Lately, the majority of Spam phone calls I get are from folks who claim to be with the So-and-So Health Center or the Whatever Wellness Center or some name that sounds kinda like a legit health-oriented business. They suggest or outright claim that they are an official branch of Medicare and suggest or outright claim some referral from one of my actual doctors. Then they start peppering me with questions about my well-being.

They want to know what parts of my body hurt or if I'm diabetic or having trouble sleeping or anything that might need curing. If they were truly referred by my doctor they wouldn't have to ask these things. Sometimes, they say something like, "I'm calling to complete your semi-annual wellness questionnaire" as if this is something routine I've complied with in the past.

Near as I can understand, the idea here is that if I say, "I'm having trouble with my gall bladder," they will offer to send me a gall bladder bandage or some other piece of (probable) junk that will make me all better. It will come at that most expensive of prices — "no cost to you" — and they'll bill Medicare or they'll bill me and then tell me to pay the bill and put in to Medicare for reimbursement or…well, someone's going to pay for the probable junk. Probably me.

I usually hang up but this morning on a whim, I said to a lady who called from "Camden Medical Supplies," "Hey, I get three or four of these calls each day. I have no pains except for these calls. How do I get them to stop?"

She replied — and I swear, she actually said this — "Oh, it's easy. Just cancel your Medicare!" That just might be the only way.

• I feel bad for the women who were molested by Bill Cosby. But I think I feel worse for the women who've been molested by powerful men who never spent a day in jail or a courtroom or even being shamed by anyone for their crimes.

The good people who run Comic-Con International today announced…

Six Posthumous Recipients to Receive 2021 Bill Finger Award

Comic-Con is proud to announce six writers who contributed greatly to the history of comics have been selected to receive the 2021 Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing. The selection, made by a blue-ribbon committee chaired by writer/historian Mark Evanier, was unanimous.

"Since we are not yet in a position to honor a writer who is still with us in a proper ceremony, we're going to a long list of comic book writers from the past who we feel did not receive sufficient recognition or reward for their contributions to the field. As with last year, we have selected six posthumous awards and no ‘alive' award," Evanier explained. "Each of these six writers left us with a body of work that the judges deem worthy of this honor."

This year's recipient list includes two of the most prolific writers to ever work in comics — and there are several others who have received or may soon receive this award who unquestionably count among the most prolific ever. The Finger Award committee takes no position as to which of them was the most prolific. Such a determination might require records that no longer exist (or never existed), as well as distinguishing between writing the most stories and writing the most pages. "All of these writers deserve recognition," Evanier remarked. He added, "Everyone should remember that it's tough to determine precise totals when you're recognizing writers who did not receive credit for most of their work or, in some cases, didn't receive any credit at all."

The Bill Finger Award was created in 2005 at the instigation of Finger's friend and colleague, Jerry Robinson, who felt that Finger had received way too little credit and compensation for his work in comics, especially regarding Batman and that character's supporting cast and mythos. As Evanier explains, "Though Bill Finger now receives a lot more recognition than he received in his lifetime, there are still so many who have not, and that's why we keep giving out these awards." Here are this year's recipients, in alphabetical order.

Robert Bernstein (1919–1988)

A former high school English teacher, Robert Bernstein began writing comic books around 1945, working for, among other companies, Fox, Hillman, Harvey, and Spark, though his longest association then was with Lev Gleason. There, he joined the ranks of ghostwriters for Charles Biro on the top-selling Crime Does Not Pay and similar comics. In the 1950s, Bernstein wrote war, western, and horror scripts for Atlas (later known as Marvel) and for EC Comics, where his scripts appeared in Valor, Impact, and M.D., among others. He is also said to have written the entirety of the short-lived EC series Psychoanalysis and to have patterned one of its recurring characters, Mark Stone, on himself and his own experiences undergoing analysis. His major account during the fifties, though, was DC Comics, where between 1952 and 1968 he wrote countless stories featuring Superman, Superboy, Supergirl, Jimmy Olsen, Lois Lane, Aquaman, Green Arrow, Congo Bill, and Congorilla as well as scripts for all of the company's war and romance titles. In the 1960s, he also wrote Iron Man, Thor, and The Human Torch stories for Marvel under the name "R. Berns," and without credit he wrote The Fly, The Jaguar, The Shadow, and other books for the Archie line. Throughout most of his career, he was also functioning as an impresario, arranging and promoting concerts in Long Island, New York (his longtime residence) and around the state. In 1968, he curtailed his comic book writing to focus on the music; he died in 1988.

