All this week, Uproxx‘s Late Night Week will take a look at late-night past, present, and future, from talk shows to late-night comedy, and beyond. Here’s a consideration about how late night fixtures don’t disappear, they evolve.
I was a childhood Letterman freak. Dave sparring with Madonna, Dave getting flashed by Drew Barrymore on his birthday, Dave working the register at Taco Bell: Those were watershed moments in my pop culture consumption. I even owned a few books of top 10 lists. That’s right kids, in my day, we had to buy our shitty listicles from a strip mall bookstore. And it was a 10-mile walk through knee-high asbestos, uphill both ways! With no iPhones to help plan us a better route, and no Amazon Prime with free two-day shipping! I’m tellin’ you, men were men in those days.
For me a big part of the Letterman show’s appeal was that it was unpredictable. Just go watch one of his interviews with Harmony Korine or Crispin Glover. And at the time, if you missed it, it was just gone. Even talking about my favorite parts now, I realize how much of it kind of defined “I guess you had to be there.”
I’d love to be a curmudgeonly old man and shake my fist at my laptop screaming “Things just ain’t what they used to be!” which is certainly true. I mean we just elected a reality TV dunking booth clown for president, if ever that was true it’d be now. Surely, late night feels less important now (just like virtually everything else does when compared to your adolescence).
To some extent, the numbers bear that out. In 1996, at the peak of late night viewership (and also the year The Late Shift was released, starring John Michael Higgins as David Letterman), nine late night shows were splitting 23.9 million viewers, with Jay Leno’s Tonight Show leading with 6.2 million. As of 2014, 12 shows were splitting 17.6 million viewers, with Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show leading with 3.6 million viewers on average.
On the one hand, there are a third more shows now splitting about a fifth fewer viewers, even as the total population has itself grown by about a fifth (from about 270 million Americans to about 320 million). On the other, Jimmy Fallon’s 3.6 million viewers aren’t that drastic a decline in relevancy from Letterman’s 4.3 million, especially if you factor in how many more shows there are now, no matter how much less relevant he seems in my mind. That’s at least a partial score for “maybe you’re just old now.”
Though I would argue it’s also something else (phew, still got it, according to me!). The other day I was listening to a podcast about Detroit’s “Disco Demolition Night,” an event largely credited as the first day of the end of the disco era (much like Charles Manson or Altamont have been declared the official endings of the 60s). But what a musician who was there argued was that disco didn’t die so much as rebrand and evolve, continuing to creep into a variety of genres, so much so that elements of it are still identifiable in half of today’s hits. A similar thing has happened with the late night variety show format, even without a comparable “Day That Late Night Died”. The format hasn’t died, but it has fragmented and balkanized (like every other type of media in the past 20 years) metastasizing into a series of other forms and rebranding as other things (even spawning The Eric Andre Show, which to my knowledge is the first surrealist anti-late night variety show late night variety show), and eventually coming back to infect itself.
If you break down the late night format from Carson through about now, its essential components are monologue, celebrity interview, followed by musical/comedy performance, with some sketches and bits sprinkled in to taste.
The Monologue — > The Daily Show
The classic late night monologue is basically a five-minute, topical stand-up set introducing the news of the day with some jokes and probably a few winks at the band leader. This is harder to pull off nowadays because the news cycle is more like 10 minutes than a day, and a lot of the best jokes are already going to have been made on Twitter. A topical stand-up routine you record at 5 pm now is going to feel a lot more stale by 11 pm than it once did. A lot of days, 2 pm’s rich premise is 11 o’clock’s thing everyone’s already tired of.
Where The Daily Show started as a sort of hybrid format between SNL‘s Weekend Update (and Not Necessarily The News — remember that?) and late night behind a desk, what it’s grown into is basically a late night monologue on steroids. The first Daily Show segment has a lot of the same difficulties as the monologue (or any topical humor) of course, but it can also go deeper. Rather than just set up a news item with “Have you seen this? Have you heard about this?” and then knock it down with a punchline, The Daily Show could actually show you that news item, contextualize it with a video montage, and then tear it apart with another montage (or perhaps just with Jon Stewart’s Jersey guido impression, which strangely never got old to me). You got the same jokes and the same news, but with more information, and often in a way that it felt like you were getting more context than if you’d seen the same news on a regular news program. More of “What does this mean?” than just “what did he say?”
We could argue in circles over whether Jon Stewart actually ever changed anyone’s political opinion, whether it was even his responsibility to, whether The Daily Show is still relevant now, and blah blah blah. But from a cultural standpoint, I was just as devoted to The Daily Show in college as I was to Letterman in middle school, and there were a lot of people like me. That show essentially evolved out of taking some of the constituent parts of a late night monologue and playing with them in ways a guy in a suit standing in front of a band couldn’t. It was just a small tweak — have the host mimic a news anchor instead of a nightclub comic! — but sometimes that’s all it takes.
The Celebrity Interview — > WTF With Marc Maron (And Podcasts In General)
Obviously The Daily Show isn’t the only example of a late night segment evolving into a new animal. The interview portion of the late night variety show has always been the best and worst of it. For every Madonna interview (when I think about it now it’s like the rest of the show didn’t even exist, like they canceled the monologue and every bit and just had Dave and Madonna neg each other for 40 minutes) there are 20 so-and-sos from such-and-such telling the high-larious story about how their dog had diarrhea that one time or whatever. The greatest interviews feel unpredictable and spontaneous, the bad ones staged and pointless.
