So down 4.4 million for the 2nd episode and a .4 deficit in the demo (not insignificant, it’s like 30%) but ’twas ever thus destined to be. Fallon labors under the handicap or advantage of a Thursday Night Throwball intro pairing the Patsies and the Steelers in the season opener.
Biden made ‘news?’ today in his interview with Stephen which was embargoed and then transcripts unembargoed while the tape remained embargoed. I’m hard put to call it actual news because nothing new came out of it except his continued protestation that running for President takes your full commitment and he got all verklempt about his kid’s service in Iraq.
The reason Biden is being sucked up to by the Villagers is Good Old Senator Credit Card is their very own pod produced clone, a hollow empty husk of institutionalized graft and corruption that they hope can fool enough of the people when Hillary falls to their decades of Clinton hate.
He says himself he is no populist. Do we really need another Democrat running to the right of Hillary? That’s Jim Webb’s job.
I hope Stephen cleans him like a fish and drops him still flopping in a pan but I expect he’ll be much gentler than that. His other guests are Travis Kalanick and Toby Keith.
It doesn’t appear in many of the accounts but last night was kind of a production fiasco. They had to do most of it twice which meant the taping was 2 hours for an hour and a bit long show. I thought the production pieces were a little lengthy over funny and neither of the interview segments struck me as particularly compelling.
I’m not alone in that opinion. As Emily Nussbaum of The New Yorker put it-
Colbert’s more admirable skill-and the thing that one expects will be a highlight of the show in the future-is his ability to do energetic, probing interviews. Yet Colbert’s sit-down with Jeb Bush was a strange one. Mostly, Bush got to spout off talking points, branding himself as a benign presence, who was, unlike Trump, a small-government conservative interested in “fiscal restraint.” The two men joked about logos. It was aggressively collegial, a kick in the shins to anyone who worried that Colbert would be some liberal muckraker. Colbert did one gentle ambush, which involved a staged interaction with his own brother, designed to elicit a genuine answer from Jeb: Could he name a policy difference between himself and his brother George? In response, Jeb simply emphasized, once again, that, unlike George, he was a small-government conservative who favored “fiscal restraint.” No one brought up the war. Colbert is smart. But the toothlessness was unnerving. Jeb Bush was Sabra hummus, plugging itself.
The George Clooney segment was far more low-energy, with the two men satirizing the faux-chumminess of such interviews-a familiar shtick, post-Letterman. There was talk about Clooney’s work in Darfur, followed, somewhat abruptly, by gags about Clooney’s marriage having turned him into “arm candy” (“just be shiny and pretty”), and then a fake-clips routine. It doesn’t have to be this way, and I’m betting that it won’t be, in the near future. If there’s got to be another man sitting behind another desk that is carved from a whole desk, I’d certainly rather have it be a smart guy like Colbert.
He did deliver the numbers, 6.6 million in the overnight. For comparison Letterman rolled up 15.2 in his debut. As an indicator of the current state of play in the target demographic (18 – 49 year olds) Colbert scored 1.4 million while the Jimmys, Fallon and Kimmel had 900 and 400 K respectively.
If you haven’t already, now is the time to adjust your expectations of the impact of Broadcast Network Television.
I also find the special Rovian math that John Kolbin of The Times uses to insist that 1.4 million is somehow smaller than Fallon’s Olympics assisted 1.3 million somewhat speculative, but the Gray Lady is not what it once was either.
What I expect going forward is that the show will continue to improve and eventually settle at the #2 spot in late night. CBS still has the same institutional problems that prevented David from crushing all comers like a bug despite the clear superiority of his product.
I’m going to try and not put too many expectations on Stephen. He’s just an entertainer after all and it’s not his job to save the Republic, though we could use some saving.
I don’t even think he’ll come out like Daaavid Letterman. Dave had something to prove, that he was much, much better than Jay Leno, and I think he did that.