Audrey "Toni" Blum (1918–1973)

Audrey "Toni" Blum was very likely the first female comic book writer/creator. The daughter of artist Alex Blum, she worked under an array of pen names — or with no credits at all — so it is difficult to determine her first work. It may have been in 1936–1937 on "The Vikings," published in New Comics (later Adventure Comics) for DC. Whatever the date of her entry into the field, it made her one of the few women creating comic book material who wasn't lettering or coloring. She began working for the Eisner-Iger shop in 1938 and wrote stories in a wide variety of genres, usually directly with Eisner and the artists who drew her stories. Some of this writing was done in what later became known as "The Marvel Method" and some was done as complete scripts. Her best-known work was for Quality Comics, where she wrote Black Condor, The Ray, Dollman, and Uncle Sam. She also reportedly wrote scripts for the "The Spirit" and "Lady Luck" Sunday newspaper comic book inserts Eisner produced. During World War II, she married shop artist Bill Bossert, and she largely retired from comic book writing when the War ended. Thereafter, she authored children's books, and some sources say she wrote stories drawn by her father for Gilberton's Classics Illustrated series. She passed away in 1973.

Vic Lockman (1927­–2017)

Born into a vaudeville family (his father was the aptly named escape artist Earl Lockman), Vic Lockman broke into comics in 1950 as a letterer for the Dell Comics created by Western Publishing. He worked briefly in editorial for Western but soon moved into freelancing. While he occasionally pencilled, lettered, and/or inked comics for Dell, his main output for the next 29 years was as a writer, producing more stories for the firm's "funny animal" comics than any other freelancer. During his most prolific period (1955–1984), he claimed to have written one story per day. Some were one-pagers or puzzle pages, a few were book-length, but most were 4 to 8 pages, submitted in "sketch" format with rough drawings and all of the copy handwritten. Western's editors did not buy every submission, and some of what they passed on was purchased by the Disney Studios for its foreign comics program that created comics not published in America. That and interviews with his editors made credible Lockman's claim of having sold more than 7,000 scripts. His work appeared in Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, Uncle Scrooge, Goofy, and all the Disney comics produced by Western, along with tales of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Tweety & Sylvester, Woody Woodpecker, Andy Panda, and dozens more. He was said to have created the Disney comic book character Moby Duck and to have developed and written The Wacky Adventures of Cracky. Lockman also wrote Terrytoons comics such as Mighty Mouse for St. John Publishing and Dennis the Menace comics for Hank Ketcham, but his most passionate work was for the Christian marketplace, where he published dozens of books and tracts, most of them featuring his writing and drawing on religion and controversial topics of the day. Lockman left this world in 2017.

Robert Morales (1958–2013)

Born in New York City and of Afro-Puerto Rican descent, Morales broke into writing for magazines such as Heavy Metal and Publishers Weekly. Moving into the world of entertainment journalism, he worked as executive editor of the music and pop culture magazine Reflex and at Quincy Jones's Vibe magazine, where he gave greater exposure to the work of cartoonists such as Chris Ware, Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, Jeff Smith, and Kyle Baker. Morales and Baker collaborated on several projects, including perhaps Morales's best-known work in comics, the groundbreaking seven-issue miniseries for Marvel Truth: Red, White & Black. Published in 2003, it introduced the African American character Isaiah Bradley. Using World War II and the Tuskegee medical atrocities as their canvas, Morales and Baker crafted a stark tale that explored America's history of racial injustice and medical experimentation on African Americans. The story revealed that Bradley was the first successful recipient of the super-soldier serum, which would later transform serviceman Steve Rogers into Captain America, and established Bradley as the first Captain America. Most recently, a version of the character appeared in the 2021 television series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, raising awareness for Morales and his work that is long overdue. Morales would go on to write a celebrated run of the monthly Captain America series for Marvel in 2004. He passed away unexpectedly on April 18, 2013, at the age of 54.

