of his job at The Tonight Show (it was the most famous late-night battle since the fight to succeed Johnny Carson, and Jay Leno won both times), he’s coming back on Nov. 8 with Conan, which will run on the basic cable network TBS and in Canada at midnight on the Comedy Network. When he took the job, many observers saw it as a step down for a man who had hosted a major network show since 1993, when Late Night With Conan O’Brien debuted. The person who’s trying hardest to portray this as a step down is Conan O’Brien himself. The obligatory musical group for the new show is called the Basic Cable Band. Brian Kiley, a writer for O’Brien’s shows, told Maclean’s that the staff is planning “jokes about being on basic cable, and that kind of thing,” while another writer, Dan Cronin, adds that they’ll be saying, “What’s TBS? What channel is that even on? We have no idea.” Back when he was an inexperienced talk-show host, O’Brien made fun of his own inexperience; now he’s mocking his exile to cable before the rest of the world can.

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Newsmakers

By macleans.ca - Friday, May 7, 2010 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

You wouldn’t want to cross either one
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin burnished his credentials as a man of action last week, while also asserting some Arctic sovereignty. He helped scientists track endangered polar bears in Franz Josef Land, an Arctic archipelago. With cameras rolling, he attached a tracking collar to a tranquilized bear. “Be well,” he said, shaking its paw. “The paw is heavy,” said Putin, one force of nature saluting another. “This is a master of the Arctic, you can feel that straight away.”

That’s how it’s done in Wawota, Sask.
Washington Capitals fans Mary Ann Wangemann and her 14-year-old daughter Lorraine were driving home from the Caps’ game-seven loss to the Montreal Canadiens when their tire was flattened by a pothole. An SUV pulled over as they stood by the side of the road in their team colours. To their amazement, out hopped Brooks Laich, the Alberta-born, Saskatchewan-raised Caps centre. He peeled off his suit jacket and spent 40 minutes, on one of the worst nights of his life, installing a spare tire for two strangers. Mary Ann asked Laich, 26, how to repay the favour. “I’m sure you’ll do something nice for someone in the future,” he said.

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Late-night is for frat boys only

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 at 1:00 AM - 11 Comments

Jay Leno is back on The Tonight Show, Conan O’Brien is gone, and fans are arguing over which version of the show is better. But no matter how often the host changes, one thing never seems to change: Leno currently has no women on his writing staff—when Sarah Palin performed a stand-up routine for him, her jokes were written by men—and neither did O’Brien during his Tonight Show tenure. In late-night comedy, shows can go years without a woman in the writers’ room, and things have gotten worse in recent years: David Letterman’s first head writer was a woman (Merrill Markoe), but he didn’t have any female writers last year. Markoe told Maclean’s that when she started in the business, “everyone made fun of ‘tokenism.’ Every show had its token one to two women.” In today’s late-night world, she’s starting to “look back at tokenism fondly as a time of enlightenment.”

Why don’t late-night shows hire women to write for them? The simplest reason is that most of the writers who apply for the job are men: “When I started the show with Dave in the early ’80s, very few women submitted work,” Markoe says. But even today, when there are more female stand-up comics and other women who Markoe describes as “very familiar with the general sensibility” of late-night comedy, things haven’t been any better. “Women are equal watchers of those shows,” fumes Melissa Silverstein, blogger and founder of womenandhollywood.com, “yet are somehow not thought of as capable of contributing behind the scenes.”

If hosts do hire a woman, it’s often because they knew her already. Craig Ferguson, who hosts The Late Late Show, has one female staff writer: his sister Lynn, a respected comedian in her own right. Markoe was romantically involved with Letterman at one point, and when Jimmy Kimmel broke up with Sarah Silverman, tabloids reported that he was dating his writer Molly McNearney. Without a prior relationship, it can take a long time for a woman to win the trust of the people who do the hiring; Jill Goodwin, who got a job last month as Letterman’s first female writer in years, was an assistant on the show for almost a decade. “People hire people they’re comfortable with,” says Silverstein, and in practice, it seems like hosts aren’t comfortable with women they haven’t met repeatedly.

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Sarah Palin is unstoppable

By Michael Petrou - Tuesday, March 16, 2010 at 8:00 AM - 196 Comments

Photograph by Sally Ryan/The New York Times/ Redux

John McCain thought he needed to spring one more surprise on America.

In August 2008, his presidential campaign against Barack Obama was listing badly. Some of this was his fault. But after eight years of George W. Bush, anyone representing the Republican party came with a lot of baggage. McCain needed to choose a candidate for vice-president who underlined his reputation as a maverick within the party and who was untainted by close ties to the previous administration. The stakes were high. As John Heilemann and Mark Halperin write in Game Change, their book about the campaign, “If McCain’s running mate selection didn’t fundamentally alter the dynamics of the race, it was lights out.”

McCain’s original plan was to partner with Joe Lieberman, the 2000 Democratic nominee for vice-president. McCain hoped such a choice would prove his bipartisan credentials, steal thunder from his opponents, and back-foot the press­—allowing his campaign to regain some momentum. But when word of the Lieberman plan leaked, much of the Republican party rebelled, and McCain was forced to scramble. “We need to have a transformative, electrifying moment in this campaign,” McCain strategist Steve Schmidt said. No one on the short list of alternative candidates could deliver this. Schmidt suggested a new option: Alaska governor Sarah Palin.

There wasn’t time to vet Palin properly, or to probe her thoughts on foreign and domestic policy. Picking Palin was a Hail Mary pass in the dying seconds of a championship game. But McCain met and liked her. She was confident and calm. She wasn’t afraid to burn bridges and upset people, even in the Republican party. She was an outsider, like him. Steve Schmidt told McCain choosing Palin could hurt him. But a safer candidate, he said, wouldn’t help. It would be better to go for the win and lose big than to tiptoe to a narrow defeat. “High risk, high reward,” another one of McCain’s advisers cautioned. “You shouldn’t have told me that,” McCain replied. “I’ve been a risk taker all my life.”

