Monthly Archives: May 2009

As we warned you, the Comic-Con International in San Diego is sold out. All tix gone. Zip. Empty. None available at the door. Don't bother asking. This kind of thing will happen next year, too…so don't be shocked when it does and you didn't get around to signing up.

I will be on, hosting or co-hosting fourteen (14) panels. The official schedule won't be up for at least a month but my "to do" list will include all your old faves — Quick Draw, Jack Kirby panel, Golden Age panel, Sergio/Mark panel, etc. There'll be two big panels featuring Cartoon Voice Actors and this year, all but one or two of the participants will be new to our dais. We'll also do a sequel to last year's well-attended panel about the business end of Cartoon Voice Work — how to get an agent, how to prepare a demo, how not to get ripped off by predatory "teachers," etc. There'll be one-on-one "spotlight" interviews with veteran comic artists like Gene Colan. There'll be individual spotlights also turned on great performers like Stan Freberg and June Foray. I'm especially excited about a planned panel that will gather together the three main "Bob Kane" ghosts who drew Batman in the forties and fifties. Oughta be fun and memorable.

I'm told hotel rooms in San Diego are still possible to get if you do a little digging and don't insist on sleeping too close to the action. When we get closer to the event, I'll try and link to info on how to use the city's fine trolley system to get from where you stay to where it's all happening. That will be for those of you who won't be able to use the convention's very efficient bus shuttle line which stops at many hotels. The one thing you don't want to rely on is getting a parking space at or around the convention center. Last year, the fine voice actor Rob Paulsen was supposed to be on our Sunday panel of folks who do what he does for a living. Five minutes before, he phoned me with sadness and exasperation in his famous voice to tell me he'd been driving around for an hour and couldn't find a place to put his car. If it can happen to Mr. Opportunity, it can happen to anyone.

Many a fan writes to tell me that they've never been to this thing and are scared off when they hear of lines the length of the Ganges, a dearth of parking, the nearest hotel rooms being in Guadalajara, etc. Don't be. First of all, those problems only exist because so many people have a great time at the con and find any inconvenience more than worth it. Secondly, tens of thousands who attend find little to complain about. If you do a little advance planning, it can be a breeze and a half. Thirdly, even those who bitch long and loud don't usually mean it the way it sounds. I have a small group of friends who every year denounce the crowds and the parking and the lines and the costumes and the price of a Diet Snapple…and the point is they do this every year. None of it stops them from attending.

If you aren't signed up for this year, it's probably too late. But as the Oakland Athletics say, there's always next year. Or the year after or the year after…

You know, I'm beginning to get the idea that the saying is wrong…that what's good for General Motors is not good for the U.S.A.

Okay, here's my fearless prediction about what's going to happen with the reconfiguration of the NBC schedule with Leno and O'Brien and those two guys who come after them. I think it's easiest to divide the prediction up into stages because that's how this thing's going to roll out.

Stage One starts Monday when Conan takes over The Tonight Show. I've found Conan disappointing the last year or two. I can't think of a single new, innovative thing he's done to equal his earlier achievements. There have been nights when he comes out and does what's largely a medley of catch phrases — "Be cool, my babies" and the string dance and a lot of mugging and such. That's great for the studio audience, boring at home. I'm assuming, based on his past track record, he and his crew will rise to the occasion, dump all that needs to be dumped and do an exciting, fresh program. I hear his test shows have been great and his set is spectacular and his mood, with the new gig and Andy Richter back on the premises, is reborn.

My guess is Conan will do very well during Stage One…and of course, that's self-perpetuating for a while. When your show is hot, the hot guests flock to it and that keeps you warm.

Stage Two starts in the Fall when The Jay Leno Show debuts at 10 PM. I think it'll do well the first few nights, a little less well the second few nights, a little less well after that and so on. ABC and CBS will be throwing stunts and heavyweight programming against it and The Jay Leno Show will not feel like "must see TV" with that competition. It'll be like, "We can watch Jay some other time" and much of America will not want to miss the big event on CSI Muncie or whatever's against him. Having Jay on will also diminish Conan somewhat. The best guests will be split between two shows instead of them all being on Tonight.