Paul S. Newman (1924–1999)

Hailed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the all-time most prolific comic book writer, Paul S. Newman is credited with more than 4,100 published stories totaling approximately 36,000 pages. His earliest credit seems to have been in 1947 for DC's teen comic A Date With Judy. Within months, though, he was selling scripts to Avon Comics, the American Comics Group, Fawcett Comics, Timely (Marvel), Hillman, Fiction House, and many others. His longest runs were writing The Lone Ranger and Turok, Son of Stone for Western Publishing in tandem with Dell Comics. In fact, when Western and Dell severed their partnership and split into two separate lines of comics in 1962, Newman was among the few contributors to then work for both houses. A very partial list of the comics he wrote would include Doctor Solar, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Plastic Man, Prince Valiant, Smokey the Bear, The Sub-Mariner, Mighty Mouse, I Love Lucy, Gunsmoke, Hopalong Cassidy, Kid Colt, Fat Albert, Gene Autry, The Twilight Zone, Jungle Jim, Leave It to Beaver, Captain Video, Yosemite Sam, Patsy Walker, Zorro, Nancy and Sluggo, and Mr. Ed, plus almost every anthology title published by Atlas/Marvel during the fifties or Western during the following three decades. All of this was in addition to dozens of young adult novels written for Western Publishing, movie scripts, and the newspaper strips of Robin Malone, Smokey the Bear, The Lone Ranger, Laugh-In, and Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. Paul S. Newman passed away in 1999.

Robert "Bob" White (1928–2005)

Bob White was the creator, writer, and artist of Archie Comics' Cosmo the Merry Martian humorous sci-fi series. Between 1954 and 1968, he worked prolifically as a penciller/inker and sometimes writer on many Archie-related titles, including Archie and Me, Archie as Pureheart the Powerful, Archie's Jokebook, Archie's Madhouse, Archie's Mechanics, Betty and Veronica, Jughead, Reggie and Me, and of course, just plain Archie. His most acclaimed work for the company was probably his stint on Archie and Me, writing and drawing many of the action/adventure-ish full-length stories for the title's early issues, as well as plenty of memorable covers. He also wrote stories about The Shield, Black Hood, and The Web for Archie's 1960s superhero line, Mighty Comics. His stint with the company came to an end in 1968 because, he said, he was found to be "moonlighting" on Tippy Teen for rival Tower Comics. White was so discouraged by this that he opted to leave the comic book industry altogether and switch careers. He labored in the emerging field of computer programming for the remainder of his working days and passed away in 2005.

The Bill Finger Award honors the memory of William Finger (1914–1974), who was the first and, some say, most important writer of Batman. Many have called him the "unsung hero" of the character and have hailed his work not only on that iconic figure but on dozens of others, primarily for DC Comics.

In addition to Evanier, the selection committee consists of Charles Kochman (executive editor at Harry N. Abrams, book publisher), comic book writer Kurt Busiek, artist/historian Jim Amash, cartoonist Scott Shaw!, and writer/editor Marv Wolfman.

The Bill Finger Award is administered by Jackie Estrada and presented by the San Diego Comic Convention (Comic-Con), a California Nonprofit Public Benefit Corporation organized for charitable purposes and dedicated to creating the general public's awareness of and appreciation for comics and related popular artforms, including participation in and support of public presentations, conventions, exhibits, museums, and other public outreach activities which celebrate the historic and ongoing contribution of comics to art and culture.

From 1966, Bobby Hebb performs "Sunny" in a clip from the TV show, Where the Action Is. It was a series that ABC aired in the afternoons and it was produced and hosted by — who else? — Dick Clark.

I had this song on my mixtape but I must admit that I knew nothing about Bobby Hebb on his biggest hit. I wasn't even sure if the Sunny he was singing to was a male or a female and I think I saw it listed then some places as "Sonny." Wikipedia, which of course may not be right, has this to say…

Hebb wrote the song after his older brother, Harold, was stabbed to death outside a Nashville nightclub. Hebb was devastated by the event and many critics say it inspired the lyrics and tune. According to Hebb, he merely wrote the song as an expression of a preference for a "sunny" disposition over a "lousy" disposition following the murder of his brother.

I just found that. Maybe when I listen to it now, I'll hear it in a different way…

For much of the pandemic, my pal Charlie Frye has been recording little videos in his workshop of him doing amazing things. I've featured a few here and it would certainly be worth your time to search YouTube and see all of them. Great credit should also go to the lovely Sherry Frye, who does all the real work.

This is the last one in the series. Take it full screen and watch Charlie do a routine that he can probably do forwards and backwards…

Here's an even better article explaining what happened. Mark Joseph Stern lays the blame, as others are doing today, squarely on the "deal" made by a previous prosecutor, Bruce Castor.