When Dave rolled out on stage at the Ed Sullivan Theater he had a fully developed show with a format, a staff, and an audience. He was the righful heir of Johnny Carson with a New York Rolodex full of edgy talent on the make instead of the fake tanned celebrity of Burbank (is that even really a place or just a CGI wax museum?).
I followed every moment of the build up and was never unhappy with the result. Leno’s only virtue is that he’s compliant for which the evidence is his dismal prime time expansion and the failed Conan hand off.
Jimmy Fallon is his proper heir, a vacuous vacant airhead with half the attention span of a tweet (I call them twits and they are incapable of expressing any thought that can not be formulated in 70 characters or less simply because it exceeds their reasoning ability).
Stephen asked Dave if he would have changed anything. Dave said- “I’d have put my desk on the other side.” You can expect to see Stephen on the left even though he says he wants Republicans to feel included in his audience.
Thus Jeb!
What even his detractors will admit is that Stephen is a pretty fair interviewer so you can expect that aspect of his talent to be featured. Tonight in addition to Jeb! he has George! (not quite sure why except Clooney makes a habit of debuts and farewells). His house band is Jonathan Batiste and Stay Human.
I think that the transition to Larry Wilmore’s Nightly Show has helped to psychologically prepare me. Even about 5 months in it’s still striving to find its balance though it is much, much better than it was. Likewise I think Trevor and Stephen get a suspension of disbelief for a time. Material doesn’t necessarily translate.
Tonightly is the 100th episode. Our topic will be birthright citizenship (good luck with that Donald) and a visit from the Trump Troll (love that hair). Our guests are: Calise Hawkins, Brett Gelman, and Lil Rel Howery.
Larry’s been mainlining politics since Jon’s departure. I sort of like it. I have no idea what’s happening next week. Larry doesn’t believe in Comedy Central’s website.
Interesting but maybe not coincidental that this discussion comes on the day Bernie pulls ahead of Hillary in at least one New Hampshire poll (the Franklin Pierce study is a little rare, a little spare, and seems designed to produce a desired Republican result of making Jeb seem stronger than he really is).
But no matter, I think anything that benefits Bernie is probably good news (unless you hold his NRA endorsement against him).
We’ll probably touch on ‘Black Lives Matter’ who’s more gentile and less militant Massachusetts branch just today got booted from a Hillary rally and accepted gratefully in return a “private meeting” where “concerns were heard”.
Bow down Bernie indeed.
Though mostly he has. He gave them the mike and an audience. There’s a new communications director, a fully developed policy, and 40 years of history at the forefront of Civil Rights (not for nothing folks). O’Malley caved after Netroots Nation without the resume and had presided over Baltimore and Freddie Gray. Now he gets a pass?
There are lots of questions (swiftboat) but I’ll put my tin foil aside.
Populist Propaganda
Ferguson
You stop being racist and I’ll stop talking about it.
It’s really hard to know what to say about Ferguson. On the one hand I don’t seem to be finding a firm answer to my question- did the guy the cops shot really have a gun? Do you remember the Molotov cocktail at the 3 am news conference last year, where they displayed a bottle of liquid with a rag in it and clamed this was an actual, factual gasoline bomb they had recovered that night and then proceeded to man handle it as if it had no forensic value at all?
You know, you’d think if they wanted to become cops they would have watched at least one cop show in the last 30 years.
Other than that teeny tiny sliver of good faith on my part (I don’t think most cops are liars, I know it) the news is that things are, if anything, worse. The capper for me is that they’re letting armed vigilantes roam the streets in cammo and body armor because they are…
Wait for it.
White! Surprise, surprise, surprise.
Missouri has always had very flexible rules about open carry and it’s always a great pleasure when I venture South to discover that everyone doesn’t wander in to the Waffle House (Waffle House!) packing a Peacemaker as a cosplay codpiece in their own personal Rio Bravo fantasy of frontier justice.
They have just relaxed their restrictions on concealed carry about which part of me asks- if I’m using a gun as a deterrent, why wouldn’t I want people to know I’m packing heat? That’s right, I like that Buntline Special with the barrel that pokes into your boot tops.