There are times when you can almost feel the press and competitors chomping to declare failure and I smell schadenfreude in the air — folks who've never liked Jay, those who've been enjoying NBC's decline, etc. Within the industry, there are many who resent that Leno is occupying five hours of network prime time that, they think, would otherwise have gone to shows from which they could have financial or career benefits. The minute it can be said, it will be said that the Leno Prime Time Experiment is a disaster. I don't think it will be but I expect we'll hear that, just as breathessly as we once heard that going with Jay over Dave was the biggest bonehead mistake a network had ever made and The Tonight Show would never be Number One again under Leno. What could make it a genuine flop is if affiliates believe that and defect…or threaten it in sufficient numbers.

We've already seen the NBC station in Boston declare they were going to stick an hour of local news in at 10 PM in place of the new Leno offering. The parent network went to work, applied pressure and got Boston on board…for now. But what if The Jay Leno Show performs below expectations in its first months? Or what if it's doing okay but too many of its viewers take its closing credits as a signal that it's time to go beddy-bye? That would not only hurt Conan further but cause many local NBC stations to consider doing what Boston wanted to do or, more likely, bumping Jay to 10:35 and putting their 11 PM local news on at ten. Local news is a key source of revenue for most stations and if a lot of NBC affiliates see a drop-off, the game will become whether the net can keep them from going rogue.

NBC knows this, thinks they can prevent it…and probably can. Since his last show, Conan has been visiting affiliates, shaking hands, taping promos, building their rooting interest. Between now and the time his new show debuts, Jay will be doing a lot of that. He'll also have this going for him: Even if it finishes second or third in its time slot, his show will probably be quite profitable for NBC. Even giving him a Lamborghini full of money every week, the network stands to make a ton because his program will be so much cheaper than the usual 10 PM film show. They can afford to pass some of those bucks on to the affiliates in various ways and to spend a fortune on promotion and advertising. They have too much riding on this not to. Still, both shows could have a rough period between the time Jay goes on and the point where we get to Stage Three…

I don't know exactly when Stage Three will kick in but it will be when his competition becomes primarily reruns. CBS and ABC may work hard to delay it but at some point, the math of prime time license fees demands that they program repeats against Leno…and that's when Jay with his new shows will have a big advantage.

Back in the Paleolithic era of television, reruns did as well or almost as well as new programming. But in the era of VCRs and TiVos and dozens of other channels on cable, that doesn't happen. For some reason, whether a show feels old is more significant than whether people can recall seeing it before. That's why Jay and Dave both do fewer reruns than Johnny did…and why they select them from a few weeks back, instead of (as J. Carson did) a year earlier. Jay will get a boost when he has new shows opposite reruns at 10 PM and that, I think, is when the success of the new venture will be realized.

Leno will do well enough then to make up for any weakness in the early months of the experiment. Conan will regain enough ground that he'll be secure. The guys I think are going to suffer are Carson Daly and, to a lesser extent, Jimmy Fallon.

You may not know who Carson Daly is but he hosts a stealth talk show. It's on NBC right after Late Night With Jimmy Fallon…or at least, I think it is. I haven't checked lately and from what I can tell, neither has anyone else. He stays on, year after year, because he shows a modest profit and doesn't cause problems. It's an unimportant time slot with nothing to support. Leno's new venture will not be a true talk show but it'll have the look and feel of one…and I can't help but think that Daly's will come to be one talk show too many, especially if NBC's rerunning Jay's show in the early A.M. (I suspect that's under discussion. It would be a lot more entertaining than the televised poker they have there now. Then again, watching my mother apply salve to her psoriasis is more entertaining than televised poker.) Maybe they'll try switching Daly to cable but I think his show's going to go away…and if and when it does, I think Jimmy Fallon will turn into Carson Daly.

I like Fallon as a performer but I can't watch his new series. I try every week or three but they still look like test shows to me. He has little rapport with his guests, not a lot of commanding presence as a host…and if you ever want to make sure I turn off your show, just bring studio audience members down and ask them to lick things in exchange for a ten dollar bill. Chuck Barris would be embarrassed to put that on television.

He's getting decent numbers but he's also not showing great strength. Craig Ferguson on CBS occasionally beats him and does it without the benefit of as strong a show on before him. Ferguson has a following…Fallon has a lead-in. NBC may be too busy fighting for Jay and Conan to pay much attention to Fallon and it'll probably be easier to just leave him on as long as he shows a profit, the way they've left Carson Daly on. (Fallon's show is also a Lorne Michaels project and the last thing anyone at NBC wants to do is displease Lorne Michaels.) I don't think he's going away but I also can't imagine him being very important…not the way Dave or Conan were once important in that time slot.

