I used to write for a comedian who told me one of the "perks" of appearing on talk shows. It was that every time he had some medium-to-small annoyance in his life, he could look on the bright side of it by thinking, "Good panel." That meant it could be material for his next appearance with Johnny, Merv, Mike or whoever. Little by little, I have come to feel that way about blogging.
I, unlike my suitcase, am in Las Vegas — at the airport, in fact. Where my suitcase is, God may know but Southwest Airlines hasn't the foggiest. I got there on time, checked in an hour before takeoff, even watched the security folks scan my bag and put it on the little conveyor belt...
...and that was the last anyone's seen of it. It might be on the next flight in from LAX, which is what I'm waiting here to see. Or it might still be on the plane I just got off, which has already continued on to Texas. Other, more horrible possibilities have also occurred to me.
Years ago, when I was coming to this town quite often, I gave up flying Southwest because this kept happening. I thought something might have changed but I guess not.
I have about twenty minutes before the next flight arrives. So what can I do in the meantime? I can blog about it.
I posted these about half an hour ago but the "technical difficulties" of which I write made them somehow go away.
Last night's ratings: Leno had a 5.3/12, Letterman had a 4.3/10 and Nightline had a 3.0/6. More viewers tuned in than usual but that's about the spread that those shows had before the strike. I suspect a lot of people are surprised that Jay did as well as he did and that Dave ain't all that happy this morning. He might become happy in the weeks to come if he can book better guests than Jay and/or if Leno's monologue segment collapses on him. Jay is under a lot of pressure to generate that thing every night and it won't be easier with all the talk that's building about how even writing for himself is a violation of WGA strike rules. I'm not certain if it is, or if it's an issue the Guild wants to press at the moment.
Tonight, I'm betting the numbers look a lot like they did, pre-strike. There's a lot less curiosity tune-in, people wondering "What will he do?" But this could change over the weeks. I still think the strike will be over sooner than the dire forecasts are predicting but we certainly have a number of weeks ahead of us and NBC ain't gonna break and make an interim contract any time soon.
In other news: Conan had a 2.5/8, Ferguson had a 1.9/6 and Kimmel had a 1.4/4. Those are more or less pre-strike numbers, though Kimmel's is a bit lower than the norm.
But none of these are the numbers you care about. You want to know the final tally in our Utterly Unscientific Poll in which thousands of you voted. Here are those numbers and I'll leave you to decide for yourself what they indicate. Me, I'm leaning towards, "Not much...but isn't it fun to vote like this?"
We're having a little trouble here at the old weblog with some postings appearing twice or even three times. I am not repeating myself. I am not repeating myself. It will be fixed. It will be fixed.
As a loyal WGA member, I wish I could report that Jay Leno's first broadcast without his writers was a total disaster. I thought his segment with Mike Huckabee was pretty lame but then politicians on talk shows usually bother me. The venue is not conducive to asking them hard questions and it's annoying to see these guys (all these guys) given the chance to present themselves as good-natured, witty chaps and not have to answer for the slimier things they've said or done.
But I thought what came before that — Jay's monologue and an unscripted Q-and-A with the audience — was entertaining enough. Leno has always been a much better ad-libber than his critics think he is and he has a great rapport with the people out front. His monologue was pretty standard Leno so I can believe he wrote it himself. I'm not as sure though that it wasn't a violation of WGA rules.
I was a lot less impressed with Conan O'Brien's show...and I say that as someone who usually likes Conan. The absence of real comedy material was felt on Leno's show but it was really felt on O'Brien's. Maybe he'll fall into a rhythm but it just seemed like he wasn't sure what he was there to do...play off the absence of written material or move past it. He and Bob Saget didn't seem to have much to say to one another after they got past the strike talk.
Letterman was Letterman. I like the guy but I don't always like his show, especially when it feels like I've seen it before. I was surprised at how totally he fell back into the old ennui and even Robin Williams couldn't do much the change the energy level. (The problem with Williams as a guest on any talk show is that he does what he does and the host could go out for a sandwich while he does it.) I really wish Dave could get back to that time when you tuned him in wondering, "What's he going to do tonight?" Maybe I set myself up for disappointment by thinking he'd seize on this opportunity to do something he hadn't done a hundred times before.
Craig Ferguson is being TiVoed at this very moment but I probably won't watch him until tomorrow.
All in all, nothing really changed much so I'm inclined to think the ratings won't, at least after a day or two. If Letterman can get substantially better guests now that Jay's being picketed and he isn't, that might give The Late Show an advantage. But pretty much everything I think has made a majority of viewers pick Jay over Dave is still intact. I'll be surprised if the numbers show much switchover.
This is a 10-and-a-half minute segment from the 60 Minutes show from September of '87...a piece on Mad Magazine. The main point of interest is the chance for those who never met him to get a look at William M. Gaines, the colorful publisher of that publication.
Gaines died in 1992 and this was one of the last interviews he did. The three men you'll see with him in his office are Nick Meglin and John Ficarra, who were then the magazine's editors (Ficarra still holds that job) and its editorial consultant, Dick DeBartolo. You also get to see a bit of the old Mad offices over at 485 MADison Avenue. There's no mention of the magazine's first editor and founder, Harvey Kurtzman, or of Al Feldstein who took over from Kurtzman and ran the mag for 29 years during which it became the best-selling humor publication in the history of mankind.
The piece dwells a lot on the fact that Mad did not merchandize much or sell advertising at all — two policies that have changed since Gaines passed away. In the interest of accuracy, it should be noted that while Bill's stated reasons for declining those dollars were true, there was also probably another, unstated reason. Gaines was a compulsive who had a dread fear of his magazine getting any larger. He liked keeping it small and simple so he could manage it by himself. He didn't like dealing with new people and ran in fear from any suggestion — and there were many — that might have meant increasing the size of the operation, its staff, its financial complexity, etc. When the subject of selling ads in Mad came up, Gaines had what you might call his "principled" reasons for refusing, and perhaps they were reason enough. But he also was horrified at the idea of just dealing with advertisers and of upgrading Mad's printing and adding more color, which is what those advertisers would have wanted.
And there was another thing: Mad had been pretty successful in the late sixties and early seventies. He'd gotten very wealthy off a magazine without ads so he didn't want to tamper with the package. By '87, sales were in serious decline but it was still profitable enough, and Mad remained a sacred untouchable within the Time-Warner company that owned it. Sales were nosediving at the time of his death and that trend continued. Some members of the Mad crew believe that if Bill had lived, he would have gone to the better-printed format — including paid ads — that is the current Mad package. (I'm of two minds on this. I sure wish Mad had had that kind of printing in the days when Wally Wood and Jack Davis were drawing for them and Mort Drucker was in every issue instead of every fourth or fifth issue. If it had meant paging through some ads to get to that, I'm not sure I wouldn't have made the trade-off.)
Gaines was an interesting man. He ran Mad in a way that was consistent with his personal quirks even when it cost him a lot of money. It was a generally-benevolent dictatorship and some of his people tolerated certain business practices that they would not have accepted elsewhere...because they loved Bill. Here are a few minutes with the man and his magazine...
January 4, 2008