Cosby issued a statement trying to spin his release as some sort of proof that he was innocent. The court didn't say you were innocent, Bill. If you try to make public appearances in the future, I'm sure the people outside with signs will explain it to you.

And here's a better article explaining the decision.

The CNN website just posted this correction…

Correction: An earlier version of this post said that the Supreme Court indicated that prosecutors went too far to call up to five other alleged victims to establish a pattern against Cosby. The majority opinion says in a footnote that they didn't consider that issue.

So ignore what I said about that being the reason for the decision this morning. Here's what seems to be a better explanation…

In 2019, an interim court upheld the trial verdict. But the Supreme Court, the state's highest court, agreed to consider the case, and at a hearing in December, some of the court's seven justices questioned prosecutors sharply.

In their 79-page opinion, the judges wrote that a "non-prosecution agreement" that had been struck with a previous prosecutor meant that Mr. Cosby should not have been charged in the case, and that he should be discharged. They barred a retrial.

In any case, the point is that Cosby was not released because a court said he was innocent…as some online seem to think. He's going free because they decided there were procedural errors in the trial via which he was convicted.

Bill Cosby is reportedly going to be released from prison today after the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court ruled that his conviction was the result of an improperly-conducted trial. As I understand it — and real analysts are still scrambling to analyze the ruling — the state's high court said that since Cosby was on trial for one specific alleged molestation, the judge should not have allowed testimony by alleged victims of other alleged crimes to establish a "pattern."

I have no idea if, going strictly by the law as written, that's a proper ruling. It does seem odd to suggest that the fact that he raped a lot of other women is not relevant (or should not be relevant) to the question of whether he raped the one in question. But in this country, guilty people do sometimes go free because of judicial error.

I doubt this is going to change any minds anywhere about whether he was guilty or not. The ruling does not address that question. It merely says that the judge erred to allow something he allowed. It's going to cause a lot of people to say that when you have his kind of money, you can always get the kind of lawyers who can make things go your way…and that view is true more often than it should be.

You can already hear the disappointment of those who celebrated his conviction. It showed it was possible that wealthy and powerful men could be held accountable for preying on those who lacked wealth and power…and now, wealth and power seems to have won in the end. Then again, it's not like Cosby wasn't punished at all and is leaving with a solid case that he was innocent. There must be lots of rich guys out there who were dissuaded from doing the kind of thing he did because they thought, "If they can nail him, they can nail me." I don't think they'll change their minds about that now. But it does seem very wrong for William Henry Cosby Jr. to be a free man.

You wonder — well, I wonder — what he thinks he's going to do now. Does he think he has a chance of getting back some of his old respect and career? Is he going to try? Or is he just going to stay in whatever mansions he has left and stay out of the public eye for the rest of his life? If he's smart, he'll do the latter…but if he was smart, he wouldn't have done the things that caused all those women to line up to testify against him in the first place.

The Criterion Collection puts out the best DVDs and Blu-rays of great movies. They don't just slap a movie on a disc. They do costly restoration work, they find experts (including, once, me) to do commentary tracks. They produce bonus features. I have a lot of their releases in my collection.

In their office, they have a special closet full of films they've issued and they occasionally invite important people to come in, help themselves and explain why they're taking what they're taking. Here, for example, is Nathan Lane…

This first appeared on this blog in July of 2013. In the last few weeks, a couple of folks who couldn't locate it via my search engine asked me where it was and if I would repost it. Here it is and it starts with a letter from a reader who later wrote to thank me for writing it and for omitting his name…

Inspired by your latest Tales of Your Father, a question occurs to me that you might not know the answer to. As I'm sure you're aware, most people who set out to be professional writers do not make a living at it right away. In fact, even most of those who manage to sell their stuff never make the bulk of their living from it. I certainly won't attribute all of this to luck; apart from raw talent you obviously work at it. (I have no idea how you can keep up your blog so well and do your professional writing, for instance….)

The question I have is: for someone trying to break into professional writing today, what's the most open market to aim at?

The reason I realize that you might not be the best person to answer that question is that the market has changed so radically since you started writing, and the markets you make most of your living from today are, I think, not the ones you would advise a beginner to shoot for (at least not if he's hoping to make money at it). I think you've mentioned comics specifically as a near-impossible field for a writer to get into these days, and I'm pretty skeptical at a beginner getting television assignments either. (And, apropos of your story, porn novels of the type you're talking about are pretty scarce these days, too…VCRs, DVDs, and the internet have pretty much wiped them out, though I'm sure there are still some kinds of writing jobs to be had in that industry.)

