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Favorite Talk Shows
Johnny Carson's True Heir
The Rosie O'Donnell Show
Who knew? When Carson retired from The Tonight Show, everyone focused on Leno and Letterman (and Arsenio — remember him?) battling it out for his time slot after the late news. What few seem to remember is that neither Leno nor Letterman is worth a dime as an interviewer, and they aren't improving. While Leno is better than Letterman, this is like saying that spoiled milk is less likely to make you sick than rotten eggs. The only reason these shows work is that they interview as little as possible, focusing their primary efforts on comic camera excursions, while guests are exploited for a few quick laughs. These guys aren't the heirs of Johnny Carson — they're the heirs of Art Linkletter. Just as daytime talk shows took a foray into being sideshows and creepshows, so also has late night moved from the Tonight Show to Truth or Consequences. Pat Sajack's talk show may have failed, but that's because he didn't have the sense to hang onto his game show roots and do what Letterman, Leno, and O'Brien have all done: hip versions of the Gong Show.
What was it that Carson did that made him so good? He excelled at public conversation. He seemed to truly enjoy his guests; one believed that he really wanted to talk with them. He was always the host: He never leapt into a guest's story and destroyed it, the way Letterman frequently does, if they weren't generating laughs every thirty seconds. He recognized that sometimes a silent audience is silent because they're listening to an interesting person, not because they're bored and wishing for something to laugh at.
There were four parts to Carson's show, three of which were superb: monologue, prepared comedy (sketches, continuing characters, desk bits), interviews, and variety performers (usually musicians). Leno is a good monologuist, but Dennis Miller shames everybody (and, yes, he's even better than Carson was — though Miller doesn't have to do it every night). Letterman handles variety better than anyone else. They both try desk bits and in the early days Letterman brilliantly opened the form (moving it away from the desk in the meantime), though now he's just going through the motions (Conan O'Brien now owns the off-the-wall-comedy trophy, even though he makes even Letterman look like a talented interviewer and monologuist). Carson's sketches were lame but fun — Carol Burnett topped him there — but only Leno's headlines and Letterman's viewer mail and top-ten-lists rival Carson's desk bits, while nobody, I mean nobody, is on the same planet as Floyd R. Turbo, Aunt Blabby, Karnak, and the late-movie guy (get out and cut off your slauson).
When we watched Carson, we looked forward to the prepared comedy as the high points of the night. So it was easy to overlook the fact that night in, night out, Carson's interviews worked. We took that for granted. Letterman's Late Night proved that a bad interviewer could still survive, if only because every now and then somebody like Cher would come on and name him for what he seemed to be. Leno's interviews have a smoothness to them, but not for one moment do we get the sense that he cares about the people he's talking to. He's using them to get laughs, and just because he's better at it than Letterman or Conan doesn't make what he does worth watching. Only Bob Costas was able to have a sustained, intelligent, informed conversation on Later, but he was never able to make guests sparkle the way Carson could.
All of which is a long, negative-sounding preamble to the good news. In the wasteland of daytime talk shows, where Ricky Lake, Jerry Springer, and Montel Williams (to name just a few) were trying to see how loathsome television could be before we all just turned off the sets, suddenly there comes an unlikely new voice in a syndicated hour. In the timeframe where only Oprah was trying to maintain a level that didn't make us ashamed to be of the same species as the people on tv, we got Rosie O'Donnell doing the last thing anybody ever thought would work in daytime — a latenight talk show in the afternoon!
This is supposed to be a women-only timeframe. The household-hints approach of the morning shows and the smarmy gossip of the shlock-talk shows seemed to be the only thing that would work. And then Rosie O'Donnell offered the largely female audience a talk show of a quality that can only be compared to Johnny Carson's Tonight Show . She plays with the audience even better than Carson did — he bantered with the audience (May your sister start wearing Eau de Dennis Franz), but Rosie converses with them as easily as with favorite relatives. And when her guests come on, she doesn't seem to be conversing with them on the basis of pre-interviews by staffers, distilled into what can fit on a Lettermanesque blue card — Rosie knows their work, loves their work, and talks to them with utter naturalness and delight. She is not scoring off them; she is willing to let conversations flow without stepping on them; she makes her guests feel welcome and as a result the audience is always at ease.
Of course her honesty is "shaped." Like any good comedian, she doesn't just have a reaction, she does a take. That's why we watch her instead of sitting around chatting with the neighbors. She's funny. But she's funny without ever losing a sense of candor and surprise. Contrast what she does with the standard comedian-guest who does observational comedy from the guest's chair, and you'll realize that instead relying entirely on rehearsed comedy, what emerges from Rosie's show is often genuinely spontaneous.
This brings out the best in her guests. (And when it doesn't, as with Donny Osmond's tasteless fat joke, she still makes it work by doing exactly the right take to put us at our ease and make us laugh.) She's having fun, her guest is having fun, and we're having fun.
Does it always work? No. The Tom Cruise thing was pushed too far. Once he came on, it should have been over except for the annual best-of show. Rosie's worst moment was the interview with Nicole Kidman, where the classy thing to do would have been not to mention Tom Cruise at all, but rather give the show to Kidman. (Rosie owes Kidman a real guest shot.) And it's possible that self-indulgence at the level shown during Tom Cruise week will sink Rosie's show after all; I know if that happens again, I'll begin to stop looking forward to 4:00 (which is when she comes on around here). But if that turns out to be a first-year aberration, and her show remains at the consistently high level of hostmanship she has shown everybody else, Rosie O'Donnell will take her place as Johnny Carson's true heir. Compared to her, nobody else is even close.
Ebert & Siskel
OK, I know it's really Siskel and Ebert. But don't you think they ought to follow their original plan and alternate whose name comes first every year?
They were the first of the widely syndicated movie-review shows, and even though I hate their local time slot, I never regret watching. They come on at 12:30 in the morning on Mondays — in other words, late Sunday night ... when they're not preempted by an infomercial.)
Mind you, I often disagree with them. They didn't care for One Fine Day and they loved Pulp Fiction, just to give you a sample of the fact that they're not immune to the jadedness problem among movie reviewers. Still, even when they're wrong, their conversation about the movies is fascinating and well-informed. I find Siskel's tone to be snooty and I am enraged when he makes fat jokes about Ebert or sneers at him as if he were an idiot child, but the truth is I agree with him about as often as with Ebert and even when Siskel is annoying, he's worth listening to. Ebert is more my kind of commentator, with a shoot-from-the-hip real-folks kind of style. But scratch him a little and he's every bit as erudite (and, of course, jaded) as Siskel is.
Even when they're wrong, touting movies that I find morally vacuous (like The English Patient), they raise issues that matter and make me think carefully about what is, after all, the most developed and uniquely American art.
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