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The meaning of Ellen (on American Idol)

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, February 19, 2010 at 9:49 PM - 9 Comments

Herein, the fifth in a semi-regular series chronicling the ninth season of American Idol. You can read the first installment here, the second installment here, the third installment here and the fourth installment here.

America in 2010 is a confused place. Americans are of deeply held, but divergent and often contradictory, opinions. On some disagreements they are even unsure as to what they’re disagreeing about. In a recent poll, prompted by renewed debate over the so-called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, 1,084 Americans adults were asked whether they favoured or opposed “homosexuals” being allowed to serve openly in the armed forces. Forty-four per cent of respondents were in favour, 42% were opposed. When the same 1,084 American adults were asked whether they favoured or opposed “gay men and lesbians” being allowed to serve openly in the armed forces, 58% were in favour, 28% opposed.

And now here, at this particularly peculiar moment in American history, is Ellen DeGeneres, an openly gay woman taking her seat to the left of Simon Cowell, appearing in prime time television on the Fox network to judge a wildly popular, nation-defining talent show.

What to make of this?

It is tempting to make something of the fact that, while openly gay men and women cannot yet officially fight to protect and preserve the American Dream, they can sit in judgment of those who pursue it. But that would be glib. And it would probably exaggerate the significance of Ellen’s arrival on American Idol. It is probably more accurate to conclude that however confusing America can be, it is also easily underestimated.

Ellen is at once the most subversive and the least objectionable person in American public life and maybe the best current demonstration of the American Dream. Thirteen years ago, she announced she was gay in big red letters on the cover of Time magazine. Two sitcoms of hers subsequently flopped, but she has since hosted the Oscars, the Grammys and the Emmys, become the star of a popular daytime talk show, been paid to represent American Express and Cover Girl, and married a beautiful TV actress with an exotic-sounding name. Last year, Forbes deemed her the 40th most powerful celebrity in America, slightly less powerful than Tom Hanks, but slightly more powerful than Eddie Murphy, Jay Leno and Barack Obama. Out magazine currently ranks her the second most powerful homosexual, behind only Senator Barney Frank.

She combines the best elements of Woody Allen and Oprah, somehow cerebral and heartfelt, self-effacing and generous. She’s uncompromising, but never more than she needs to be. The defining three minutes of her career to date might be her shrugging dismissal in May 2008 of John McCain’s position on same-sex marriage—possibly the nicest, but most efficient, deconstruction of a politician and a political position in the history of television.

She debuted last week as a judge on Idol, kissing Ryan Seacrest as she arrived and quickly settling into the role with relative ease. Without dominating the proceedings, she has already established herself as the über-judge: empathetic, but mischievous; blunt and biting, but also encouraging. She watches with deep concern in her eyes and beams when contestants succeed, but will quickly scold the off-key. She prizes confidence. She arrived in time for the final round of auditions—dubbed Hollywood Week, it is essentially a televised social experiment meant to see how many desperate young singers can be made to cry on camera—and seemed determined to impose some degree of humanity on the affair.

On paper, it might not make sense that a populist, explicitly Middle-American television show pitched to a nation openly grappling with the perceived ramifications of homosexuality could, with reasonable success, put a quirky, openly gay woman in a position of prominence. But she fits. If there is anything remarkable about her inclusion on Idol, it’s how relatively unremarkable it seems.

On paper, America is a confusing and messy place. But it is almost always better than it seems.

Late night civil war

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, February 3, 2010 at 11:40 AM - 8 Comments

When Conan O’Brien hosted his final episode of The Tonight Show last Friday—“we have exactly one hour to steal every item in this studio,” he announced—it somehow seemed appropriate that he was losing the show to Jay Leno the same week the Democrats lost Ted Kennedy’s U.S. Senate seat to Republican Scott Brown: this latest late-night shakeup has inspired the kind of passion usually reserved for political movements. When NBC announced that it was giving the 11:35 p.m. time slot back to Leno (after angry affiliates forced the network to cancel his low-rated prime-time show), there was what veteran TV critic Diane Werts described to Maclean’s as “a frenzy.” NBC executive Jeff Zucker, who is often blamed for the decline of the network, told Charlie Rose that he received death threats over the move. Demonstrations were held across America to protest the reinstatement of Leno, including a rain-soaked rally outside the Tonight Show studio, where O’Brien and sidekick Andy Richter waved to the crowd like politicians departing office. When Leno got The Tonight Show in 1992 instead of David Letterman, it was just an entertaining showbiz story, but Leno and O’Brien have come to represent more than who gets to interview Tom Hanks. They may be a proxy for two different viewpoints in a divided country.

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The problem is bigger than Obama

By Andrew Potter - Wednesday, February 3, 2010 at 9:10 AM - 32 Comments

Jay Leno took some time out from his own problems last week to take a shot at Barack Obama. “It’s hard to believe President Obama’s now been in office for a year,” be said. “And you know, it’s incredible. He took something that was in terrible, terrible shape and he brought it back from the brink of disaster: the Republican party.”

In Leno veritas, as they say. Obama’s approval ratings are in the toilet, and his ever-shortening coattails keep sending more and more party loyalists tumbling into the gutter. With Scott Brown’s astonishing theft of the late Teddy Kennedy’s Senate seat, it is starting to look as if the Democrats will be toast come the mid-term elections in November.

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Will Simon destroy ‘American Idol’?

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, January 26, 2010 at 10:54 AM - 13 Comments

Simon Cowell may destroy American Idol by leaving it, but does that suit his plans? The ninth season of the show, which began last Tuesday, is Cowell’s last season hosting the world’s No. 1 hit. While Fox tries to replace him, he will concentrate on developing a U.S. version of his U.K. hit The X Factor, to premiere on Fox in the fall of 2011. That show is a multi-week competition in which unknowns audition for a panel of judges, including Cowell, and the audience’s favourite performer gets to make a recording. In other words, it’s basically Idol under a different name. It might seem risky for the network to give Cowell almost the same show. But if it succeeds, it could make him more successful than ever.