Speaking of Dave: I don't think any of what happens on NBC will affect him much. He might lose some share to Conan for a few weeks as viewers see what the The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien is like but it'll all settle back to the old levels. I don't imagine anything that happens on NBC is going to make a lot of difference in his life. Or Jimmy Kimmel's. They're more likely to be impacted if someone new gets into the mix…like if Fox hired away Jon Stewart and gave him an hour at 11 PM, that would be a Brand New Ball Game for everyone.

As you might have sensed, I don't have gobs of confidence in any of this. The waters here are just too uncharted. Still, it does seem to me that those who are predicting disaster for Leno at 10 PM are underestimating, as onlookers so often have, Leno's popularity…and also the value of counterprogramming new comedy shows against rerun cop shows. Some are also saying that the lineup of Jay/Conan/Jimmy/Carson will be just too many programs that cover much the same ground. I think that's true but that the weakness will show at the end of the parlay, not at the beginning.

Anyway, if I had to bet, that's how I'd bet: Stage one, Conan does great. Stage two, Leno debuts strong but soon drops off and maybe drags Conan down with him. Stage three, both shows rebuild to the point where the whole idea of Jay at ten, Monday through Friday, starts to look like a smart move. Dave and Jimmy are unchanged. Carson Daly goes away. And Fallon hangs in there with one of those shows that no one watches but somehow it just stays on.

Let's see if I'm even vaguely close to right. A few years ago, I wouldn't have stuck my neck out with a prediction like this but I've been watching pundits on cable news. There's no longer any penalty in this world for getting everything wrong. And at least if I'm wrong, I'll be wrong about something pretty inconsequential.

The Los Angeles Times is now, like most newspapers, in a certain amount of business trouble. But fifty years ago, that company published not one but two papers. The L.A. Times came out in the morning and then they had an afternoon paper called The Los Angeles Mirror.

Each had a full page of comic strips. Here's what the L.A. Times comic strip page looked like. And here's what the L.A. Mirror comic strip page looked like.

I mentioned before here that the musical version of The Producers was, incredibly, being staged in Germany. Well, it's opened…and it's a hit.

I thought Mr. Leno's last show was okay…not his best but pleasant enough. His big comedy piece was a montage of past "Jaywalking" bits and I've developed an intolerance for routines based on the premise that human beings can be really, really stupid when you put a TV camera on them. I feel the same way about Letterman's employment of Rupert, the deli owner around the corner from his theater. Dave seems to have dialed back on those bits lately while Jay has embraced the concept.

Still, I've generally favored Jay over Dave the last few years. I TiVo them both but don't watch a lot of Letterman unless something different seems to be going on…something that knocks Dave out of that dour manner he often has. Increasingly, he reminds me of what I came to dislike about Dennis Miller.

This was before Miller's shrewd career change from Topical Comedian to Fox News Correspondent. I saw him at the MGM Grand in Vegas with Rita Rudner as his opening act. She was very funny. Miller wasn't. He did his whole set with an attitude of "I'm too hip to be entertaining you people so somebody gimme my check and let me outta here." It was all, every word of it, old material I recognized. A topical comic oughta have at least one joke you haven't heard before. I remember Miller did his line about how the models on The Price is Right were getting old and oughta be rotated…then followed it with the one likening Dan Quayle to Binzer on the TV show, Vegas. This was long after Vegas was off the air and every single other comedian in America had filed away his Quayle jokes in the same folder as the "Kate Smith is fat" material.

One of the things I like about Leno is that he's not afraid to enjoy the little party he throws as much as he'd like us to. He enjoys his monologue. I know what it takes to write that thing every day and it ain't easy. He likes most of his guests and makes them look good with his enthusiasm. Yeah, some of the stock bits are silly and I could do without most of the Special Correspondent segments where it stops being The Tonight Show for ten minutes. But there's something about watching Leno that I just like…which is really all it takes with one of these shows. (Mr. Carson used to say, "It's all about the guy behind the desk.")

Much is being written about what the ratings dominance of Jay over Dave says about our national character or intellect. I don't think it says anything more than that more people like Jay's current show as opposed to Dave's current show. I think they find Jay's comfortably predictable and Dave's, uncomfortably predictable. My guess is if they were opposite something as fresh as Letterman's old NBC program in its early years, neither host would have many viewers. NBC's primary motive for doing what they did, displacing Leno with Conan O'Brien may have been a fear that O'Brien could do such a show…and do it on Fox with an 11 PM start time.

