MagneticMediaFed

Am I the only person who isn’t particularly offended by the news Jimmy Fallon will be taking over Late Night next summer? This isn’t to say I’ll be watching, but as a strategic move in chess game of late night programming, it makes perfect sense. Let us not forget the genre is clearly in its waning years. Really, network television, like newspapers, aren’t a particularly sound investment right now. That being said, the transition from where we are now to where we will eventually be isn’t going to be immediate, and frankly, we probably won’t see it happening. One day we’ll just wake up, go to work, stumble over to the water cooler and say to whomever is standing there, “Hey, did you watch Letterman last night?” To which they will undoubtedly respond, “What’s a letterman?” And then you will realize that they don’t even have televisions at the nursing home and that you haven’t gone to work in 23 years. More after the jump…

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This post is basically an excuse to use this awesome picture of Letterman that The Post ran on Friday, as well as to say that various sources are reporting that all of the big-four late-night hosts have been talking about coming back on the air at the same time (presumably early January) as to avoid generating Ellen-esque animosity from the union.

Update: The NYTimes just posted this story about talks between Letterman and the WGA that would allow him to come back in January WITH writers.

So I’m sitting at work, and my friend Geri asks me the question posed above. My initial reaction was, “Well, it’s probably because that’s the way The Tonight Show did it.”  After all, I’m in the middle of reading “The Late Shift” by Bill Carter and if the first 100 pages have taught me anything, it’s that people LOVED The Tonight Show.

The problem is that answer, while logical, doesn’t seem all that legit. I mean, surely there has to be some science behind this?  Why did The Tonight Show go with that look?  Was it completely arbitrary?

I decided to look into the matter a little bit.

AnswerBag says that it’s a matter of stage design. Well, obviously!  That’s not really much of an “answer,” AnswerBag.  Thanks for nothing.  They do point out the following:

But not all talk shows sits thier guests in the right side of the host. A popular show called PARKINSON has the host at the right side of the set and his guests are seated to his right. OPRAH seats her guest in the center of the stage while she sits mostly along the audience.

I don’t know about “Parkinson” but Oprah hasn’t stood amongst the crowd since the late 80s.  Conclusion: AnswerBag sucks.

A better explanation was found on the Jump The Shark page for The Chris Rock Show, where a frustrated viewer said the following:

Chris Rock was funny, but too full of himself. All talk shows, with the exception of this one, have the guest sitting on the viewers left and the host sitting to the right of the screen. This is because our eyes, due to reading habits, move left to right. The person on the left side is the one you tend to look at the most. Talk show hosts, for all their faults, concede this honor to their guests. Not Chris Rock, he had such an ego, worse than even Carson or Letterman, that he sat on the left (dominant) side.

While Mr. Rock’s ego can certainly be questioned, I must say that aesthetic reasoning seemed to make the most sense. It’s a matter of where people tend to look.  Possibly unrelated sidebar:  when walking down the street, if someone is approaching me from the opposite direction in my walking path, I tend to, more often than not, step left instead of stepping right.  This usually results in awkward exchanges.