Welcome to the inaugural edition of my Pop Culture Club, in which every week we’ll meet in PopWatch and dissect, critique, or just generally mock a movie, TV show, or DVD. I’ll be on the boards, and look forward to our back and forth. And, time permitting, our to and fro.
Our first assignment was Late Night With Jimmy Fallon. As I mentioned previously, I haven’t seen this show since its first week, when it was rusty and awkward, as all new talk shows are in their opening days. It wouldn’t have been fair to judge it then. But now it’s a few months later, and JIMMY FALLON, WE JUDGE THEE!
I’ve had a deep love for late night TV ever since discovering David Letterman in high school in 1986, and then taping his show every night and gorging on them over the weekends. But now, with so many talk shows big and small on so many different networks, and comedy having evolved long past the desk-bit "Look what crazy stuff I found in a newspaper!" staples, I find it hard to care when a new host arrives. It’s not that Fallon is supremely bad at his job, he’s just gotten involved with a format that nobody’s clamoring for anymore. He’s like a new and improved Atari 2600. Or a network news anchor.
Fallon seems to (subconsciously or not) know that. As he stands before his reflexive curtain, telling monologue jokes that are passable, but interchangeable from anyone else’s, he occasionally laughs and looks off to his Dan Aykroyd-doppelganger sidekick Steve Higgins, as if to say, "I know, can you believe we’re still doing this?" It’s the same expression I’d make if somebody ordered me on stage and forced me to do ventriloquism.
Late night comedy was constructed by Steve Allen and Johnny Carson,deconstructed by Letterman, and then meta-deconstructed by Conan O’Brien.There’s nothing left to reinvent, unless you just come out and kill theguests. Fallon’s desk pieces, like "real animals with fake arms," arelike deleted scenes you’d find on an old Conan DVD. And as aninterviewer, Fallon is genial, but it’s difficult to figure out what hereally cares about. On Monday he kept going on about how great SusanSarandon’s play Exit the King was, but you just know that he wasplaying Brickbreaker on his BlackBerry by act 2.
(He does care about one thing — Saturday Night Live — and he needsto stop caring so much. When he had Andy Samberg on on Tuesday, andthey kept name-dropping SNL writers and referred to ex-cast memberChris Parnell as "Parnsy," it was as alienating as attending someoneelse’s high school reunion.)
The thing is, I find Fallon likable. He just doesn’t fill out hisstudio. His low key, silly sense of humor would do well in a tiny,informal space. Does anyone remember the talk show Night After Night With Allan Havey, from Comedy Central’s early days? Havey, a comedian,sat in a dark studio, talking and joking to the camera and then his oneguest: There was no braying crowd, just an "audience of one," adifferent fan every night who would sit alone in an empty bleacher.That informal, intimate, hear-the-crew-guys-snicker feel then went onto work for Talk Soup, and I think it would work for Fallon. He’s 34,but seems like a perma-college student (getting his honorary doctoratein Monday’s remote, he seemed far more comfortable with the studentsthan any of the administration). Watching an intimate show makes youfeel like you’re in on something, and a young audience would get off onfeeling like they were hanging out with Jimmy in his basement, ratherthan seeing him dressed up in old Conan hand-me-downs and acting fartoo psyched that Randy Jackson stopped by. Really, once you seem hoppedup by the impending presence of Randy Jackson, you’ve lost allcredibility.
Okay, enough of my blathering. What do you think of his show? Wheredo you think he ranks among the other talk show hosts, past andpresent? And what should I have for lunch? All pressing questions.
Before I throw open the boards, I have to present next week’sassignment: Let’s watch Glee, the new campy musical comedy series abouta high school show chorus. (It’s on Tuesday, May 19, at 9 p.m. on Fox,right after the American Idol finale.) If you like jazz hands, you’lllove this show! And if you hate jazz hands, you’ll love making fun ofit. Also, I really want to hear about the kinds of things you think weshould be watching in future weeks: New movies? Old movies on DVD?Premiering or existing shows? Crap or supercrap? This is ademocracy…albeit a democracy with a really strict profanity filter.
Jimmy Fallon makes me sad. He should be so much funnier and more original than he is. Why does he wear a suit? Because everyone else in late night wears a suit. Why does he sit behind a desk? Ditto. NBC will be airing 4 hours of talk come fall, and Jimmy needs to get outside of the box if he (and his audience) are going to have any fun.
First off, I was really hoping that this new feature would defy ew.com conventions and somehow have a message board like the recaps. I’m disappointed to see it doesn’t. Anyway, I managed to watch 3 episodes without a single suicidal thought, but I only really laughed maybe once or twice. He pulls the whole “we all know the punchline to this joke so I’m going to mumble it under breath” thing way too often. And he doesn’t seem self-aware enough. Half of the stuff I laugh at during Conan is because he’s constantly making fun of the production values. I don’t know that I can watch a similar talk show without that element.
