Hey, didn't James Corden do a fine job as host of the Tony Awards last night? As a talk show host, I find him way too fawning and wildly in love with everyone around him…though I must say I met him briefly last year at Academy screening of Into the Woods and decided it was utterly sincere. That's just who he is. If you can get past that, he's really a fascinating, talented performer and he sure showed that last evening.
Much of the broadcast was boring but that's the nature of the Tony Awards, I'm afraid. It is, after all, about giving awards to people and shows that even a moderately engaged theater buff such as myself has never heard of. It's not fair to judge the host and the folks who assemble the telecast for that. It is fair to judge them by what they wrap around all that award-bestowing and I thought they did quite well, especially in paying proper reverence to the mass murder in Orlando without allowing it to drag down the program. I wonder what kind of announcement, if any, they made to presenters and recipients about mentioning it or not mentioning it.
But back to Corden. He was just delightful, as he always seems to be when he isn't wedged into a recycled Letterman remote bit or telling someone who's on a CBS sitcom how super and marvelous and super and wonderful and positively super they are. His show is doing well too and the rumor is about that certain folks at CBS wish he was on at 11:35 and that Mr. Colbert, if he was on at all, followed him. Some of that is due to Corden's staggering success in having his clips go epidemic-level viral on YouTube. Some of that is due to a general disappointment with Colbert not doing as revolutionary a show on CBS as he did on Comedy Central.
I still think Stephen Colbert may be the most gifted performer who ever got a late night talk show but I'm liking his show less and less with each passing week. I have no inside info there but I'll tell you how it feels to me as a viewer. It feels like when they started out, they accepted the arguable premise that Colbert couldn't bake from scratch; that he had to balance any desire to reinvent the form and do things no one has ever done before with the recognition that certain things have just plain been proven to work in that format lately. The fact that he took over David Letterman's slot in David Letterman's studio with some of David Letterman's crew may also have contributed to the latter consideration.
So it feels — and again, remember this is my sense as a viewer — like they said, "Well, we'll do one-third innovative stuff and two-thirds of the show will be the kind of bits and interviews that worked for Dave, that are working for Fallon and Kimmel and other shows. Then as things progress, we'll ramp up the former and tone down the latter."
And then as the ratings failed to soar as much as was hoped, it's gone in the other direction. More latter, less former.
Colbert is a terrific improviser. He proved that on his old show when each night, he not only conducted a largely-unscripted interview with a guest — who often was not a seasoned performer or particularly skilled at verbal banter. And not only that but Colbert did it in character. Johnny Carson in his prime could not have done that. Not and made it funny.
But increasingly on his current show, Colbert might as well be reading the whole thing off the TelePrompter, including the jokes about Donald Trump reading off a TelePrompter. Every so often, Stephen has on a guest — usually an old friend of his — for an actual spontaneous conversation. Here's one from a few months ago when he had John Oliver in the guest chair. This clearly was not a re-creation of a pre-interview by some Talent Coordinator or a semi-scripted chat based on input from Oliver's publicists…
Just two funny, witty men talking without much, if any prearrangement. This does not occur often on talk shows today. It has become obvious to all in the business that the guests who drive ratings are mainly the kind of guests who have a new movie or TV show or book to plug. That's always been true to some extent but it's truer these days. And another thing that's changed is that those new movies or TV shows (sometimes even those new books) have so much money riding on them that the guest appearances are more rigidly planned. Publicists for the product won't let the guests do Fallon or Colbert or Kimmel without exerting controls to make sure the plug is properly delivered and "on message."
Once upon a time when Jack Lemmon had a new movie coming out, he'd go visit Johnny Carson for a chat and they'd talk about various things, some of which concerned the upcoming movie. Johnny had notes and planted questions but Jack was a charming, funny man and they might well depart from what was in those notes. The segment with Lemmon would also be longer because the presumption these days is that viewers (especially the ones in the younger demographics) have much shorter attention spans. Shorter interviews mean you have to get to the sales pitch faster.
When Colbert started, I predicted he'd do well. I assumed his show would be configured to let him do the things he did so well. It's not working out that way…and by the way, I don't mean to suggest he's being victimized here. He obviously is complicit in all of this, possibly even believing it's the way to go. It would not be the first time a performer, in moving from the small time to the big time, abandoned too much of what worked for him in the old venue. I think that was one of the mistakes Conan O'Brien made when he took over The Tonight Show.
You know, everyone who does talk shows gives props to Steve Allen, Johnny Carson and David Letterman for being masters of the form. Some include Jack Paar, as well. But no one seems to want to do what made those men masters, which is to do a talk show that presumed the host could ad-lib and handle unplanned situations…and then allow those unplanned situations to occur. Even Dave's show didn't do much of that its last decade or so.
Colbert could do it. Since Craig Ferguson became a game show host, Colbert may be the only guy with a talk show days who could, which is why it's maddening that he's doing so little that everyone else can do — and does.