It’s easy to understand how it happens. These shows have producers, and not knowing what’s going to happen for 10 minutes of precious air time when people are deciding to flip the channel or not is terrifying. There’s no way to prevent a chit chat from going dull from time to time, and that’s a hard uncertainty to accept when your very job depends on ratings. And so they overplan. Which is why the late night interview segment can easily (and has often) turned into a couple transparent setups for a few publicist-approved anecdotes all worked out beforehand during the pre-interview. Woof.
Despite this, the celebrity interview is bigger than ever. It’s just that, as often as not, it’s migrated elsewhere, largely to podcasts. Specifically WTF with Marc Maron but there are a million imitators. (You know your old friend Todd? Todd has a podcast.) Like The Daily Show, WTF seems to have begun partly in imitation of the late night format, only to evolve based on the advantages peculiar to the medium. WTF even has an opening monologue, sort of (that I always fast forward through — sorry, Marc).
Point being, Marc Maron is such a brilliant interviewer (my pet theory is that he never quite figured out who he is as a person and so he searches for it in other people, which ends up revealing all kinds of things) and the format allows him to delve so deeply that it’s kind of hard to go back to five minute anecdote-style interviews on late night afterwards. We’ve seen what the interview can be. Part of the beauty of the podcast is that it doesn’t have producers (heck, even Todd can make one). That means they get interviews that are allowed be spontaneous and revealing (or banal and kind of dull — sorry, Todd).
They’re freed from the worry that someone’s flipping the channel, partly because most of them don’t make much money, and partly because if there are dead spots, who cares? When you’re walking your dog or driving a car dead spots don’t matter as much. Listening to a podcast doesn’t demand as much of your attention as TV. And for the interviewee, if you’re just talking to Maron (or some dickhead named Todd), and not to an entire studio audience, you can tell a story that doesn’t have a huge punchline without worrying that you’re going to let everyone down. A live audiences amplifies the pressure and reduces the intimacy (which isn’t always bad, but it definitely can be).
The Sketch — > YouTube, Celebrity Lip Sync Battle
Certainly, sketches were around before Johnny Carson, but sketches and recurring bits are frequently the most memorable parts and signature offerings of any late night variety show. Johnny Carson had Carnac, Conan had Pimpbot 5000, Dave worked the drive thru (I’ll never forget “she’s already gone, chief“), etc. etc. These bits eventually split off and migrated away, to YouTube, and to hard-to-categorize shows like Trigger Happy TV (which always reminded me of the weirder Dave Letterman remotes) and Nathan For You.
These days, a lot of people (especially those of us who never watch them live) judge the relevancy of late night shows by the number of viral clips they produce. I would say Jimmy Kimmel is in the lead, but that’s probably personal bias since Jimmy Fallon’s latest celebrity grab-ass stunt seems to be all over the internet every few days. The point is, we’ve come full circle. The internet video created itself in late night’s image and late night is now returning the favor. There’s also so much room in the TV schedule now that when a late night bit gets popular enough, they just spin it off into its own show like with Celebrity Lip Sync Battle. If the main drive of late night is to keep people from switching the channel, getting a bit to go viral has to be a close second.
A lot of late night bits look like they’re begging to be put online, and show runners have admitted as much. Would Carpool Karaoke even exist without the internet? At the very least, it’s a symbiotic relationship, with bits like Carpool Karaoke and Celebrity Lip Sync Battle inspiring sites like musical.ly and vice versa.
The Future of Late Night
So where does that put the future of late night? It’s tough to think about, because even as I point out phenomena late night has inspired, the more recent of them mostly make me puke in my mouth a little. Celebrities pretending to sing is, to me, entertainment at its absolute lamest. If you share Celebrity Lip Sync Battle clips, you’re an idiot and I hate you. JK. Maybe. Anyway, it’d be nice to see a late night bit that didn’t fall into the “celebrity does a thing” format (all due respect to celebrities reading mean tweets, which at least started out clever).
It’s a tough gig. Today’s crop of late night hosts are about as talented as it gets. Kimmel’s team are genius bit creators and just last night I watched Colbert do some extended word scat thing during his monologue that was incredible to think he’d learned in less than a day and performed live; the guy is an undeniably genius performer. But you have to wonder about the long term viability of the format. It’s been a while since most of the people I talk to watched much on network TV. And thus it seems a bit like all the network shows are competing for shrinking shares of a greying market, while trying to attract the young ones who might be in the room, (the kids on musical.ly). In other words, the very young and the very old. Which is, I’m guessing, why so much of the network promos tend to look like cruise ship entertainment. “This week, Miley Cyrus judges ‘Kids Say The Darndest Things Volume Four!'”
Or, to use a food analogy, the kind of fare that seems kind of cloying and bland unless you’re very young or very old. But then, it seems like every time I’m about to write off late night and say the format is dead, I’ll be flipping through the channels and see something pretty clever, like last night’s Colbert monologue. And then I’ll think maybe there’s still great stuff happening there and I’m just missing it. Maybe it’s time, for both me and today’s current crop of late night hosts, most of whom seem to have grown up idolizing the same hosts I did, to let go of our fond memories and let the format grow into whatever it needs to be for the generation growing up with it now. If there’s one thing late night has been good at, it’s being able to evolve without changing that much.