The Tonight Show
Jan 17
I have been enjoying this NBC/”Tonight Show”/Jay&Conan nonsense as much as anyone over the past week—mostly due to the sincere snarkery of TV critics like Alan Sepinwall, Mo Ryan, and Tim Goodman, as they tweeted the best lines and gossip as overheard at the Television Critics Association meeting—but I admit to being flabbergasted that late night is still this big a deal. Seriously, paying Conan O’Brien forty million dollars to go away, when few people were even aware he was there?
Of course, this is the same network that’s pissing two hundred million dollars down the Olympic hole, so what do they know?
(When it’s quite clear that I could run a television network better than these bozos can…it’s safe to say, “You’re doing it wrong.”)
It’s hard to remember (or to believe), but here’s why “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson was such a big deal: That’s the show where you got to see the stars. If you wanted to see a star chatting and “letting loose” with a host who made them feel at home and let them talk a bit, you watched “The Tonight Show.”
We didn’t have TV and internet 24/7 filling endless hours with minutiae of the stars’ lives, with the reality shows letting us in on every little goddamn minute of these people’s days. Yes, there were supermarket tabloids, but news channels barely existed in 1992, when Carson quit. Now when anything having to do with a celebrity happens, we get endless blathering coverage, filling air time, hoping against hope that they will get the money shot of someone overdosing or whatever. And if you want to watch something at 11:30pm, how many choices do you have now? Answer: lots.
Johnny Carson was an amazing host, and here’s what he did that I’ve seen rarely since: he listened. Letterman never listens to the guest; he’s on to the next scripted question while the star is still babbling their scripted answer to the last one. I don’t know if Craig Ferguson listens, although he seems like he might. Jay Leno certainly never listens (to anyone, if these stories burbling out are correct).
We have endless talk and columns and blog entries (hey there) about this segment of TV history that has, frankly, passed. Except for the part about them having even more hours that they need to fill, and they can’t fill them all with obvious infomercials.
All I’m wondering is, if they can afford forty million dollars to make Conan go away, how much money is every hour of broadcast TV worth? And could they start coughing up some more public-interest programming as part of the price?
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