{"id":199392,"date":"2010-01-19T11:25:10","date_gmt":"2010-01-19T16:25:10","guid":{"rendered":"tag:business.theatlantic.com,2010:\/\/3.33750"},"modified":"2010-01-19T11:28:28","modified_gmt":"2010-01-19T16:28:28","slug":"whos-to-blame-for-nbcs-late-night-disaster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/199392","title":{"rendered":"Who’s to Blame for NBC’s Late Night Disaster?"},"content":{"rendered":"

With Conan O’Brien set to receive $40 million to walk away from the “Tonight Show,” the television media is circling to pin the blame for NBC’s broken late night carousel. Months after moving Jay Leno to primetime, the network announced that they would return their leading chin to late night, prompting O’Brien to demand a severance deal. Is this mess all Jay’s fault for sticking around, and being generally lame? Or Conan’s fault for failing to capture a late night audience, and being too goofy? Or NBC’s fault for coming up with the generally horrible idea in the first place?<\/p>\n

Let’s start at the beginning. The problem with late night comedy is that it’s really neither late night nor comedy. <\/p>\n

The NYT’s David Carr and his daughter have been watching the Jay Leno show recently, he
\nwrites<\/a>. But not on TV. On Hulu. The first problem with late night
\ncomedy is that it’s no longer always late night. We can watch most
\ntelevision shows online at any time. But late night TV — whose
\ntransience is literally a part of its genre title: Late Night<\/i>
\nTV– loses all cultural currency mere hours after their hosts sign off because the news changes and the jokes stale. <\/p>\n

That is, if the shows haven’t lost all cultural currency to begin with. Carr explains:<\/p>\n

\n

But as things stand now, by the end of the day, we all have been
\nbombarded by news and commentary from all manner of media, making “The
\nTonight Show” and its ilk increasingly seem beside the point, no matter
\nwho is delivering the monologue. In its glory days, “The Tonight Show”
\nserved as a search engine on culture, letting us know which politician
\nhad made a gaffe, which corporate evildoer had been caught doing evil
\nand which starlet had experienced a wardrobe malfunction. <\/p>\n

Now the search engine is the search engine — or more likely, any number of “did-you-see” alerts received by e-mail or on Facebook<\/a>, Twitter<\/a> or other sites we visit from our desktops or on our cellphones.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The choice to watch late night TV used to be: Leno or Letterman. Now it’s
\nLeno, or Letterman, or Community<\/i> on NBC.com, or CSI<\/i> on Hulu, or
\nArrested Development<\/i> on DVD, and so forth. Late night TV used to live in the alpine
\nwilderness of midnight television, where no primetime dramas dared to
\ntread. Now it’s fighting to survive in a jungle where every show on TV
\nis, technically speaking, “on.”\n<\/p>\n

The second problem with late night comedy is that it’s not comedy — at
\nleast not to me and everybody I know. I can’t remember the last time somebody recited a Jay
\nLeno joke, or sent along a David Letterman monologue, or implored me to
\nwatch last night’s Conan O’Brien – Andy Richter interaction. But I get
\nDaily Show<\/i> clips sent to me all the time. Precisely because late night
\ncomedy is designed to appeal to everyone and offend as little as
\npossible, it inevitably appeals to no one and surprises as little as
\npossible. Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart — the real heirs to late
\nnight comedy as a brand of actual comedy — peddle media satire and
\ncriticism with an edge of partisanship. They’re funny because they’re
\nunpredictable yet purposeful, incendiary with a point. <\/p>\n

Late night television has lost more than an audience, or a host. It’s lost its reason to exist.


\n

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\n\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With Conan O’Brien set to receive $40 million to walk away from the “Tonight Show,” the television media is circling to pin the blame for NBC’s broken late night carousel. Months after moving Jay Leno to primetime, the network announced that they would return their leading chin to late night, prompting O’Brien to demand a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1534,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-199392","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199392","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1534"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199392"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199392\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}