Idol has been durable so far: despite the departure of Paula Abdul, the first new episode of the season showed almost no ratings drop-off from last year. But observers think that Cowell is a different story. Audiences have come to associate the entire franchise with his nasty remarks, and episodes inevitably seem to revolve around him (like a much-hyped moment in the season premiere in which people told him to “shut up”). TV writer Ken Levine compared Idol without Cowell to the PGA tour without Tiger Woods, while Craig Ferguson told his late-night audience that Cowell “is the show.” After Cowell announced his departure, Idol creator Simon Fuller left the show to “start a new entertainment company,” as if acknowledging that his old property isn’t as valuable now.

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LCK on Coco: "His dreams are misguided"

By Colby Cosh - Friday, January 22, 2010 at 7:03 AM - 9 Comments

Louis C.K., who may be the dean of American standup comedy (or perhaps a regent serving during the Madness of King Chappelle), offers a sage commentary on the Late Night Wars. His insight is unique and valuable because 1) it’s Louis C.K., for God’s sake; 2) it’s saturated with sincere respect for everybody involved; 3) he’s written for and with pretty much everybody, including Conan O’Brien and David Letterman; 4) it’s easy to forget because he’s bald and pudgy, but he’s got a generational perspective quite distinct, in important ways, from that of the principals. LCK is four years younger than the boyish Conan, and easily young enough to be Jay Leno’s kid. In some respects he is obviously speaking for all the major comic talents out there who haven’t yet had their own successful series.

Jay Leno: Anti-Conan Insurance

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, January 21, 2010 at 12:40 PM - 36 Comments

As Conan O’Brien signs his severance pact with NBC and prepares to leave — see Maureen Ryan for the latest good LenCon analysis — the Hollywood Reporter points us to this 2008 article where an “inside source” sort of predicted the whole thing (I’ve added line breaks for greater ease of reading):

NBC has committed to Conan for ‘The Tonight Show’ and will go through with it. It’s less of a financial decision, because the $40-45 million penalty payment is not super relevant. If they went to Jay and said, ‘we need you to split the payment,’ he’d do it. They’ve made a public commitment to Conan and don’t want to get beaten up over it.

NBC will do everything to try to keep Jay. Morning shows, afternoon shows, daytime shows – he won’t take any of those. They will try to keep Jay in the fold so if Conan fails on ‘The Tonight Show’ they will put Jay right back in there. Jeff Zucker will call Jay into his office with big wink and say, ‘if you say it publicly I’ll deny it, but if Conan fails, I want you back.’ That’s just the way NBC works. Back when Dave and Jay were fighting over ‘The Tonight Show,’ they tried to see if they could do the same thing. That’s what they’re going to try and do here with Jay and Conan, only they are more likely to pull it off this time.

So much for the “not getting beaten up” part, of course.

In my opinion, David Letterman has been the most entertaining person in this whole thing. His response to Leno’s “don’t blame Conan” comments, two nights ago, was particularly good. Letterman is bitter and cranky and his affable manner (intentionally) does not conceal his seething rage. All this can be a handicap when he’s trying to be lighthearted and funny, but it is perfectly suited for the current situation, in addition to the fact that he isn’t directly involved in this and can therefore say whatever he wants (unlike Conan). Letterman was the guy who really perfected the idea that a talk-show host could be a character on his own show, someone whose reactions, feelings and petty jealousies could be a part of each night’s storyline. Other people had done it, of course, but his shows are really not so much talk shows as the story of a guy hosting a talk show. And the reactions of the Letterman character, with his anger, his personal baggage, his passive-aggressive loathing of Leno, and his taunting response to Leno’s cheap shots (Leno can’t really think of anything to say about Letterman except to refer to the blackmail scandal over and over) has created some of his best character-comedy moments.

I think my favourite part of this speech is “Lonnie Donegan.”

[vodpod id=Video.2905453&w=560&h=340&fv=%26rel%3D0%26border%3D0%26]

And just for the hell of it, and to explain the obscure reference, here’s the actual Lonnie Donegan with one of his biggest hit recordings:

Comedy fans may remember Stan Freberg’s hilarious parody of Donegan’s endless pre-song narration.

How about when hell freezes over? Two degrees, no separation and The price was right

By macleans.ca - Thursday, January 21, 2010 at 9:20 AM - 0 Comments

Just prorogue his subscription
Prime Minister Stephen Harper has called The Economist one of his favourite magazines. The feeling isn’t mutual. The British journal has laid an editorial beating on the PM under the headline “Harper goes prorogue.” It condemns the “naked self-interest” it sees behind suspending Parliament until March 3, after the Olympics. It called his cabinet “a bunch of Gerald Fords,” who apparently can’t walk and chew gum at the same time, or run the country and host the Olympics. The more likely reason for proroguing, the editors say, was to avoid scrutiny on issues including Canada’s policy on handing over Afghan detainees to local authorities when they risked torture. Canadians are complacent, but only if the “government is in good hands,” the editorial ends. “They may soon conclude that it isn’t.”

Expos 1, Blue Jays 0
Andre Dawson, a fan favourite of the late Montreal Expos, was finally voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, in his ninth year on the ballot. Not so lucky was former Toronto Blue Jay Roberto Alomar, who didn’t make the cut in his first year of eligibility, though few doubt that one of the best second baseman to ever play will make it to the Cooperstown, N.Y., shrine. As for Mark McGwire’s chances, fuggedaboutit. He finally admitted the obvious Monday, telling the Associated Press he was on steroids before, during and after breaking the home run record in 1998.

Going down to Luisana
Her name, Luisana Loreley Lopilato de la Torre, is almost as long as the Vancouver to Buenos Aires commute singer Michael Bublé, 34, has been making these past two years to see his lady love. This week he confirmed that he trekked down to Argentina with an engagement ring in November and proposed to the 22-year-old star of a popular South American soap opera. The two met at a record company party in Buenos Aires in late 2008. No date has been set for the wedding. Bublé’s fiancée played his imaginary love interest in his recent video for Haven’t Met You Yet, filmed in a Vancouver grocery store.

