Late-night television is the most static genre on TV. This hasn’t kept the media from touting it as the most exciting one—and maybe it is, if you’re most interested in TV as an economic horse race. Each year, we get fresh forensic analysis of the minute differences between Letterman, Leno, O’Brien, Fallon, Kimmel, Daly, and now Seth Meyers and, on HBO, John Oliver. Someone’s always the hot young buck. Someone’s the egghead. Yet every show looks identical, as if the format had made the same face one too many times, and got stuck.
Still, if the genre can be saved, or at least revived, this might be the year. In February, Jay Leno stepped down from the “Tonight Show,” on NBC; Jimmy Fallon took his place. In April, David Letterman announced his retirement from the “Late Show,” and CBS hired Stephen Colbert, who is leaving Comedy Central, to replace him. Then, a few weeks ago, it was Craig Ferguson, of “The Late Late Show,” who was saying his goodbyes. Oddly, it was only with Ferguson’s departure that I suddenly believed the tingle in the air might be real. It’s not that Ferguson won’t be missed; a raffish Scottish ex-punk, he worked in the tradition of Dick Cavett, having real conversations with his guests, who included novelists and intellectuals. He had a robot skeleton for a sidekick and no band. And at 12:35 A.M., in the airless outer rings of the buzz cycle, he took risks, talking about his own sobriety rather than sneer at Britney Spears. Yet his departure provides an opportunity: in that time slot, when nobody’s watching, CBS might finally make an absurdly overdue move. It could hire Amy Schumer, Neil Patrick Harris, Aisha Tyler, Kumail Nanjiani—honestly, anyone who isn’t another straight white guy named Jimmy. Maybe a lesser-known quirky type with an online presence: “Night Late with Jenny Slate”? In comedy, smaller is often freer, and the names don’t have to be those you’ve heard of, which is why you find the wildest talk show out there—“Billy on the Street,” in which Billy Eichner screams his way through Manhattan—on FUSE, a network that barely exists.
At the same time, it’s equally exciting to imagine Colbert picking up the biggest megaphone available. I’ve got a soft spot for Letterman: he was the sardonic star of my adolescence, and I stayed loyal long after I stopped watching—even once he turned into the scary uncle who used to be with my favorite aunt, who now had nothing nice to say about him. Letterman was never likable, but that was what I liked: he was a know-it-all, a descendant of cranks like Mort Sahl. Colbert is a know-it-all as well, but he’s a warmer, slyer, and more nimble figure than his predecessors, having forged a parodic persona that lets him make outrage look elegant. Though it includes excellent interviews, “The Colbert Report” isn’t a talk show, exactly; it’s more like a form of satirical chemotherapy, a caustic antidote to fatheads like Bill O’Reilly.
And yet the notion of Colbert unzipping this persona and stepping out—forced to own his opinions—is legitimately fascinating. What happens when Colbert, who is a Catholic, a liberal (one presumes), and a scathing critic of ideological dishonesty, speaks under his own name? (Or, I guess, the same name, only wearing different glasses.) How will his personality, and his comedic style, shift within the rigid formula of network television? Though Colbert’s a more mannerly presence than Letterman, he’s still a sharp and cerebral individual, not Silly Putty for his guests to imprint themselves upon. If anyone can jolt a genre that feels near-paralyzed, he’s the guy.
He’ll certainly have little competition in Jimmy Fallon, the nation’s most promising nephew. That’s unkind, I know; it’s a cheap shot, the type that Fallon supposedly doesn’t take. After years of reading puff pieces, I’d begun to absorb the idea that I should be won over, charmed—until I watched Fallon’s show for two weeks. Nearly every night, a Chris Christie fat joke. For more than a week, an unfunny dancing panda, a bit that seems to go on forever. Fallon’s an enthusiast, which sounds good, until you see him spray the same gush on everything: “Californication,” “The Other Woman,” Diane Keaton’s new book. His “digital” material consists of YOLO and photobomb jokes. On his set, all products and people are equally valid brands—even Sarah Palin gets a promo opportunity, in a skit where she crows that she’s a “mama grizzly,” while Fallon, doing his Count Chocula imitation of Putin, delivers Palin’s ancient gag about Obama wearing “mom jeans.”
