Tuned In

Late-Night Poll: Writers or No Writers?

  • Share
  • Read Later

I’m officially on vacation until tomorrow. But I’m limbering up my fingers with a little low-impact blogging. And lo and behold, the late-night hosts have obligingly provided me with my material for my first day back by returning to the air tonight. But not, thanks to Worldwide Pants’ interim agreement with the striking writers, on equal footing. David Letterman will have writers, jokes, Top Ten items, and so forth. Jay Leno will have, well, finally a legitimate excuse to be less funny than Letterman.

At first blush, this seems like a coup for Dave, Craig and CBS. But maybe not right away. After all, when it comes down to it, Late Show will only be offering essentially what it did before the strike started. But Leno, Conan, Kimmel–flying without writers, and probably without A-list actor guests–will offer the opportunity to watch them flail around without support, without witticisms fed to them by writers. Watch CBS tonight and you can see a couple of talk shows. But watch NBC or ABC tonight and you could see some possibly historically bad talk shows. Now that’s stunt programming!

I have several DVRs and it’s my job, so I’ll watch all tonight’s shows eventually. But I put the question to you: which talk shows will you watch, if any?