How about when hell freezes over?
Relations are frosty between Iceland’s president, Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, and Britain and the Netherlands after the head of the tiny, bankrupt nation vetoed a bill to repay the countries for bailing out creditors of the failed Icesave online bank. Icesave, which lacked adequate deposit insurance, failed in 2008. Britain and the Netherlands compensated depositors in their countries for $6 billion in losses and pressured Iceland for repayment. Compensation legislation was passed in Iceland’s parliament, but Grimsson refused to sign it, and instead called a referendum, which ends March 6. The vote will determine how—or if—Iceland will reimburse the bailout. So far public opinion is behind the president; the debt amounts to 40 per cent of Iceland’s GDP, about $18,000 a person.

Keanu’s not very excellent adventure
In the imagination of Karen Sala of Barrie, Ont., Toronto-born actor Keanu Reeves hangs out at the local No Frills grocery store, disguises himself as her ex-husband, and is the father of her four adult children. Last week, Judge Fred Graham dismissed her claim for $3 million a month in spousal support. He called the case “patently unbelievable,” and assessed her $15,000 in costs. Reeves, who says he never met Sala, submitted to a DNA test to prove he wasn’t the father. His lawyer said Reeves may not enforce the cost order against the cash-strapped Sala, though he spent some $85,000 in legal fees.

Two degrees, no separation
For most university students, life in a cramped residence room is a one-year transition from leaving home to a first apartment. Not so for Alkis Gerd’son, who has lived almost continuously in a University of Victoria residence since 1991. Gerd’son graduated more than 12 years ago with his second undergraduate degree and has since dabbled in a few non-credit courses. B.C.’s Supreme Court ruled the university can evict him. Gerd’son, who says he suffers from obsessive compulsive disorder and depression, has taken his case to the provincial human rights tribunal, claiming the university is unfair to the disabled.

What’s that you say, Mrs. Robinson?
Peter Robinson was Northern Ireland’s first minister and his wife, Iris, also an MP, was a religious and moral crusader who caused outrage in 2008 for saying homosexuality was as vile as child abuse. At the same time, it turns out, the first lady, now 60, was having an affair with 19-year-old Kirk McCambley, apparently after previously bedding his father, now dead. She also solicited money from property developers to help McCambley start a café. Iris has resigned her seat. Her husband, who temporarily stepped down from his post, is fighting to salvage his career. He has vowed to stay in the marriage.

Lean on us
The Chicopee ski hill in Kitchener, Ont., is short on elevation, but its skiers are big in heart. Last Thursday night the ski club paid a surprise visit to the family home of injured national team skier Kelly VanderBeek. She is there recovering from surgery for a knee injury that ended her hopes of competing in Whistler at the Olympics. A stunned VanderBeek hobbled to the door on crutches to be greeted by a crowd of 60, waving flags and singing O Canada, the song she’d hoped to hear from the podium. VanderBeek, who learned to ski at Chicopee, was moved to tears.

Life with Dad was a real blast
When your name is bin Laden, and your dad is Osama, it’s a safe bet your family life was complicated. Still, the clan has seen more than its share of drama lately. It emerged Osama’s  daughter Imam had fled the family compound near Tehran where one bin Laden wife and several children have lived under house arrest since 9/11. She sought refuge in the Saudi Embassy, and the Saudis are in talks to repatriate her. Brother Omar has since revealed another sibling, Bakr, who’s 16, has left Iran. Omar, of course, wrote the recent Growing Up Bin Laden, a portrait of a man who is a better terrorist than a father. Osama beat his children, sacrificed their pets to poison-gas experiments, and asked his sons to volunteer for suicide missions. Omar wrote, “My father hated his enemies more than he loved his sons.”

Stimulus begins at home
Balancing a trillion-dollar deficit may be less challenging for Peter Orszag, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), than flow-charting his relationships. Orszag, 41, is such a man about the Beltway he inspired a fan site, Orszgasm.com (“putting the OMG back in the OMB”). As a divorced father of two, he’s squired such dates as Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth, and venture capitalist Claire Milonas. Milonas was pregnant with their daughter when he took up with ABC reporter Bianna Golodryga. Weeks after Milonas gave birth, he and Golodryga announced their engagement. As an MSNBC headline put it, it’s a “Budget baby mama drama.”

The price was right
Affable former TV game show host Bob Barker seems an unlikely foil for the uncompromising Canadian environmentalist Paul Watson, head of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, but the two vegetarians are bitter foes of the Japanese whaling industry. Last week a Sea Shepherd speedboat and a Japanese whaler collided during a confrontation off Antarctica. Steaming to the rescue of the sinking speedboat and its crew was the 1,200-ton Bob Barker, financed by its namesake. Watson had told Barker he could put the whalers out of business for $5 million. “I have the $5 million,” Barker replied, “so let’s get it on.”

Another Reagan hits the panic button
Los Angeles police wasted no time responding to a silent alarm at 1 a.m. at the home of Michael Reagan, a conservative commentator and the adopted son of the late president Ronald Reagan. They quickly surrounded the home and arrested Michael’s 31-year-old son Cameron, who berated the officers and attempted to leave. Police say Ronnie’s grandson had been drinking. He was later released on a $10,000 bond. Michael said the “misunderstanding” resulted when his son, unaware he had tripped the alarm, panicked at the presence of police. He has had previous run-ins with police.

A shot of Tequila
Reality TV star Tila Tequila has turned to Twitter in her grief over the death of her fiancée, hard-partying Johnson & Johnson heiress Casey Johnson. Tequila’s tweets soon degenerated into a slanging match with heiress Courtenay Semel, of the Yahoo! Semels. Semel has been romantically linked with both women and claimed the impending marriage was a fraud: “We’re talking about the biggest fame whore in L.A.,” a reference to Tequila. Meantime, yet another heiress, Nicky Hilton, and her socialite friend Bijou Phillips, seized two of Johnson’s dogs from a weeping Tequila. Zoey, an elderly, ill poodle, was to be put to sleep, and buried with his owner.

