Late Night Losers and Winners (Screw NBC)

Current Tunes: Isis – Carry

I don’t care much for late night TV talk shows. If there’s any one characteristic that turns me off across all forms of media it’s repetition, and repetition is the fuel of the late night talk show. Every single episode is the same. Crack jokes about what’s going on in the world, silly skits, interviewing celebrities with movies or books they want to sell, a mediocre live performance by a popular band (also selling their album), then you’re done.

I will admit to an affinity for CBS’ Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. My appreciation for that show I’m certain stems from the fact that it is precisely devoid of many of the conventions most of the other late night shows rely on so heavily. Not to say the Late Late show doesn’t help celebrities sell movies either, because they do, and not to say they don’t have silly skits either, because they also have that. Thinking about it now, maybe I dislike the Late Late show too…

Anyway, that’s not what I’m here to discuss. There’s what’s been called a “war” going on between Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien over who gets to hold that coveted “The Tonight Show” spot on NBC, an apparently dwindling network that once held a firm grip on greatness. To call it a war is, frankly, an insult. People die in war, people get their legs severed. This is a tiff, a disagreement, a contest even. So don’t call it that anymore.

If I understand the situation right, NBC hasn’t been happy with O’Brien’s work on “The Tonight Show” and have been even less happy with the ratings of “The Jay Leno Show,” which is hosted by guess who. So their idea is to completely remove “The Tonight Show” from it’s traditional time slot and move Jay into it, pushing Conan’s show back, and by proxy pushing Jimmy Fallon’s “Late Late Show” back even further into the graveyard shift.

That, I’m sorry, seems like a relatively uncomplicated situation for me. I’m not even going to bother talking about how the situation got to this point, what happened happened and can’t change. From my vantage point, NBC simply has a surplus of talent, in essence. They have two heavyweight late night show hosts, but only one time slot to use them in. Neither is obviously in a position to retreat to hosting “The Late Late Show,” that’d be like carrying a team to the World Series then being forced to sit on the bench next season, no offense Fallon.

So, if we look at this like a baseball team, and you have one too many starting first basemen, what do you do with the excess? Well, most teams would probably trade him away. Of course there’s no “trading” per se in network broadcasting, but the principle boils down to simply choosing which all-star host you want to stick with and going from there.

Extrapolating from there, in the past few days it appears to me that NBC has made its choice and they’re sticking (I think smartly) with Jay Leno as their main man. Which leaves Conan the odd man out; sucks to be him, but that’s show business. So let him go, NBC. Let him go. Now before you start threatening to blow up my apartment for taking sides against Conan, take a deep breath. I'll freely admit I don't really like Conan O'Brien all that much. I think he's an ass. But all you folks who’ve thrown your hat in with Coco should be ecstatic. NBC is slowly dying inside.

Let’s look at the Nielsen ratings from a few weeks ago, for the week that constituted the last four days of 2009 into the first three days of 2010. In the Top 20 rated shows for that week, NBC only had three shows place. Notice anything those three shows have in common? All three of those ‘shows’ are all actually one event, the Bengals/Jets Sunday Night NFL game for that week. Besides the game itself, the other two NBC showings were the pregame show & recap show “Football Night in America.”

Basically, the way I see it is that Sunday night game would have gotten high ratings no matter what network it was broadcast on. NBC did good to move in on the NFL market a few years back when they did, but it’s not enough to hold up an entire network. And let me tell you too, most of you who know me I know you don’t really watch or care about NFL but take me at my word when I tell you NBC’s broadcasting actually is substandard to the material that CBS and Fox both do. For one, Al Michaels just bores me to death without John Madden, which I guess it's not really NBC’s fault he retired. Branching out from that though, these idiots actually have Keith Olbermann as a commentator during their pregame show. I know he used to work for ESPN and all that, but that guy is a buffoon, I’m sorry.

Moving on from NFL, tell me what good, worthwhile shows NBC has that aren’t being driven into the ground. I hear tell “Chuck” is really good; I haven’t watched it, so I’ll reserve judgment. I really enjoy my “Law & Order: SVU,” but I’m always watching reruns of it on USA, not on NBC. That show has gone on for what, like 30 seasons? It’s time to call it quits on that one. I guess NBC has “Saturday Night Live,” but that show, in my opinion, died when Adam Sandler, David Spade, and all that crew left the show. Will Farrell gave me hope, but clearly he was far too bright a star to waste on that show. I really don't see NBC as the powerhouse it used to be.

Hear me, Conan O’Brien fans, you want him to leave NBC. I don’t know if Fox will offer him anything, but I pray they do. Fox isn’t afraid to do the stuff that other people shy away from. The Fox Networks brought us “Family Guy” and “Nip/Tuck” “The Shield,” shows that I’m certain all the other major networks would have turned down in a heartbeat.

Pause it. As I’m writing this, look what I found. I’m certain that won’t happen. But by god it’s a great idea, and I love it. Conan as an Irish mobster/gun-runner on “Sons of Anarchy” would pretty much be the blockbuster “trade” of the year, to put things in baseball terms again.

Well even though I don't much like him, wherever he ends up from here I think he'll meet with a lot of success. He's obviously got a metric poop-ton of devoted, hardcore fans who'll follow him off a cliff if that's where he wants to go. And whatever happens at NBC happens. It's time to move on. And it's definitely not the end of the world that lots of people have made it out to be. Calm down.