Heeeeeeeeeere's Trouble

Ever since Johnny Carson rode off into the sunset last spring, the late-night television scene has looked something like a report from post-Cold War Eastern Europe. All is chaos and bloodshed, at least metaphorically speaking.

For 30 years Carson dominated the late-night field as thoroughly as the two Cold War blocs dominated geopolitics. Anything attempted after 11 p.m. Eastern time had to take Johnny into account. Other late-night shows either sought to follow on his coattails -- remember Tom Snyder? -- or posited an alternative of some entirely different sort -- Ted Koppel's Nightline.

Down through the decades, a foolhardy few sought to directly challenge Carson's mastery of his own medium. TV history is littered with their sport-coated corpses -- from Bishop to Cavett to Sajak. Then there was that nasty business when Joan Rivers, for years Johnny's vacation stand-in, jumped ship and started her own show. Defectors were not tolerated in the Carson era, and neither were uppity women apparently, as the many wives of Carson might attest.

Only Arsenio Hall found success with the talk show format during the Carson years. He did this in part by opening up the talk show demographics to include the hip hop generation, the metalheads, and the whole spectrum of non-white America.

But Arsenio, at heart, was never a video crusader. He was, as he often says, a black kid from Cleveland who wanted to be Johnny Carson. Hall's deference to the talk show king was transparent. And besides, Arsenio's show was a syndicated, non-network affair -- the TV equivalent of a Third World country. He presented no real commercial threat to Carson.

Late-night life could be harsh when Johnny ruled. But it was stable. In the months since Carson's retirement all hell has broken loose. First, former allies Jay Leno and David Letterman waged a war of succession. When Leno won, Letterman began openly plotting revenge and looking for a hostile army with which to ally himself.

Simultaneously, Saturday Night Live smart guy Dennis Miller started up his own syndicated operation, which seemed aimed at cloning the best elements from Arsenio Hall and Letterman. The result could have been called Dave-Lite or Arsenio-White.

Meanwhile, the long knives were out in the Leno camp. Sure, Jay is a nice guy, to all appearances. But his personal manager-producer, Helen Kushnick, waged the talk show wars with the merciless drive of a Serbian general. She issued a directive that no performer who appeared on the competing shows would be allowed to play on Jay's couch. This caused considerable grousing, especially from Miller who saw his little uprising smothered in its cradle.

Finally Kushnick went too far when she threatened a secondary boycott against any performer represented by an agent who had placed someone on the competing shows. In Hollywood superstars are superpowers, but agents are gods. When Kushnick offended the gods she was gone, and some of Leno's confidence and competitive edge went with her.

BUT THE CHAOS HAS continued to spread. Letterman is moving to CBS, and putting his anti-talk show head-to-head against his old buddy Jay. Whoopi Goldberg has started her own low-key, half-hour celebrity chat nook. Public television has gone national with the New York-produced Charlie Rose Show for a "live-at-11" nightly conversation hour. And Fox will soon offer a Chevy Chase talk spot.

Ten years ago, if you'd asked for a vote on who was most likely to be the Johnny Carson of his generation, Chevy Chase would have won hands down. He's got the dry, sneaky wit, the self-deprecating bent, the sport coats -- the whole "Johnny" thing, sans sidekick. But lately Chevy has been in a sort of mid-career crisis. Seemingly guilty for those terrible National Lampoon's Vacation movies, he can't seem to muster the will to try anything really different. He seems to see himself as a failure.

One thing that is clear in the post-Carson era is that, even without Johnny, the talk show genre he embodied will continue to dominate the world beyond the late news. The genre is, of course, as old as television itself. And its endurance should be no surprise. When the talk show format works it is everything television is -- intimate, participatory, and superficial.

Above all, the talk show succeeds as television because it is "real life," or at least in some sense "based on real life." It brings us real people appearing under their real names, or at least their real stage names. And they come before us talking about their real lives and work -- their plane trips, their children, their latest "project."

But at the same time the people (even the ones who aren't actors) are performers on a studio set in front of a live theatrical audience. They are, in fact, acting the part of celebrity buddies in a presentation that is, by its very nature, no less contrived than the hokiest soap opera plot.

This is the warm, comfortable, pseudo-familial late night video cocoon in which Americans have wrapped themselves since the ancient days of Steve Allen.

From his late-late-night perch, David Letterman has mocked talk show conventions and tried to remake the genre into a vehicle for creative disruption. As he moves into the Carson time slot, I suspect the tradition will ultimately overtake him and his show will evolve into the postmodern version of a chat show family. Either that or he'll join all the other sport coats in the talk show graveyard.

Danny Duncan Collum is a contributing editor of Sojourners.