Careful what you wish for, Conan
In case you’re losing sleep over the state of NBC late night TV (and isn’t that the point of it?), here’s an update. Jay Leno’s prime-time show dies when NBC broadcasts the Vancouver Olympic Games next month. Leno moves to 11:35 p.m., bumping Conan O’Brien’s Tonight Show to 12:05 a.m. On Monday, O’Brien ripped NBC in his monologue and joked he’ll star in a TV movie “about a woman trapped in an abusive relationship with her network.” Then, on Tuesday, he announced he wouldn’t host the show in its new “next day” time slot. Meantime, he has an exit strategy of sorts, revealed in pre-taped comments aired for the 20th anniversary of The Simpsons, a show he once wrote for. If somebody (Fox, say?) would put him to pasture in Spain, and pay him $1 a year to write dialogue for the evil Mr. Burns, he said, “I would take that job.”

Scenes from a television war

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, January 14, 2010 at 11:05 AM - 71 Comments

The Conan-Leno fight is clearly a generational one. I have yet to hear anyone in my online social network declare for “Team Leno”; I’m not sure that there is any such thing, or who would be part of it if there were. Consider this: Jay Leno was at one time one of the most respected standup comedians on Earth, and continues to perform live all over the continent and refine his live act. Conan O’Brien, a Harvard man who spent no more than ten seconds paying comic dues of any kind, has no traceable experience of standup. And yet every single standup comic I’ve heard or seen weigh in on the feud has backed Conan—even though he appears to be walking away from the Tonight Show, which has been the dominant economic force in their industry for more than 50 years. There’s something happening here, but what it is ain’t exactly clear.

At first I was tempted to wonder if blowback from the 2007-08 Writer’s Guild strike was playing a role here. Some comics were uncomfortable with Leno making a side deal to do struck work by writing his own monologues for the Tonight Show. But Leno was exonerated in WGA hearings, and besides, union hatred of blacklegs can’t account for the mass popular agitation against Leno. Moreover, from a strictly business standpoint, Conan started this whole fracas during his 2004 negotiations with NBC when he demanded that the countdown be started on Leno’s Tonight Show tenure. This game of musical chairs, with Conan, Leno, and Jimmy Fallon trying to squeeze together onto two bus seats, would never have existed if not for that maneouvre. Any such move against Johnny Carson would have been regarded as an appalling act of showbiz regicide.

In part, surely, this affray is being perceived as a replay of the Leno-Letterman war. (Wars, one notices, often come in pairs.) Back then, Leno’s cartoonish scheming coupled with his interruption of what was perceived as a natural monarchical succession, with Letterman as the rightful heir, to turn industry and popular sentiment against him. Over time, Leno proved that NBC had made the correct business decision. But like King John he couldn’t shake the bad reputation he had earned by stepping out of line. He made matters worse by giving the world a safe, sterile Tonight Show, without the slyness or the dimly anarchic aura of Carson’s version. Though, again, it must be to somebody’s taste. Leno seems a lot like Margaret Thatcher—you never heard any performer or intellectual in England say they didn’t loathe her with every cell of their body, and yet she kept on winning elections.

Letterman himself has seen a lot of his edge dulled in the meantime; I can’t be alone in having found his Late Night work seminal, but finding myself unable to watch him fawn over celebrities and extract cheap laughs from audiences now. Owing to events, however—9/11, the heart bypass, marriage, progeny, and even his philandering—he has somehow grown in American affections. Conan, who already loomed larger than Leno in the annals of American comedy before anybody thought of giving him a talk show, is certainly serving as a proxy or champion for Letterman in people’s imaginations. If the spirit of the revolt against Leno could be summed up in a single phrase, it might be “Not again!”

Will Jay Leno Win By Losing?

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, January 7, 2010 at 4:09 PM - 27 Comments

Take this cum grano salis (that’s Latin for “don’t believe nothing until you get actual confirmation”), but TMZ is saying that Jay Leno’s 10 o’clock show will be placed on hiatus and that he will be put back in the 11:30 slot, presumably replacing Conan O’Brien. This follows a day of constant rumours that Leno would be gone at 10 o’clock, followed by a semi-denial where NBC admitted the affiliates were rebelling against his terrible lead-in to the 11 o’clock news, but reiterated their faith in Leno as a performer.

Update: Bill Carter of the New York Times confirms that NBC is “considering” this move.

Update # 2, also from Carter: “NBC Plans Leno at 11:30, Conan at 12.” So basically NBC, roundly mocked for its attempt to have both Jay and Conan, will try to fix its failed experiment by… having both Jay and Conan, but at different times than before. Under this plan, Leno’s “new” 11:30 show would be half an hour, followed by an hour from Conan, followed by Fallon. This would force Carson Daly out of a job, and no one will care. The whole thing will undoubtedly be spun by NBC as some kind of bold experiment, shaking the very foundations of TV — and I will say this: if they had done this in the first place, it might actually have made sense. (Let Leno continue to do his monologue against Letterman, then let Conan do what he does. I personally would be happy not to have to decide between Conan and Stephen Colbert; I usually pick Colbert.) Now, of course, it doesn’t make sense; it just looks desperate, because it is.

TMZ does not have as strong a record with business gossip as they do with celebrity death (where they are now seen as very close to infallible; nobody’s dead until TMZ says so). I doubt they’d announce something like this without an actual source, but there are all kinds of reasons why it might turn out not to be true. These things can be trial balloons that someone puts out to test the reaction, or they can be rumours that are put out to make the actual news sound better by comparison… anyway, it’s not confirmed. Something is going to change with NBC’s talk show lineup, because it has to or their affiliates will kill them. It might not be this.

