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I’m back from staycation, and big thanks to Steven James Snyder for going above and beyond the call with a wide-ranging series of guest posts last week, on top of his work at Techland. But party’s over now, kids—it’s back to your regularly scheduled half-assed mediocrity with yours truly. Here’s some of what I missed in …
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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lz1EOYtxUu0]
In your late-night update for the week:
* Two weeks into his restoration, Jay Leno is still leading David Letterman in the ratings, albeit with fewer viewers than when he left the Tonight Show.
* Dave, meanwhile, had fellow Leno-basher Jimmy Kimmel on his own show (above) to fondly …
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Word is just in that Robert Halderman, the TV producer whose extortion attempt led to David Letterman‘s confessing a longtime affair with a staffer, has pleaded guilty.
That there will be no drawn-out trial means Letterman potentially dodged a bullet, insofar as any further embarrassing details might have come out. I suppose this is …
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Coming back from a vacation is a pain in the ass, isn’t it? It is for NBC, which, its second week back from its blissful Canadian Olympics idyll, is now back in the soggy late-winter reality of its usual shows and its normal ratings. (Indications are that Jay Leno’s high return ratings may also be coming back to reality, though as I …
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Jay Leno’s transition from primetime failure to once-and-future host of the Tonight Show lasted about a minute and a half. The cold open of his new Tonight Show had him waking up in a sepia-toned sequence—with Betty White, because the Internet loves her—a la Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. (If you had “finds it was all a dream” in …
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Tonight, The Grover Cleveland of television, Jay Leno, commences his second nonconsecutive term as the host of The Tonight Show. (As I write this I’m about to head off on assignment for a couple days, so I’m not sure if I’ll be able to blog about his first night back or not.) His first week, as I’ve noted, has no blockbuster guest list, …
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Next Monday, the corpse of The Jay Leno Show will get a jolt of electricity and shamble, moaning, back to life as The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. NBC and Jay have nodded to that restoration–and, perhaps, to the generational skew of Jay’s audience–with promos set to The Beatles’ “Get Back.”
And with whom will Jay get back? His first …
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Never mind:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujo9FRh8nf0]
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If you are celebrity trying to get past a major public controversy, one time-tested option is to do a dramatic interview on late-night TV. If you are the once and future host of the Tonight Show, however, and the hosts of every other late-night show apparently think you are the biggest jerk in showbiz, that is not so much of an …
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Last week, with Conan O’Brien getting ready to leave the air, Team Coco dominated the Internet. This week, with Jay Leno preparing for an image-rehab visit to Oprah tomorrow, the race to be “the only one out there sticking up for Jay Leno” is starting to get crowded. Mark Evanier argues that Jay is not the bad guy and that NBC’s decision …
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I’ve said before and will say it again: whatever my opinion of Jay Leno as a talk show host, and whatever my opinion of NBC’s canning Conan O’Brien or Leno’s role in it, the idea that he is in danger of a big ratings backlash over it is a stretch. (His ratings could be lower when he returns for other reasons, like viewers’ having drifted …
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Because of the NBC Nightly News’ bizarre obsession with prioritizing actual important news, the segment I taped yesterday on that network’s late-night wars was shuffled off to the Web. For those of you still interested, you can see me holding forth for about five seconds, in front of the giant books in the fake library I retire to …
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Taiwanese Animated Hulk-Conan smash!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJ9m1an-pQ8]
[h/t The Awl.]
