COMMENTARY
Lopez, as host, brings some diversity to gab
Some of us love the little museum of promotional tchotchkes that lies next to the eastern wall of this paper’s features department. Probably the best piece of promotional flotsam to float our way recently was the plastic (nonworking) water cooler that announced George Lopez’s upcoming talk show on TBS. (It will premiere at 11 p. m. Monday and will run nightly Monday through Thursday.)
A toy water cooler to promote the show—get it? This, say the busy promotional elves at Turner Broadcasting, is the show that’s going to get everyone gathering around the water cooler the next day yammering away.
A tall order, frankly. We have no water cooler in our department— except the new toy one. Believe me, if we did, the one story we couldn’t stop talking about would be the Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post editor who, on his way out the door into retirement, started punching out objectionable coworkers for their more conspicuous and brazen deficiencies.
Your water cooler topics might be completely different.
Nor, frankly, do I see the announced guests on Lopez’s first show Monday causing cluster-gabs from Falmouth to Fresno: Kobe Bryant, Ellen DeGeneres, Eva Longoria Parker.
Bryant, of course, could always confess to Lopez that, yeah, that legally contested sex in Colorado was something less than consensual and that he’d give the world if he could only play on the same team with Shaquille O’Neal again.
Ellen DeGeneres always could announce on Lopez’s show that, nope, she isn’t a lesbian anymore and she is dating Steve Martin. Eva Longoria Parker could tell Lopez that her NBA star husband, Tony Parker of the San Antonio Spurs, is divorcing her and taking up with her “Desperate Housewives” costar Teri Hatcher.
None of that is even possible, at the moment, much less likely.
This is not to say, of course, that Lopez—oversized head and all, (it was the subject of some of his earliest comedy routines)—might not have a gift for very jolly and engaging gab. You never know who’s going to be good at talk shows really. If you had asked me beforehand, I would have doubted DeGeneres’ abilities to keep an afternoon talk show afloat against Oprah Winfrey; I’d have doubted Craig Ferguson’s abilities and Arsenio Hall’s, too, in days of yore.
And all three—especially DeGeneres and Ferguson— have proven to be standards in the talk show racket to whom others are now aspiring. (Hall will be a guest on one of Lopez’s opening shows, which tells you more than a little about how he sees himself.)
While Lopez’s invasion of your local water cooler may be something less than triumphant, there is, I think, something cooler-worthy about the whole current and much-noticed minority invasion of TV talk. Lopez is the first major Hispanic figure in the late-night TV talk game just as, once upon a time, Hall was TV’s first major black practitioner of late night foolery. The browning of the nation isn’t a huge issue in this city, but in, say, Los Angeles, Houston and Miami, it’s as big as it gets.
What Johnny Carson once represented so charismatically —white, literally corn-fed, Midwestern American manhood— now has a grand total of only one representative in TV talk— David Letterman, former wiseguy weatherman from Indiana.
“Manning” the TV talk water cooler these days is a huge platoon of people who are anything but white, male and Midwestern, from ex-model Tyra Banks in daytime to Joy Behar taking her brash “view” to the HSN network to Wanda Sykes’ rather wonderfully ballyhooed debut tomorrow night on Fox. It’s a nice water cooler subject in and of itself for those who need one.
Here are a couple of others, even though Lopez may not get to them:
Pull the plug on Leno? Or O’Brien?— Jay Leno’s OK, it’s his show that’s sinking. However much money NBC is saving, audiences have virtually announced their preference for the more expensive stuff prime time used to deliver at 10 p. m. (It was smart, therefore, of drama- rich TNT to pick up the remains of NBC’s awfully good “Southland,” one of the shows in Leno exile.) What needs to be done fearlessly is simply undo the executive idiocy done in the first place: Put Leno back on at 11:30 p. m. and let Conan O’Brien go wherever he wants and take his golden demographic with him. It was never even remotely worth the havoc and mayhem committed in its name.
Letterman Follies: As most of us guessed all along, Letterman’s astonishing public announcement of his blackmail pickle—my personal nomination for the late night talk story of all time—has, so far, led to no avalanche of sexual discrimination troubles or announcements of hard feelings. In fact, the only thing even remotely resembling it was TV writer Nell Scovell’s blog for Vanity Fair that she, in fact, left the Letterman writers’ room years ago because its gender arrangements were unfair and made her uncomfortable. But even she admitted that Letterman pleaded with her to stay and said that the real issue is the degree to which late night writers’ rooms are still boys’ clubs.
And she’s right. That is the story that ought to be thoroughly aired out, and not who’s hooking up with whom—as interesting as, heaven help us, we all find that.
It’s a journalistic subject, not one for cops and lawyers. Unless there are surprises down the road, that ship seems to have sailed for good, as most of us thought it would.
OK, so Letterman spent years acting like the randy and emotionally needy comedian that, at his up-from-the-Comedy- Store heart, he is, thereby making himself a very complicated boss and his show a less-than- ideal workplace as Gloria Allred might define one. But then, that would probably describe 80 percent of the workplaces in the nation, where needy members of the human race are still going to hook up, whatever their job titles, and generally will act imperfectly, without actually breaking a single law.
It’s Nell Scovell’s question that matters: What are we missing by not having more women, minorities, etc., in all those boys’ clubs of late night writers?
Place a bet on Lopez to help answer that question.
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