A lot of Conan O'Brien's bits go on way too long. This segment is a lot longer than I thought it would be, but it's okay because there are some great payoffs. Stuntman Steven Ho showed up on The Tonight Show last night to punch and kick Conan and to make him jump through a window. This was practiced, of course, but it could have gone wrong. Conan is pretty funny with stuff like this.
(Side note: TV Tattle wonders if Conan is having trouble getting guests since this is Ho's third appearance since June. Or maybe Conan just loves doing stunts.)
So Conan O'Brien takes over The Tonight Show tonight, and I was wondering, what are you going to watch tonight? Conan? Letterman? Nightline? Something else?
I'm going to assume (if I may be so bold) that a lot of people are going to be watching Conan tonight. Not just old fans of Late Night or even fans of The Tonight Show. I bet there will be a lot of David Letterman fans watching and maybe even people who don't regularly watch late night television. Tonight is an institution and a lot of TV fans are going to be interested in seeing what exactly Conan is going to do on his first night.
I'm going to predict here and now that he'll thank Jay Leno (unlike Leno, who didn't thank Johnny Carson on his first show). So what are you going to watch?
Did you know that there was a late night television tradition over at NBC of late night hosts giving each other the pickle? It's true!
Conan O'Brien has given the giant green pickle to new Late Night host Jimmy Fallon. The tradition was started by David Letterman, who gave the pickle to O'Brien when O'Brien took over Late Night all those years ago and Letterman went over to CBS. The pickle was delivered by someone on Conan's staff and included a nice note from the new Tonight Show host, asking that Fallon give it to the next person. Conan was sure to say that would be many years from now.
OK, now that I've done a post like a third grader by including the words "pickle" and "staff" as much as possible, here's the video that Fallon made for his blog showing the pickle and the note. I'm assuming it won't show up on ebay at some point.
There's been a lot of talk about Conan taking over for Jay on The Tonight Show and Jimmy Fallon taking over the 12:35 slot and ABC possibly canceling Nightline and moving Jimmy Kimmel to 11:35 and Jay moving to 10pm. But there's one person who has sort of been forgotten in all of the late-night talk show talk: Carson Daly.
It's not hard to forget Last Call with Carson Daly, mind you. If you're up at 1:35am and want to watch a good late-night talk show, Daly's isn't it. It's just so trivial and boring and unexceptional that you sit there and wonder why the hell it's even still on television. And then you realize it's almost 2am and that's probably the reason why it's still on television. If it was on a lot earlier it probably would have been canceled a while ago. That's probably the reason why Daly didn't get Conan's 12:35 slot.
I think last night, Norm MacDonald expressed the thoughts of a lot of television viewers.
He was a guest on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, and he started off by talking about how he started on Saturday Night Live the same year that Conan started on Late Night. Then he told Conan that it was "stunning how Jay Leno outfoxed you again." Conan tries to laugh at all of it, but you can sense it's sort of an uneasy, "oh no, where is Norm going with this?" sort of laugh. MacDonald says that everyone thinks Leno is the funny, high-pitched voice guy, but he's incredibly shrewd, because he beat Johnny Carson, David Letterman, and now Conan in the late night wars. "You're in good company."
The funniest part is when MacDonald reenacts a conversation that NBC had with Conan: "remember that discussion we had where you said I'll never have to f***ing follow Leno ever again?" Conan laughs again but quickly (and oddly) changes the subject to the bad economy. Video after the jump.
Every year around this time we all make our New Year's resolutions. We're going to lose weight, stop smoking, not bite our nails, be nicer to each other, make more money, and generally become the most perfect, awesome people in the world. It doesn't usually work out, of course, and we're forced to come up with more realistic resolutions ("I cut down on the number of mocha lattes I have each day from 5 to 4!").
But we can make TV resolutions too. Here are mine.
Next year marks a changing of the guard for Conan O'Brien from Late Night to The Tonight Show. It'll be an easy transition for the fair-skinned one since he's already got a recipe for success: a die-hard audience, smart and inventive writers and puppets that curse.
The real challenge will be for Jimmy Fallon, Conan's Late Night successor, who hasn't had much TV time since he left Saturday Night Live for a movie career that made Chevy Chase's lineup look Lawrence Olivier-ian.
Variety reports that Fallon will first test the airwaves' waters instead of doing a full-blown cannonball by starring in some "webisodes" on NBC.com starting Monday.
The big question, if Jay Leno does indeed go over to ABC when his contract is up with NBC, is what will happen to Jimmy Kimmel? His show has been increasing in ratings and the late night talk show with the most buzz right now, and even if they were to cancel Nightline (a definite possibility), then Kimmel would still be pushed to 12:35 from his 12:05 start. Maybe 30 minutes isn't a lot when you're talking about the age of the universe, but it's a big leap in late night TV.
Kimmel is aware of this, and besides asking questions at the Television Critics Association press conference (as a member of the media), Kimmel is also trying to convince Leno not to come over to his channel. Last Friday he told Leno that he shouldn't come on over to ABC because it's filled with bees, they pay him in Disney dollars (which you can only spend at the theme parks), and every single day his car is keyed.
Leno calls the rumors of him going to ABC "ridiculous." And by ridiculous he means "I'll do it if I'm bored and they want to pay me a ton of money."
Conan O'Brien sent Triumph The Insult Comic Dog to St. Paul last week to cover the convention, and as usual the results are hilarious. He manages to get an interview with CNN anchor Anderson Cooper. Well, at first Cooper just sends him a note from across the convention hall (I won't spoil for you what the note says) but Triumph finally gets a face-to-face interview with Cooper, where he lays down an awesome dig at MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews that Cooper laughs at (Cooper should be looking at Triumph during the interview but keeps looking at Robert Smigel instead).
Triumph also gets Wolf Blitzer. Actually, Wolf doesn't talk to Triumph, but that doesn't stop the dog from thanking Blitzer for keeping his porn name even after he got into journalism. There's also a mention of Law and Order, thanks to Fred Thompson, and he screams to Greta van Susteren and other pundits and hosts.
Jay Leno has been getting some heat for refusing to have Democratic Gubernatorial candidate Phil Angelides on his show after having Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger on many times, and now he's getting a, um, different kind of heat from another person in the race...porn star Mary Carey.
The buxom woman wants equal time on Leno's show, but Leno hasn't made any comment about it yet. Carey says that she is a very popular search term on the web, so that proves her popularity. Of course, how many of those people are in California? She says "our polling results have shown my name to be more recognizable than any other candidate in the race." I doubt her name is more known than Ahnuld's, but feel free to laugh like Beavis and Butthead when you read the words "polling results." Heh heh heh heh heh.
She ran for Governor in 2003, but this year she got her teeth replaced and got new breast implants.