I haven’t weighed in on this whole Jay v. Conan thing; mostly, I’ve been enjoying the unusual public fighting. You don’t typically see people just say straight out what they really think.
But it seemed hard to care all that much and two recent news items clarify the point.
- Comedian Louis C.K. appeared at the TCA tour, expressing his respect for Conan O’Brien, while also saying he doesn’t understand the allure of hosting The Tonight Show (which he describes as “just this old, shitty thing.”).
- In the NY Times, David Carr says that the age of The Tonight Show as “a search engine on culture,” encouraging water cooler conversation the next day, may have passed.
After the death of Johnny Carson, and the subsequent universal praising of his talent, my wife and I purchased some DVDs of his show. I hadn’t watched Carson in years. He was clearly funny and gifted, but it didn’t take long to remember why I had eventually stopped caring about The Tonight Show in the Eighties. It was from a by-gone era of sexist jokes and out-of-date references. It was a format whose time had gone.
We used to have variety shows on TV, lots of them. We used to have westerns. Soap operas used to have huge audiences. Slowly, these things are changing and fading away. We can mourn their passing, but we should not hang on unduly long. (See this previous post on I Love Lucy.)
I’m just old enough to have watched The Mike Douglas Show and The Dinah Shore Show and The Andy Williams Show and The Ed Sullivan Show and The Dean Martin Show. There is a style to these programs I do not ever expect to see return.
But maybe The Tonight Show is different! After all, NBC has a few programs with classic pedigrees: The Today Show, Saturday Night Live, Meet the Press. They’ve been around for a long time; we expect them to last forever; we don’t particularly care who the host is at any given time.
But Louis C.K. notes that Letterman’s show in the Eighties was known as “Letterman,” even though it was actually called Late Night. The Late Late Show has been on the air for 15 years and Craig Ferguson is its third host. Does it feel like there has any continuity going on there?
Let’s ignore how NBC has handled this situation (badly) and how Leno has behaved (badly). The Tonight Show as an idea, as a television tradition stretching back 56 years, the third longest-running entertainment program in the U.S., is probably gone now. If it wasn’t before, it feels to me as though these shenanigans – this elegantly brutal game of Musical Chairs – have killed it.