Thursday, January 21, 2010

This Week in Off-Topic: I'm on Team Letterman

David Letterman


Welcome to a new weekly feature on the blog, This Week in Off-Topic. It is what the name says, an off-topic-to-wrestling post just to spice things up a bit. Don't worry, it'll only be one post a week, but hey, I have non-wrestling thoughts too. Sometimes. Not very often.

Aaaanyway, unless you're foreign to the US/Canada or you've been living under a rock, NBC has been in the process of royally screwing up their late night talk show lineup for the second time in two decades. The first time happened when Johnny Carson retired and they bumbled their way into naming Jay Leno his heir to the Tonight Show despite rumblings that it would be David Letterman. Letterman followed Carson on his Late Show, and was the odds-on favorite to take the slot, but NBC bungled things up. Letterman is still bitter to this day, although his bitterness manifests itself in cutting jokes, both at the network and at Leno whom he felt stabbed him in the back. Leno had been a regular on Letterman's show and a close friend until, in Letterman's view, he stabbed the gap-toothed lothario of the interns in the back.

I was ten at the time, so I didn't understand what was going on. If I did, I'd have been Team Letterman all the way. I don't really watch late night television a lot, but when I do, I'm with CBS and Letterman all the way. Dave isn't afraid to cut when he needs to cut, he's an excellent interviewer, and his features, including the Top Ten, are for the most part laugh-inducing. Funny, CBS is a network known for its boring, pandering-to-old-farts television in prime time, and they employ the edgy late night guy. NBC, a network that has brought us phenomenal, cutting-edge shows like Chuck and 30 Rock, has the "safe bet", the guy who'd rather point out the obvious stupidity of the average American rather than go after things that might be the core reason why the average American doesn't know where Iraq is on a map.

Yes, Jay Leno may be a ratings winner, but he's also boring as all fuck. I tried watching him, I just couldn't get into him. It's the most insipid of observational humor, like pointing out the obvious. Bert Kreischer, a comedian, appeared on the Preston and Steve morning show here in Philly, and he hit the nail on the head describing Leno's target audience. He described them as the people who write angry letters into the network if they show something remotely risque on television. Remember back to that Simpsons episode where Kent Brockman screamed an obscenity on the air after Homer spilled hot coffee on him. He didn't get fired from his post until Ned Flanders, reviewing EVERY TV show from the last week for something to bitch about, came across it and wrote an angry letter to Brockman's TV station.

That's right, Jay Leno's core audience is full of Ned Flanderses.

They feel too uncomfortable watching Letterman, or Kimmel, or hell, even George Lopez on TBS; I mean, he had Jennifer Love Hewitt on his show talking about how she bedazzled her vagina. (lolwut?) The fact that you can't even vaguely refer to genitalia on network TV without the Flanderses coming out and screaming bloody murder is sign enough for you that that wouldn't have flown with Leno's audience.

But what does that have to do with anything? Yeah, I just described the 11:35 PM talk show scene for the last 20 years, but what does this have to do with Conan O'Brien? Well, everything really. When Leno said he was going to retire in five years in 2004, there was no way in hell that Conan should have believed that history wasn't going to repeat itself. Conan, like Letterman, attracts a hipper, smarter crowd than Leno. I mean, he has cred as a former writer for the Simpsons, and his regular bits include a dog that likes to poop on everything and the freaking Masturbating Bear. Plus, we know how Leno weaseled his way into the Tonight Show gig in front of Letterman. What would make anyone think that he wouldn't change his mind in the five years he gave himself to wind the show down?

Then, of course, in the final stroke of foreshadowing for all this, instead of leaving the network after retiring, Leno took what was probably the most idiotic time slot to put a talk show on a weeknight, 10 PM. Shouldn't Jay have known that his core audience was already watching NCIS or whatever CSI spinoff that the Flanders demographic already watches on CBS at that time slot? This was a disaster waiting to happen.

That being said, I'm not on Team Conan per se. I'm not against him, but I've never watched his show, and outside of his brilliant writing for the Simpsons, I really don't know what he's all about other than what other people tell me. The reason why I'm so vehemently in his corner and against Leno is because I'm with Team Letterman. This has happened before, the ballsier choice was let go because the network wanted someone "safe" (I refrain from using the term "more talented" because from what I've heard, before he took the Tonight Show gig, Leno was among the best stand-up comedians ever along with Richard Pryor and George Carlin). To be on Team Letterman is to back Conan O'Brien in this debacle like you were a hardcore fan of his show.

And yes, it may seem unfair to heap all this on Leno because it's the network's doing. NBC didn't give Conan nearly enough time. NBC were the idiots who created the combustible situation where they kept the highly successful talk show host they were pushing out, dumping him into a timeslot doomed for failure. Jeff Zucker and all his sycophants aping the party line deserve to die in a fire for this, but at the same time, this isn't the first time that Leno has come out looking like a weasel. Yeah, he's said the right things, but actions speak louder than words.

And with history repeating itself, as a wrestling fan, you can only sit back and watch how these Late Night Wars make the old Monday Night Wars look like tea socials in comparison, no?