Colin McEnroe Show: Is Late Night TV Dying?
The Nose talks about what they love (and hate) about late night television.
Somehow America decided, as a culture, that we would watch a certain kind of television show before we went to bed.
It would be hosted by a man. He would usually wear a suit and tie, while we sat there in our pajamas. He would have a live band and an announcer/sidekick. He would begin the show with a monologue. He would then interview other famous people trying to get us interested in something they've done recently. These interviews would be interspersed with other bits of marginally transgressive, ever so slightly out of the box comedy.
That's it. The formula hasn't changed much for more than 50 years, and the only difference now is that instead of two or three of these shows, there's David, Jay, Jimmy, the other Jimmy, George, Conan, Craig -- plus Stewart and Colbert, who really did smash the paradigm. Is the late night talk show sounding a death rattle?
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E-mail from Sara
Two years ago the conversations between me and my old man involved me talking while he grunted and shuffled his book or newspaper. The minute I'd start to talk his face would take on the same expression as my dog's when I'd take him to the vet. Similarly, when he would initiate conversation it would usually end in me crying and threatening divorce over our different point of view from everything from politics to the proper pronunciation of the word "coupon". All that changed when Eric came home one day with the best marital aid ever, a Netflix subscription and the first season of The Wire. Suddenly we had stuff to talk about, people we cared about (besides our son). When The Wire ended we mourned together and together we moved onto The Sopranos. And it wasn't just the HBO drama's that brought us together. We remembered our love of the Simpsons, discovered It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and learned to speak to each other in news anchor language. Thank God for TV because without it men and women would have nothing to talk about.
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