But while you're writing for more selective markets, if you do know of any segments of the industry that are crying out for people who can put sentences together and even spell most of the words right, it might be something of interest to some of your readers besides just myself.

(Just as an aside: some years back…ten or fifteen, I think….I attended a panel at the San Diego Comic-Con on breaking into comics as an artist or writer. Most of the time was spent talking about art, but when it came to writing, they said there were four basic paths: (1) be an artist, and if you're good, someday they might let you writes some of your own stuff; (2) be a successful writer in another field; (3) move to New York, get a job at Marvel or DC as an assistant editor, work long hours for low pay, and hope to move up; or (4) submit unsolicited stuff and hope it stands out in the slush pile. The pro editors there all agreed the latter was possible….but none of them could remember actually ever buying anything that way…)

Well, you're right that you're asking me for advice with a problem I really haven't faced since 1969…and in a line of work that is forever changing. But I think I can give you a few tips…

Stay out of slush piles. There's a reason they're called that. Most of the unsolicited submissions that any editor or producer receives are not very good. Now, you might think, "Ah, but then my superior work will really stand out" and the answer is that assuming your work is superior — and it may not be as superior as you'd like to think — it doesn't. Being in that pile lumps you in with the folks who are in there because their work is so unexceptional that they haven't been able to be considered via any more direct, dignified route.

Moreover, in most companies, very little attention is paid to the slush pile. The top folks with the power to buy things rarely (if ever) look at it. Often, it's assigned to glorified interns to cull through, meaning that your work is read by people who hope not to find gold in them thar hills because they themselves want to fill any openings and get away from glorified interning.

The main path to writing comic books these days seems to be to your #2 — to have credits in movies or TV or gaming or any of the fields which comic book publishers like to think of as their main areas. Only a few comic book publishers these days are interested in publishing comic books for the sake of publishing comic books. Most see the comics as loss leaders to leverage them into other, more lucrative areas.

The secondary path — and it's a distant second — seems to be to make a splash with a comic for a small publisher. But it's hard to do stand-out work at a publisher which hires its artists at the 99-Cent Store and if you do great work in that venue, it may not get noticed in the major leagues. I started writing comics in 1970 and I don't recall it ever being this difficult for a newcomer to break in.

There's rarely a high-profile marketplace that is easy for new writers to crack…and for the same reason that there's never a lottery that's a cinch to win. Too many other people want to do it…and if the number of openings were to ever double, the number of applicants would probably triple. The one that would be easiest for you depends on two things: What you're good at and what kind of connections you have. You may think you can write anything but even if that's true — and it isn't — you're better at one kind of material than another. You need to weigh demand against the things you're best at and pursue whatever has the best ratio. If you're best at writing Gregorian Chants and second-best at writing wacky sitcoms, I'd go with the latter.

But really, it comes down to access. Do you know anyone in any company for which you'd like to work? Do you have a non-pushy way of approaching someone? And if you don't have access, you need to look for the markets that aren't high-profile, the ones that don't have a slush pile. That's what I did back in '69 when I submitted to Laugh-In magazine. There was an editor sitting there with pages to fill and no one to fill them. This never happens with Superman and Spider-Man.

It's not easy to become a professional writer and it's more difficult, though in a different way, to remain one for any length of time. It never has been easy and it never will be so I don't encourage anyone. I think a lot of people who believe they'd be happy to work in that area would actually be happier doing something else.

You have to be willing to accept a certain uncertainty in your life and you need to really, really keep a good perspective on your work and its value. If you undervalue it or overvalue it, you cannot succeed. And you need to be pragmatic about where you can get your work read and actually considered by people with the power to buy or hire. Once you have experience and a rep, it's different…though often not as different as you might think or wish. I'll post more tips here in the future as I think of them.

Can you believe Ray Stevens is still performing and making records? He's 82 and he's still at it. Back when I put "Gitarzan" on my mixtape, he often had hits in the mainstream Top 20 or at least the Top 50. At some point, he narrowed in on a country-western audience and did just fine. He's had a couple of his own theaters over the years and starred in a couple of syndicated TV shows that I don't think ever made it to TV here in Los Angeles.