Still, this does give us license to speculate, and if it does turn out to be true, it will mean that Leno won by losing — by doing a show that under-performed, he has at least created the chance that he could get his old job back. If he’d been a success, he’d have no chance whatsoever of going back to The Tonight Show. Jay Leno may turn out to be the Max Bialystock of TV talk: he can advance his career more with a flop than he can with a hit, as long as the Little Old Ladies (replaced here by NBC Executives) believe in him.

I am not prepared to answer the question of whether Leno’s 10 o’clock show employed Roger De Bris as a consulting director.

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"Well, NBC Just Lost Another Affiliate" — Groucho Marx

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, October 19, 2009 at 4:34 PM - 3 Comments

That’s a quote from an episode of You Bet Your Life, and it popped into my head when I saw this L.A. Times article on Jay Leno’s disastrous effect on the 11 o’clock news.

Leno, who is smarter about TV than most network executives, knew this was going to be the biggest problem; he said several times before he started his new show that his job was to provide a good lead-in to the 11 o’clock news where affiliates make their real money. But he hasn’t managed to keep people watching. Maybe he thought leaving “Headlines” to the end of the show would be enough to prevent the tune-out that often happens after the interview is over; it wasn’t.

This is a case where what makes economic sense for the network doesn’t make sense for its affiliates. NBC might do fine with Leno because, little-watched though it is, it is cheap to produce. But the thing about expensive scripted shows is that they have stories, and people who watch the first half-hour (or the first 15 minutes, if it’s a comedy) tend to want to see the second half to find out how it ends. Which in turn keeps them looking at the TV by the time the “film at 11″ arrives. A talk show has no story, no ending, and unlike variety shows, it doesn’t even usually have the promise of a great sketch or act in the final five minutes. Even if you liked what you saw so far, there’s not a whole lot keeping you from changing the channel. Which is a disaster for local stations.

NBC Is Not a Real Network, Take 3

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, October 9, 2009 at 2:04 PM - 14 Comments

Please read Linda Holmes’s piece on NBC’s decision to cancel Southland after ordering, and then not airing, a second season. The main point of the decision is that NBC has dropped the pretense that The Jay Leno Show will not interfere with their commitment to drama. NBC ordered what was basically a 10 o’clock drama, assured everyone that this would be fine to air at 9 o’clock, and then decided that, no, it’s really not a 9 o’clock show after all. In doing so they probably killed their relationship with John Wells and, perhaps more importantly, gave themselves a reputation as a network that drama producers can’ t depend upon to air their episodes at all. And what with the decision to sink lots of money into episodes and then not air them, you have to wonder whether even the low production costs of Jay Leno can make up for all the money NBC is wasting on that.

In part this may just prove that NBC’s drama development hasn’t yet caught up with their last-minute decision to abandon the 10 o’clock hour. I’d be reluctant to say that their Leno experiment can’t work, because Fox does just fine not broadcasting anything after 10 o’clock. But they have stayed away from the shows like ER and NYPD Blue that wouldn’t work as 9 o’clock shows. As Holmes points out, NBC’s abandonment of drama looks even worse because their sister network USA is doing extremely well with scripted dramas — and not ambitious, expensive dramas like Kings, just good solid light entertainments. Shows like Southland — not great works of television art, but solid mainstream dramas with a dark tone — were perfect for 10 o’clock; they really do have trouble working earlier, so NBC isn’t necessarily wrong to think it wouldn’t be a 9 o’clocker; the network was just wrong to come to this realization in the most expensive, humiliating and angry-making way possible.

NBC could theoretically come up with 9 o’clock dramas that would work for them. On the other hand, since even their time-slot-appropriate dramas either stink now (Heroes) or don’t get very good ratings in spite of being perfect for that time slot (Chuck), it may not be that their drama development needs to adjust to the new reality. It might just be that they’re just a very poorly-run network.

The Living Embodiment of "Pluggers"

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, September 3, 2009 at 3:32 PM - 8 Comments

Speaking of Jay Leno, Time has posted James Poniewozik’s excellent cover story on NBC’s experiment/gamble/cost-cutting measure. (It includes quotes from Fred Silverman, who says that if the show succeeds, t will be the most significant thing to happen in broadcast television in the last decade.” And attention must be paid to anything Fred Silverman says, now that he’s no longer the most ineffective Silverman in NBC history.) But the thing that’s really striking, and that doesn’t bode well for the watchability of the show, is that Leno appears to be taking his regular-Joe, death-of-common schtick to an even higher level than I had previously thought possible. His opening quote is a classic of the genre:

Jay Leno drove to work today in an 84-year-old car. It sits in his parking space in the NBC lot, on this sweltering summer morning in Burbank, a 1925 Model T Roadster. “That’s part of my social experiment, being green,” he tells me. “It’s my theory that if you drive the same car for 80 years, you’re more environmentally friendly than buying a new car every five or six years, even if it’s a hybrid. I mean, that is the original green car. It has nothing on it. There’s no water pump, no oil pump. There’s no — it just has what you need to get from point A to point B.”

Everybody’s used to Leno saying, half-jokingly and half-not, that his incredible wealth and gigantic car collection actually proves what a regular guy he is. But what Leno is doing in that quote, apart from making an expensive hobby sound like a Common Man activity, is taking some Elitist Liberal idea (in this case, going green) and saying that common-sense types know that the real way to achieve the same goal is to never change your habits. He is, in other words, sounding exactly like the comic strip “Pluggers.”

And yes, I’m over-analyzing one joke, but Leno has been sounding like this for a long time, and I think it provides a hint of what we can expect from him. Because, again, Leno is a very smart guy who’s very conscious of his own image and how he presents himself. And the way he has chosen to present himself is, in a strange way, similar to the way Jon Stewart presents himself. Stewart’s schtick is that of the Last Sane Man, the representative of the viewer who wants pundits and politicians to cut out the BS and talk sensibly. Leno’s image is the same; it’s just that the viewers he’s trying to represent have a different worldview. The Leno viewer sees his or herself as somewhere in the middle, much like the “Independents” who keep changing their opinions in polls every week. They don’t like elitists but they also don’t like stupidity (which is the point of the “Jaywalking” segment). Stewart congratulates his audience for knowing more than cable news pundits; Leno congratulates his audience for knowing more than their dumb neighbours. They’re not all that different in some ways.