Before the weekend is out, I'll have some more thoughts here about Jay and Dave and Conan and late night TV. This probably interests me more than it should…but it is my third favorite spectator sport right after Ladies' Nude Volleyball and the Republican Party Demolition Derby. Check back soon.

Not that this has any bearing on whether he's a good president of not…but Barack Obama likes my favorite fast food hamburger.

Paul Levitz, lord high master of DC Comics, reminds me that among the many achievements of Leo Dorfman was that he created a comic for that company called, simply, Ghosts. It was one of those anthology titles filled with disconnected stories about ghosts and as Paul says in an e-mail to me, "…while it wasn't a fan favorite (then or in retrospect), it was a disproportionately good seller. When Leo passed, editor Murray Boltinoff never found a satisfactory replacement, and a lot of the title's distinctive character faded (ouch)."

During the same period, Leo was writing a lot of scripts for the ghost comics that Gold Key was publishing — Twilight Zone, Ripley's Believe it or Not, Boris Karloff Mystery and Grimm's Ghost Stories. One of the editors there told me, "Leo writes stories and then he decides whether he's going to sell them to DC [for Ghosts] or to us. He tells us that if they come out good, they go to us and if they don't, they go to DC. I assume he tells DC the opposite."

By the way: I always thought it was odd that Gold Key was publishing ghost comics hosted by two actual dead human beings, Boris Karloff and Rod Serling. I never wrote for those books when I was working for that company but if I had, I would have tried to write the host's intros by having them say things like, "This story is so chilling, I had to come back from the great beyond to share it with you…"

Jay Leno's last Tonight Show is tonight. It won't be a tearful farewell. It won't even really be a farewell since he'll be back on TV in a similar, earlier position in a few months, Still, this is a good time to say the following, which is that I like the guy. I think he's done a fine job with the program the last seventeen years…and I admire his sheer survival when so many predicted he'd crash and burn in seventeen weeks. Once upon a time, TV columnists were labelling his selection to succeed Johnny the biggest mistake in the history of broadcast television. That was before he was finishing first in his time slot…a feat he has managed for roughly the last thirteen years.

And throughout those thirteen years, there were still folks betting against him, fearlessly predicting his lead could not hold and that it would soon crumble. Rumor has it that NBC's decision to displace Leno with Conan O'Brien was founded in a belief at his own network that Jay would wear out his welcome by '09. Didn't happen, of course…just as most predictions of Leno failure haven't happened.

I've been a fan of Jay's since I first saw him back at the Comedy Store, back in the days he owned but one car and a motorcycle. He'd zoom around on the latter, doing standup several times in an evening at this club or that. He was so tireless they called him Robocomic. Hard work doesn't always guarantee success in show business — nothing does — but if you have anything to offer, hard work can make a fair amount of difference. It did with Leno. So did his reputation for just being nice to others, including some he might have viewed as competitors.

Though a big fan of Mssrs. Carson and Letterman, I was never one of those who believed that Dave "deserved" The Tonight Show and that there was some grave injustice in him not getting it. TV never works like that and besides, I think a strong case can be made that Leno had earned the job by guest-hosting so long for Johnny, doing a very difficult job and succeeding in both the ratings and key demographics. One of those thoughts that many in the industry believed but no one dared speak aloud is that Johnny Carson was able to stay on top those last few years largely because he had Jay as his guest host. Folks forget how often Jay sat in and how he managed to draw pretty much the same numbers but skewing younger.

I've generally liked the Leno Tonight Show, though I feel like neither he nor Dave have been trying very hard for some time. In interviews, Jay has often bragged about his hard work and told the story of how he was writing monologue jokes one night and he flipped on the TV, saw one of his competitors at a basketball game and thought, "Ha! That guy won't have a good monologue for tomorrow's show." The moral, of course, is that Leno gets ahead while the other guy's goofing off…and that's a good moral that makes you wonder why Jay spends so much time playing Vegas and/or fixing cars in his Burbank warehouse.

Still, I enjoy his show most of the time, even though I occasionally TiVo-skip enough to watch him (or Letterman) in about twenty minutes. And I really enjoy the fact that Leno triumphed over all the predictions of failure, showing up all the people who thought NBC would be forever humiliated by their decision. In the last decade or so, he's turned into one of the few right decisions they've made over there.

I have some thoughts about how his new show will fare and how Conan will do as Tonight host. I'll try and post them over the weekend.