TVSquad

The late night talk show process hasn't been refined in any major way since the early days of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Well there is Carson Daly's show, but I don't count that as a late night talk show ... or a show, for that matter.

You've got your monologue, your one or two comedy bits or sketches and banter with the band and the sidekick, throw in two or three guests, end with a musical performance and you're done. It's comedy by the numbers that works as long as the comedy is funny.

So it's refreshing to see Jay Leno and company retooling the format of the bit, even if the result still screams of the old show. It's also nice to see a show that knows and plays on Leno's strengths and weaknesses as a comedian and a talk show host with the skills of an NFL offensive coordinator, even if it sometimes feels as though that offensive coordinator works for the Detroit Lions.

The strongest part of his shows have always been his monologues. He's a seasoned stand-up comedian who has paid more than his share of dues on the road (the best story are his days touring strip clubs including one named "The Mine Shaft," a pitch black club where patrons had to pay to wear miner helmets to see their share of flesh), and it shows in his monologue. They are simple, precise and funny, and monologues only have to be funny in order for them to work. Even the door knocking segment at the end of the show had a great sense of fun to it, even if some of the bits felt pre-planned and almost shattered the illusion of spontaneity.

The guest comedian spot also works very well. It takes the attention off Jay for a while, lighting the laugh load from his lumbar and giving another up-and-comer a chance to bust their chops on the national stage. Jim Norton's "Uninivited Guest" segment threw me for a bigger loop than the giant lazy-susan he was sitting on that whirled him onto the stage. It let him showcase his very unique sense of humor, which as anyone who listens to Opie and Anthony or saw his awesome HBO special Monster Rain can agree wouldn't earn him an appearance on a late night infomercial on formerly-free TV if it didn't have a filter on it. Even with all the naughty chunks cut out, it was crafted and presented in a way that let Norton be funny without completely erasing the things that make him funny, mainly that he looks and sounds exactly like the kind of guy who you would expect to see being asked to have a seat by Chris Hanssen of Dateline NBC.

The rest of the show went downhill faster than Richard Hammond's Dolomite Sprint trying to complete a handbrake incline test on Mount Killimanjaro. Leno likes talking to guests and asking them about uncomfortable situations, but his interviews have never been very engaging. So the show tried to compensate this by birthing the "Ten@Ten" segment in which he sits down via satellite with Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz and asks them 10 pre-written questions. It brought the show to a grinding halt. The whole thing was designed to make the guests squirm and blush with hokey requests for reciting movie lines and sexual performance stats, the latter of which would have been fine ... if he didn't ask them to Tom $&%ing Cruise.

The Michael Moore interview was slightly more engaging, but also felt like setups to easy questions for Moore, who by nature provides the opportunity for an interesting and engaging discussion in a funny way, whether you agree with him or not. Plus, any show that tries to follow a musical performance by Jay-Z, Kanye West and Rihanna with a musical performance by Michael Moore needs more than just their head examined.