Standing Up For Jay

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, September 1, 2009 at 8:15 PM - 2 Comments

The Jay Leno Show approacheth (September 14, for those of you into calendar-marking), and with it, a lot of confusion as to the meaning of Leno. Aaron Barnhart’s article is probably the best piece I’ve seen so far on the fiendishly brilliant “image control” that Leno and NBC have practiced since he took over The Tonight Show – or more specifically, since a little while after he took over The Tonight Show, when he re-vamped the show to be more Middle-America friendly. As Barnhart points out, not only his comedy but his biography changed to fit the new image. As a cool, smart stand-up comic, he emphasized what all cool dudes emphasize: their detachment from the rest of the world, so that they can stand back and make fun of a society to which they don’t quite belong. (Jerry Seinfeld and Leno were good friends and similar comedians, and Seinfeld’s whole persona is not only cool, but downright cold.) To make Tonight work for him, Leno re-invented himself as a guy who was no longer detached from his viewers, but one of them: a working Joe, someone who laughs at the same things they do and is interested in the same things they are (O.J., Monica Lewinsky). All late-night hosts have to make these jokes, but some of them find ways to demonstrate that they don’t quite like it, or to telegraph their contempt for corny humour. Leno stopped doing that.

The re-invention of Leno has been going on, as I said, for a long time, and was clearly a deliberate strategy on the part of NBC as well as Leno himself. I can’t find it online, but in his early Tonight days, before the Hugh Grant interview established him as late night comedy’s official Voice of Reason, I recall seeing a singing commercial about various decent hard-working Middle Americans who were “Standing Up for Jay.” (If I’m misquoting, forgive me; it’s been years since I saw it.) Leno hated the campaign, finding it corny, but it fit in with what he himself was doing for the show and his own humour. He was selling himself as the People’s host in comparison to the frosty Letterman, just like now he’s going to be a friendly presence for people who find other 10 p.m. shows to be too dark and depressing.

The strategy worked because Leno knew that he had to find a niche. He was a hip guy, but Letterman had the Hip demographic sewn up. He couldn’t counter Letterman with warmth, because while Letterman is totally incapable of warmth, Leno is only close to totally incapable of it. (That was Carson’s big thing: somehow he projected warmth and charm, or as much of it as a superstar comedian can have. Nobody’s going to be able to do that again, though Craig Ferguson’s bursts of candour have made him seem more like a real person than most hosts. And Jon Stewart, while he serves a relatively small audience, does try to project a sense that he’s the viewer’s pal.) If he can’t do Hip, and he can’t do Warm, then the only thing to do was to be the host who was on the side of the viewers, liking what they liked, saying to Hugh Grant what they wished they could say. It doesn’t lend itself to good comedy, since really funny comedy usually gives the audience something they weren’t quite expecting (even if it’s within the context of a routine about something that is very familiar to them) and Leno’s act, on Tonight and on his new show, is based on giving the audience exactly what they were expecting. But it works.

I found Barnhart’s piece via Mark Evanier, who, back in 1995, wrote an article also called “Standing Up For Jay.” The piece was about why stand-up comics thought they did better performances on Leno’s show than on Letterman’s — though neither of them were as good for comedians as Carson was — because Letterman tended to make everything about him, and his studio audience followed suit by focusing mainly on what he was doing.

Did you hear the one about Obama?

By John Intini - Monday, June 22, 2009 at 4:10 PM - 96 Comments

Soon after Barack Obama’s victory last November, late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel stopped by Legends, a barbershop in L.A. He was there for a trim but also to test out, “on behalf of the comedy community,” what type of jokes about the new President the almost all-black staff and clientele considered offensive. Cracks about Obama being a bad dancer are fine, they said. So are jabs at his big ears. But, Kimmel was told, Mrs. O’s “butt” is off-limits.

The skit was a joke (a pretty good one, actually), but it illustrated a real concern among some comedians and late-night scribes heading into the Obama era. Sure, comics would be able to count on Vice-President Joe Biden to regularly stuff his foot in his mouth, but Obama, unlike most of the commanders-in-chief who preceded him, wasn’t a walking punchline. Most of the late-night hosts have publicly complained about how little the President gives them to work with. Comedian Chris Rock compared Obama to the untouchable Brad Pitt. “Ooh, you’re young and virile and you’ve got a beautiful wife and kids,” Rock told CNN. “You know, what do you say?”

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Conan better keep Jay on the team

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, June 12, 2009 at 1:00 PM - 4 Comments

On his first episode of The Tonight Show, Conan O’Brien joked that Jay Leno would be coming back to NBC “in two days.” Well, not quite that soon, but starting in the fall, O’Brien’s Tonight predecessor will have a nightly talk show at 10 p.m. This was seen as a sign of NBC executives’ lack of confidence in O’Brien, but they may be doing O’Brien a favour. O’Brien’s first Tonight episode beat David Letterman in the ratings; if Leno had gotten a competing talk-show on another network, he might have beaten Conan, just as he beat everyone else. O’Brien told his audience that Leno is a friend and that “I’m looking forward to him being our lead-in.” It’s better to have him as a lead-in than competition, because audiences prefer the unhip, familiar, comfortable—in short, Jay Leno.

Even Leno’s network didn’t expect him to be this popular for this long. Sue Trowbridge, who runs The Late Night TV Page (a Web resource for finding out the upcoming guests on talk shows), points out that NBC announced O’Brien as Leno’s successor in 2004 “far enough ahead of time that maybe Leno thought that would be a good time to step down.” But “five years passed, and he’s still number one and still enjoying it.” It wasn’t hard to see why NBC might have expected his popularity to decrease: Leno is a dinosaur in a talk-show landscape dominated by people with a hip, ironic take on the format.