I liked a number of his records, mainly for the sheer silliness of them. He also never seemed to care what other artists were recording or where the music business was going. He just put out Ray Stevens record after Ray Stevens record. Here's a video (and re-recording) he made of "Gitarzan," long after it was on the charts — which it was in 1969. It adheres to the old show business rule that you can't go wrong with a bunch of guys in gorilla suits…

And while we're on the subject of Mr. Stevens, here's a song he recorded that came out too late to be on my mixtape. It's called "I Need Your Help, Barry Manilow." I remember when I first heard it, I thought, "That's great but I'll bet Stevens didn't write it." I was right. It was written by Dale Gonyea, who I recall popping up in Los Angeles showrooms and in the credits for TV shows where he wrote "Special Musical Material." Very funny guy…

Several folks have written in to tell me that Petula Clark wasn't lip-syncing in this video I linked to. Someone took a video of her singing "My Love" somewhere and overdubbed the record. They're right and I should have noticed that.

Someone else (one person) wrote to point out what they thought was a grievous error. I said my little mixtape, which I am reconstructing via video links here, was "compiled between approximately 1967 and 1972. Some of the songs are from before '67 since KHJ played "oldies," defining them as anything (I think) that had been off the charts for more than about eight weeks." This person wrote to ask how "My Love" could have been on it since it came out in 1966.

David Leonhardt charts how COVID-19 is making a comeback in some areas of this country…some notably non-vaccinated areas of this country. Oh, I hope this is not so but it apparently is.

It was one thing when we didn't have the means to combat this disease. It's quite another when we do and people don't want to use those means because…well, I understand fear of putting a relatively-new drug into one's system. Then again, I do know (semi-distantly) a guy who won't get the vaccine for that reason but if you handed him an unlabeled drug and said, "Here, this'll give you a glorious high," it would be in his veins faster than you could say "Timothy Leary."

The ones I really don't get are the ones who took a position that the virus was a hoax, there was some sort of plot to vaccinate Americans to control their minds, all that stuff about people dying was phony, et cetera…and now they'd rather get the Delta variant than admit they might have been wrong.

Lastly for now: Way past the announced deadline and way past the time the judges decided, folks are still sending me nominations or this year's Bill Finger Awards for Excellence in Comic Book Writing. Those nominations will roll over to next year so no harm done. Six posthumous recipients for this year will be announced shortly. Next year, we hope to present one — hopefully, more than one — to someone alive.

Four minutes of a tortoise eating a strawberry. Okay, so they aren't fast eaters. They aren't fast anything…

Since I've written a lot here about late night TV in the past, I have a few e-mails asking why I haven't written anything about the last Conan show with Conan O'Brien which aired this past week on TBS. I guess I don't have as much interest in late night as I once did.

Leaving aside John Oliver, the only show I regularly TiVo is Stephen Colbert's and more than half the time, I watch highlights from an episode on YouTube, then delete the show from the TiVo without watching the recording. I wonder how much of the decline in late night viewing is from folks like me who figure, "Why watch the whole hour when I can watch the best fifteen minutes online…and miss all those commercials?"

I watch YouTube videos from Seth Meyers — especially "A Closer Look" — and now and then clips from James Corden, Jimmy Fallon, Bill Maher, Andy Cohen and Jimmy Kimmel. As much as I don't like Donald Trump, there are times when I'm just plain oversaturated with jokes or even criticisms about the man, especially late at night when I'm trying to calm my brain down before beddy-bye.

I've barely watched Conan O'Brien on TBS. I tried. Really, I did.

I thought he was wonderful for about the first half of Late Night on NBC. There was really sharp comedy writing on that series and as David Letterman noted when he famously guested there, they were doing a lot of it every night. And Conan, I thought, was terrific at playing straight in most of those sketches and bits. He was also really good at letting his guests talk and staying out of the way when they were en route to a great punchline.

At some point though, the show began doing less and less prepared material and more and more of the show, it seemed to me, was Conan trying to see how much he could talk about nothing in particular. I had the same problem with Letterman in his last decade.

I greatly admire what Conan did…coming from nowhere, getting a job few thought he deserved and then doing it so well that he came to seem like a natural for it. It's really one of the great stories of Show Business. I just thought he got too slick at it and his shows became too much about him trying to top his guests.

If you loved him, fine. Obviously, a lot of people did and I'm curious to see what he does next. And maybe part of my problem is that there are just too many talk shows out there and too few variations between them.