What gives the show its reputation for warmth is the viral elements, those joyful dance contests and lip-synch showdowns, in which Fallon is at his best, laid-back and generous. There’s something undeniably ingratiating, too, about the way he has spliced two strains of nostalgia: fondness for sixties talk shows and memories of dumb nineties pop culture (a recent skit featured four separate, logarithmically unfunny references to Sour Patch Kids). But as a host? The man’s a lox. At times, watching him, I tried to imagine a female host with these qualities: cute enough to set up with your cousin, with an air of giggly amateurism, never asking a surprising question or having an opinion beyond “That’s so cool.” She’d be torn apart. (To be fair, a female Letterman would probably be in trouble, too, not to mention a black one.)
Still, there is one way in which Fallon does stand out, and that’s as a musical impresario, with a love of hip-hop that doesn’t feel put-on. For decades, the racial dynamics of late-night shows have been queasy at best. Think of gags like Ed Sullivan’s Señor Wences or Johnny Carson’s Carnac the Magnificent, with his “Middle Eastern curses.” Back in the sixties, when the African-American comic Moms Mabley became a frequent guest on late-night TV, her jokes, submerged in this new medium, changed: suddenly, she was an exotic figure, not a powerful Harlem headliner. This sort of off flavor can infect Fallon’s comedy, too: in another Putin skit, President Obama (played by Dion Flynn) erupts, “I don’t play that!”—it’s just like “Key & Peele” ’s anger-translator skit, only drained of context and insight.
Yet Fallon’s house band is the funky and awesome Roots, with its leader, Questlove. Questlove’s presence grants daily credibility to Fallon, even if there is something skewed about their relationship—sometimes it feels as if Questlove should be the host. Again and again, Fallon does lip-synch routines to rap songs, often with white guests, and these bits aren’t nearly as lame as they should be, since the black artists he adores are also fully in the mix. When Jamie Foxx came on, he beatboxed while the Roots’ Tariq Trotter rapped, giving “mad props” to Fallon’s show and cracking jokes about Charlie Mack with the band. In a way, Fallon harks back to Ed Sullivan, who used his power as a white host to feature African-American artists, although, in this case, the polarities are reversed: instead of a kingmaker, Fallon’s a supplicant. He absorbs the potency of the guests, rather than the other way around.
There’s a damning anecdote about Jimmy Fallon in Tina Fey’s book “Bossypants,” which I’ve never quite been able to put out of my mind: Amy Poehler was in the “Saturday Night Live” writers’ room, doing some filthy, unladylike riff. “Jimmy Fallon, who was arguably the star of the show at the time, turned to her and in a faux-squeamish voice said, ‘Stop that! It’s not cute! I don’t like it,’ ” Fey writes. “Amy dropped what she was doing, went black in the eyes for a second, and wheeled around on him. ‘I don’t fucking care if you like it.’ ” Fey describes the moment as a “cosmic shift” that made her “so happy.” At last, she had an ally; that’s all a person needs to stop being Smurfette, having to answer dumb questions about who gets to be funny. With “Broad City,” “Inside Amy Schumer,” “Parks and Recreation,” “Veep,” “The Mindy Project,” and so many other shows, television comedy has begun to crack open: no one chick comic has to symbolize all women anymore, or be the doomed and earnest pioneer.
No such cosmic shift has ever taken place on late-night television, which is hardly Jimmy Fallon’s fault, or the fault of other only O.K. types, such as Seth Meyers or Carson Daly. And the truth is, as much as I would like a woman host (beyond Chelsea Handler, who is stepping down), or a black host (in addition to Arsenio Hall, who has rebooted his old act), or any one of those linking-rings categories, I also dread the prospect. The think pieces alone! It could be a “glass cliff” scenario, the phenomenon in which female or minority executives are appointed as C.E.O.s only by companies that are likely to fail.
But then I remember Bella Abzug’s useful point: the goal of feminism isn’t to get a female Einstein appointed to associate professor; it’s to make a world in which a female schlemiel gets promoted the same as a male schlemiel. Late night is a schlemiel’s paradise. People don’t get these gigs because they “deserve” it; they’re appointed because they have charisma and a mentor, and, to the network executives, they look the part. Take any good-enough performer who’s committed to working insane hours, and then surround that person with solid writers and smart producers. Give the show a year to bake. Until there’s a variety of such hosts out there, this will be a painful process. But someone has to be thrown into the volcano. Sacrifice yourself for me, Jenny Slate. Purify the genre for the rest of us. ♦