There is another part of me that wonders- so what if I’m Black? How exactly does that interaction go?
“Officer- you need to know I have a permit”?
My instinct is- not well.
You stop being racist and I’ll stop talking about it.
Stewart gradually evolved into the principal media mouthpiece or channel – the two things are not quite the same – for what might be called common-sense liberalism, the self-appointed pathway of Enlightenment reason. He has called himself a moderate and admitted voting for George H.W. Bush in 1988, and while you shouldn’t hold a person’s youthful indiscretions against him, I think that fact is important to the Stewart brand. He is disappointed, disillusioned and sometimes outraged by the evil and idiocy found on the Republican right and the thoroughgoing corruption of the political system. But he is not unreasonable, not an ideologue, not a “leftist.” He believes in comity and compromise, and yearns for the kinder, gentler days when a 25-year-old Jewish standup comedian in New York could vote for Ronald Reagan’s vice president without consciously self-identifying with a party of bigotry, warmongering and paranoia.
Was that a low blow? I’m honestly not sure. I come to bury Jon Stewart, not to praise him – except, wait, maybe it’s the other way around. First of all, let’s note that Stewart isn’t dead, so I’m under no obligation to say nice stuff about him just because he is leaving a television program after 16 years. Furthermore, there’s a reason most people get that Shakespeare quotation backwards: The speaker of that famous monologue, Marc Antony, repeatedly challenges his audience to perceive that what he says is not what he means: “Brutus is an honorable man,” and all that. He is using irony, in its old-fashioned Socratic sense (not the debased modern sense of easy mockery, or just a bad attitude), which is a mode that Jon Stewart has never mastered and largely avoids.
Stephen Colbert’s long-running satirical portrayal of a jingoistic Fox-style commentator, first on Stewart’s show and then on his own, had a random, hit-and-miss quality and often descended to cheap gags. (On balance, Stewart probably provides more laffs per minute.) But in his best moments, Colbert has employed the ironic mode to reality-altering effect, and never more so than in his infamous performance at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2006, when he mocked the empty, photo-op presidency of George W. Bush to the president’s face and derided the Washington press corps for its stenographic compliance: “Over the last five years you people were so good, over tax cuts, WMD intelligence, the effect of global warming. We Americans didn’t want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out.”
Stewart would make the same joke on his show, pretty much, but he would immediately walk it back to the mode of earnestness and be super clear about what he meant: CNN et al. had behaved like a bag of dicks and that was really a shame. Colbert, on the other hand, vividly demonstrated Socrates’ principle that the destabilizing and disorienting effect of irony depends upon the “aneiron,” the person who doesn’t get the joke. In this case, everyone at that dinner understood that Colbert meant the opposite of what he said, which is why none of them were laughing. What they had not understood, because it seemed inconceivable, was that a TV comic’s joke persona contained a radical critique of the nature of politics and the news media, and that Colbert was not going to observe the cozy, chummy conventions of a Beltway event whose sole purpose is to make the subservient Washington press corps feel like special snowflakes.
Stewart is not comfortable in that mode, and has never pursued that kind of confrontation. His on-air rhetoric slid perceptibly leftward over the course of the Bush administration, as he vigorously went after the bankers, the Iraq war apologists and the torture defenders. But even after his show hit a demographic sweet spot somewhere around the Democratic center-left – the position of the 2008 Obama voter – he struggled to avoid the impression of pure partisanship. As recently as 2010, although it feels like a lifetime ago, Stewart was calling for an end to partisan vitriol with his Rally to Restore Sanity on the National Mall. Even he must have thought the immediate aftermath was pretty funny: A few days later, Tea Party Republicans swept to victory from coast to coast in the midterm election that pretty much paralyzed Obama’s presidency. So that was the end of that.
Salon columnist Bill Curry has suggested that Stewart belongs to the Pragmatist tradition of Oliver Wendell Holmes, and seeks to draw a distinction between Stewart’s faith in reason and usefulness and Obama’s penchant for back-room political compromise. It’s a fascinating argument, but that might be an overly fine way to parse a TV comedian – often a very funny one, with a delightful ability to mock others and mock himself in the same moment – who has insisted on walking the narrow plank of reasonableness in times of rampant unreason, and now finds himself alone at the end of the plank above an ocean of hungry sharks.