The one thing I like about Fallon (which he still needs to cultivate) is him embracing technology. Right now it’s still feels forced (I tweet! I’ve got a MacBook Air! Hip is what I undoubtedly am!), but he has the potential to do something uniquely Fallon with the medium.
You’re spot-on with the general air of “why am I even monologuing?” each night. He needs to cut that out altogether.
Josh, you’re completely right about Fallon caring too much about SNL. If he has a guest on who has hosted during his time there, that’s all he talks about. I notice it less now, but in the early days of the show, he seemed fixated on guests doing impersonations of other celebrities, which he then used as an excuse to do his own watered-down impersonations. I think he’s a little too concerned with audience participation and leveraging social media (user-generated comedy?) He might as well ask the studio audience if they’ve heard any good jokes lately. I’m still willing to give Fallon a chance. Like any new job, you really need about a year to figure out exactly how to navigate the pitfalls. He’s certainly less awkward than Conan when he first started.
Fallon is awful, plain and simple. I totally disagree that you can’t reinvent late-night talk shows– EVERYTHING can be fixed, rethought, improved, etc. I’m betting Conan, who thinks outside the box so much there isn’t a box anymore, will shake up the “Tonight Show.” Fallon just doesn’t have the talent (nor, apparently, the interest) to do it.
I think he has settled into his own on the show. He brings his own style of funny, which is similar to what he used to bring on “SNL.” Speaking of “SNL,” who doesn’t love when he does Barry Gibb?? LOL!!
I watched this show last night for the first time. Not funny at all. Fallon is likeable, but the jokes were bad, he’s not much of an interviewer, and he just generally seemed out of his element. There are already so many talk shows out there, why do we need one where the host so clearly doesn’t know what he’s doing? Back to sketch comedy for him I think.
I watched this show last night for the first time. Not funny at all. Fallon is likeable, but the jokes were bad, he’s not much of an interviewer, and he just generally seemed out of his element. There are already so many talk shows out there, why do we need one where the host so clearly doesn’t know what he’s doing? Back to sketch comedy for him I think.
I watched this show last night for the first time. Not funny at all. Fallon is likeable, but the jokes were bad, he’s not much of an interviewer, and he just generally seemed out of his element. There are already so many talk shows out there, why do we need one where the host so clearly doesn’t know what he’s doing? Back to sketch comedy for him I think.
I think that he DOES go outside the box. I don’t think that he’s done this in any of the episodes this week, but he has taken to doing some “activity” with a guest, like playing beer pong with Serena Williams, air hockey with Denis Leary, and grapefruit bowling with Jennifer Aniston. Not something you see on Letterman or Leno (at least not yet.)
First off, Wojo, I hear what you’re saying about the message boards. Right now we can’t put this in the TV-recap format for really uninteresting tech reasons, but we’re working on it.
And Dennis, his tech-friendly stuff is another example of why I think he’d be better off in a small studio. He could do small, random stuff like you’d find on YouTube, and it’d feel cool. Once an idea is surrounded by all the bombast of a studio show, it seems anticlimactic. It should feel less polished.
Fallon is just like any other fan when he interviews his guests. I realized this when he interviews the two Spocks and couldn’t stop himself giggling through then entire interaction. I feel like I am watching a regular person mingle with “celebrities” and that makes me tune it.
I actually enjoy LNwJF. I find his enthusiasm infections. One criticism is that he kind of talks at his guests. They never get to reveal any stories about themselves. He kinda just tells it for them. Which is pretty awkward.
On the other side who can’t say they didn’t love the Dude game he played with Jorge Garcia? Also the Hawaii/helicopter story was pretty great.
I think this is a prime example of the “car crash affect”.
No matter how disturbing the image is, you still can’t help but to look at the car crash. Same with Jimmy. He and Leno are ruling in the ratings…and it’s not because they’re the best lol
Jimmy has been horrible since Day 1. His jokes flop most of the time, he can’t keep a straight face EVER, and he is out staged by his announcer and his band.
And yet…we still watch.
http://tvdonewright.com/2009/05/13/tv-tonight-thursday-may-14th-2009/
Turkey panini with provolone.
I still can’t believe that NBC is going to have like four solid hours of late-night-talk-show crap every single weekday. That’s ridiculous. You only need to watch one of those a night, whichever has the best guest. And if there aren’t any good ones on, Craig Ferguson. I love his style–just talk and talk and be random and funny. I really do like Jimmy Fallon (loved Fever Pitch–don’t groan, it was genuinely funny and I love baseball), and I wanted to enjoy the show, but it’s just plain dull and awkward. Every time he makes a lame joke that’s probably already been made like twelve times the same night on other shows, I just cringe. It’s not very watchable.