MagneticMediaFed

The line for Wednesday’s show, the first in eight weeks.

These are dark times for fans of television. The writers are in the middle of a seemingly endless strike that has effectively wiped original scripted programming from the networks (both broadcast and cable) for the foreseeable future. While there are some new series in the can, only a few have any significant buzz behind them (like, say, half a season of Lost). Two and a half days into 2008 and there are only two television events that I was genuinely excited about. The first is the fifth (and final) season premiere of The Wire this Sunday (an episode which I’ve actually already seen on HBO On-Demand). The second, and dare I say the more culturally significant of the two (at least when it comes to ‘the now’), was Wednesday’s return of the late night talk shows, specifically The Late Show with David Letterman. More after the jump…

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USA Today recently named Britney Spears as “Celebrity of the Year.” If you were unsure up to this point just how awful 2007 was, this should be the last piece of evidence needed. How this decision was reached seems dubious at best and probably should be avoided at all costs. Whatever the methodology, the result is sadly spot-on, and goes to great lengths to not only summarize 2007 but the entire decade.

To really understand why 2007 was the way that it was, and why it is the year that best represents the aughts, we need to revisit the previous decade, some would say the better decade: the nineties. More specifically, we should take the Way-Back Machine to see where our “Celebrity of the Year” was so that we can better understand where she is now and by extension where we are now. If we focus primarily on mass culture, Britney Spear completely embodies what we often think of as being “the nineties” (or at least late-nineties) despite the fact that she didn’t really explode in the music industry until 1999. Because of this we have to acknowledge that cultural eras aren’t particularly concerned with the Gregorian calendar. Need proof, look at that photo of you from 1991. Those tight-rolled jeans and neon bracelets scream 80s far more than grungy 90s. 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 Tina Fey is leaving SNL. That’s the word on the street, and by ‘word on the street’ I obviously mean, ‘what she told Jay Leno on the Tonight Show.’ I assume she has no reason to lie. Frankly, this (along with her costar Rachel Dratch’s departure from the Saturday staple to network programming) was about the least shocking thing to come from Hollywood since the revelations that Suri Cruise is actually a composite of several different celebrity babies. If you remember this years finale of SNL, you’d recall that Fey and Dratch were very thank-youey during the goodbye.

The fact that she has a must succeed sit-com premiering in the fall (30 Rock) obviously has some impact on the whole thing. (NBC has some info/video.) Based on the clips that are available, and the assumption that Tina Fey is a pretty decent comedy writer, I’d say that 30 Rock will be a good show despite the fact that I’m putting the odds of survival at 4:1. Keep reading by clicking below…

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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.

In this segment, “DVR Catch-Up,” I hope to discuss things that catch my attention while trying to burn through some of the shows on my DVR that I watch in groups (i.e. Instead of watching Letterman everynight, I usually watch it twice a week, but see 2 or 3 episodes at a time and fast-forward through the slow parts).

On The Late Show Monday night Dave had on “Kid Scientists” in one of the segments. Fans of the show will be familiar with this as they have the kids on every year and it’s always a hoot. But this year I’m sitting there watching it with my lady-friend next to me and we’re both laughing out loud and something dawns on me: “Kid Scientist” is PURE Letterman. What I mean by this is not that the segment has been around for the past twenty years (I assume) and we’re all familiar with it, but that the parameters of the segment cater to Dave’s strengths more than anything else that is done on the show. “Kid Scientists” is David Letterman’s The Blue Album. It’s what you get if you reduce the show to its roots. Regular viewers will note that he seems to be having the most fun not with the written material or the interviews (natch), but when he’s interacting with people in the audience or on stage during specialty acts. But with Stupid Human/Pet Tricks and Know Your Current Events and Stump the Band etc., he’s playing off of adults who understand the significance of television and understand what Dave Letterman is doing. In short, they laugh at his jokes, and they play along and all is right with the world. With the kids, however, you don’t have that wall built up. Dave can crack wise to a 12 year old and be greeted with absolute dead silence. Sometimes it seems that they are actually bothered by his presence and they if he wasn’t there they could, perhaps, really teach these idiots in the audience a thing or two about science, and he seems to LOVE it. Combining the two you get this perfect combination of, basically, everything that The Late Show stands for: smart comedy coming out of the seemingly bland.

People swear by Conan, and I won’t disagree that his sketches are some of the wildest on television, but as a performer he simply can’t come close to screen presence of David Letterman, a presence that comes into complete focus once a year for “Kid Scientists.”