I understand why it bothers Stewart that Fox News is depicting him, during his last days on the air, as a shameless Obama sock-puppet. He feels that it’s not quite fair and he feels more than a little vulnerable on that front. Both perceptions are justified. (Stewart himself said on the air that he has been much harder on Obama than Fox ever was on Bush, which is what you might call an invidious comparison.) But Stewart’s role as Obama’s stealth strategic defender, who has criticized the administration on several key issues while consistently seeking to channel progressive anger and disappointment toward the crazy and intransigent opposition, wouldn’t bother me at all if I felt convinced that it reflected underlying convictions. (I am not counting the nonideological relativism that drives the 21st-century Democratic Party as a conviction.)
As with Stewart’s pal in the White House, that question has only grown murkier over the years. All the contradictions of political satire in the Obama years would exhaust anyone, but Stewart’s performance of sincerity, the factor that gave his comedy its force and also limited its scope, has pretty much come unraveled. You can see that in his recent interview with Tom Cruise, which barely differed from a boot-licking celebrity appearance with Oprah or Ellen, and in which (as filmmaker Alex Gibney has observed), Stewart never mentioned Cruise’s central role in the noxious Church of Scientology. You see it in Stewart’s increasingly tedious feud with Bill O’Reilly, where they play the roles of media commentators with profound ideological differences and pretend to dislike each other, coming dangerously close to the kind of masturbatory media-insider banter Colbert mocked so mercilessly a decade ago.
Jon Stewart has had a great run as the host of a comedy show, the kind of longevity that has become nearly impossible in American pop culture. In political terms, his mission has either been fulfilled – if he was really sent here by Putin to bewilder us and destroy democracy – or was never possible in the first place. As I said earlier, we want to be permanently in on the joke and we want to believe in something. But what if the things we want to believe in are just a joke?
I believe I can see the future, ‘Cause I repeat the same routine
I think I used to have a purpose, Then again, that might have been a dream
I think I used to have a voice, Now I never make a sound
I just do what I’m been told
I really don’t want them to come around, oh no
I can feel their eyes are watching, In case I lose myself again
Sometimes I think I’m happy here
Sometimes, yet I still pretend
I can’t remember how this got started
But I can tell you exactly how it will end
I’m writing on a paper, I’m hoping someday I might find
Well I’ll hide it behind something, They won’t look behind
I am still inside, A little bit comes bleeding through
I wish this could’ve been any other way, But I just don’t know, I don’t know
What else I can do?
You may think this is the future, you may think that it’s the end.
I won’t give up the struggle.
Some times, sometimes you take a stand.
Every day is exactly the same. Every day is exactly the same. There is no love here and there is no pain. Every day is exactly the same.
Future Directions
Jon Stewart is not dying. The Daily Show is not dying. The Sausage Grinder of Snark is not dying and neither am I (well, in the normal course of things. I’m 120+ years old!).
I’ve been a huge supporter of Larry Wilmore ever since he took over from Stephen. His Nightly Show has gotten better and better since it’s found its format (Daily Show + panel instead of interview, duh). That will not change.
I’m totally willing to get behind Trevor and expect to feature his efforts at the helm as well. I’ve watched a number of his comedy sets and he really is as bright and funny as Jon thinks he is. He’s more international than anyone since Oliver so he gets the class thing and he’s also an expert on racism (South Africa?).
However.
While Jon is retiring to raise bees in Sussex, Stephen is taking up the sword again on Late Night. I will certainly give him a fair shot too.
So while it’s easy enough to track the guests (which I intend to do) I have a serious viewing overlap at 11:35 and frankly the repeats of Larry are easier to access (1:30 am ET) or tape (30 minutes) than Late Night (1 hour and who knows?).
Well, it’s something to think about instead of silently weeping.