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The Tonight Show, now with more smart stupid humour

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, June 2, 2009 at 1:13 PM - 5 Comments

Conan O’Brien is really, really obsessed with Los Angeles. Or that’s what you’d think after watching his first episode of The Tonight Show. It’s doubtful that most viewers care, or even know, whether a particular talk show is taped on one coast or another, but O’Brien never let us forget it. The opening sketch had him running across the country to get from New York to L.A.; one of his first jokes was about how he’s moved to “a state that’s bankrupt”; when the audience laughed at an L.A. Clippers joke, he commented that he’d learned how to get laughs “in this town.” Even his guest, Will Ferrell, engaged him in a conversation about things to do now that he’s relocated.

The point of all this L.A.-based humour is to portray O’Brien as a fish out of water, an ordinary guy getting used to a new city. The fact that he already lived in L.A. when he wrote for The Simpsons is inconvenient, and therefore never mentioned.

Continuing with the outsider theme, O’Brien presents himself as an upstart turned loose on a respectable showbiz franchise—and a lot of his bits last night were about him looking uncomfortable in stolid, old-fashioned Hollywood, or making mischief by fooling around with show-business institutions (including vandalizing the sacred Hollywood sign). He’s an overgrown kid who’s been given The Tonight Show to play with.

Unlike Jay Leno, who was a confident showbiz insider and a natural performer, O’Brien’s schtick has always been based on the fact that he’s not really a performer, and doesn’t seem comfortable with the conventions of show business. Last night, he laughed sheepishly at his own jokes, good and bad, and he did his trademark move of clasping his hands and bowing, as if debasing himself in front of everyone else. He allowed Ferrell to put him down frequently (though the best line of the night was Ferrell announcing that Liza Minnelli, who will likely beat him out for a Tony, “is a Communist.”)

For some viewers, it may be a jarring change from Leno. While O’Brien is known as the edgier of the two comics, his edginess comes from doing almost childish, infantile humour: he loves silly jokes, like dubbing stupid lines over a clip of Joe Biden, or hauling out old pop-culture icons like Fabio for cameos. Leno’s humour was aimed more at people who wanted to think of themselves as too grown-up for that kind of thing; while Leno’s jokes were not actually smart, they were meant to make the viewer feel smart. Leno fans could listen to his topical political jokes and feel, because they got the jokes, that they were well-informed people; then they’d watch the “Jaywalking” segments and feel smarter than the idiots who couldn’t answer Leno’s questions. That’s the biggest change between Leno and O’Brien: Leno did dumbed-down smart humour for older viewers, while O’Brien does smart stupid humour for younger hipsters. Whether the Tonight Show audience will accept these extra layers of irony is still an open question.

It seems likely that O’Brien will be on The Tonight Show for a while: last night’s ratings were good, NBC likes him, and he knows how to steer a show in the right direction (remember, his first talk show started disastrously). But it’s possible that he may never become an institution like Carson or even Leno, just because he doesn’t have—or want to have—their kind of authority. Those guys were showbiz kings who loved the phony glamour of Hollywood; O’Brien wanted us to know, last night, that he’s not an authority figure, but someone like us who happens to have stumbled into an important job. Of course he’s rich, powerful and loves his job, just like Leno. The difference is that O’Brien is hoping we won’t figure that out.

Everybody Loves a Good Manufactured Outrage

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, March 20, 2009 at 9:26 AM - 13 Comments

Last night President Obama was on Jay Leno, normal enough for a candidate but unusual (if not unprecedented) for a President, and when Jay Leno mock-complimented him on his higher (but still low) bowling score, Obama said: “It’s like the special Olympics or something.”

The line was immediately picked up by commentators, was walked back by a Presidential spokesman, prompted a Presidential apology, and became a top blog issue within the hour. The internet and the 24-hour news cycle have turned word-parsing into a science, but it’s also become, in a strange way, a “scoop.” Jake Tapper, who “broke” this story on his ABC News blog, is basically obsessed with turning up mis-statements or gaffes that others have ignored; he’s ABC’s Senior Trivia Correspondent. In this case, the story may get even more play because it fits into an emerging media narrative, that Obama can’t say anything right without a teleprompter. Gaffes get more play when they fit an overall narrative.

I have to admit I’m not terribly outraged by the manufactured outrage machine in this case. Powerful political figures do need to watch what they say and choose their words carefully. It’s a different matter when someone says something that is not stupid but is then wilfully misinterpreted to mean something else, like Al Gore with his internet comments (he never said he invented the internet, but a whole media narrative was created around the idea that he did). But this is just standard-issue stuff where somebody makes a poor choice of words, it becomes a 24-hour story and is then forgotten. Besides, I suspect that politicians don’t always mind this kind of outrage, since it creates a distraction from the genuinely controversial or embarrassing things they say. So Obama probably considers himself lucky that he’s getting more outrage over that than his statement that Tim Geithner is doing an outstanding job.

NBC 10 p.m. Programs Of the Past

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, December 9, 2008 at 4:36 PM - 0 Comments

As NBC prepares to Leno-ize the 10 p.m. slot starting next fall, I thought I’d remind myself of some of the NBC shows that have appeared in that now-off-limits slot in the past. (This was done with the help of this list of shows that appeared on network schedules each season, or at least on the fall schedules.)

Up until the early ’60s, the 10 p.m. hour was frequently used for half-hour programs — there weren’t all that many hour-long shows in the early years of TV, and those that did exist were more likely to air at 9. But as the modern TV schedule developed, that last hour became a place where a network would try to find one show, put it there forever and forget about it — since it’s not an easy slot to fill. Often that something was variety or talk: after Jack Paar left The Tonight Show, NBC gave him his own talk show in prime-time at 10 p.m. See, everything old is new again, except Paar only did the show one night a week, not five.

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