As Tonight shifts, late night could use real change.
When NBC announced on april 3 that Jimmy Fallon would take over The Tonight Show from Jay Leno next year, the question was, Could 38-year-old Fallon maintain Tonight as a dominant cultural icon? The answer: No--it hasn't been one for years. Leno still beats David Letterman's and Jimmy Kimmel's ratings, narrowly, among the under-50 fans who determine ad rates. But he's been losing to Comedy Central's fake news and sometimes to the Cartoon Network too. And he long ago lost the watercooler. On a recent Mad Men episode set in 1967, a business scrapped a Super Bowl ad because of a controversial joke on Tonight. Today that joke would compete for attention with dozens of channels, YouTube and the "26 Cats Judging You" slide show your cousin e-mailed you.
For an era of diminished reach, Fallon has made his good-natured Late Night bite-size. He's created viral videos (like "Evolution of Mom Dancing" with Michelle Obama) that people can watch online later. He's courted young viewers on social media, asking fans to tweet ideas for inventions with the Twitter hashtag #WhyDontTheyMakeThat. (Sample: "A 'Nobody cares' button on Facebook.")
Short term, Fallon will probably cost NBC ratings. Long term, the move makes sense. (It made exactly the same long-term sense when NBC briefly tried it with Conan O'Brien, but c'est la TV.) Fallon is the guy to lead Tonight into the future--that is, into the time when people don't so much watch Tonight tonight.
So it's puzzling that for Fallon's replacement at 12:35, NBC may go the most predictable route. Reports give the inside track to Seth Meyers, who like Fallon hosted Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update and whose Late Night, along with Fallon's Tonight, would be produced by SNL's Lorne Michaels.
Really? Really? There is, first, a white-guy issue here (wrote the white-guy columnist). Meyers is sharp and topically funny, but with Carson Daly still at 1:35, NBC would have three white dudes--born within 15 months of one another--stacked up like Russian nesting dolls, with Kimmel, Letterman, Craig Ferguson and TBS's O'Brien completing the set. (Reportedly, NBC has also been in talks with Alec Baldwin for a late-night interview show. Always room for one more!)
But as important as who replaces Fallon is what replaces Fallon. Let's be blunt: the problem is the desk. Late night is saturated with the guy behind a desk, giving a monologue, doing comedy bits and interviewing actors with movies to plug. That desk feels more and more like an antique.
And audiences have been fleeing for anything different. W. Kamau Bell, on FX's Totally Biased, builds his show on unapologetically political comedy. Bell, who is black, is an example of how diversity really does influence content. (Imagine Leno, say, doing Bell's man-on-the-street bit about stop and frisk.) Andy Cohen hosts a reality-TV salon--with an open bar and celebs drinking and dishing--on Bravo's Watch What Happens Live. On AMC's Talking Dead, Chris Hardwick dissects The Walking Dead's zombie wars, and on BBC America's chat show The Nerdist, he can be found theorizing with Lost's Dominic Monaghan on the sexual orientations of C-3PO and R2-D2.