David Kronke was appointed Mayor of Television after a bloodless coup in 2000. Since then, he has improved infrastructure, championed greater educational opportunities and fought for reforms that have utterly erased corruption and incompetence from the television industry. Since Mr. Kronke has ascended to power, Television is a far better place. More angry late-night bickering!
In promos, NBC’s touting “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” and “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” as being “Unscripted!” As if that’s a good thing.
Of course, that’s not entirely true: The Writers Guild of America and NBC are engaging in a p!ssing match over the fact that Leno’s writing his own monologue. Late yesterday, the network issued a statement more strongly worded than its initial response to the WGA’s gripe:
“NBC shares America's enthusiasm for Jay Leno's return. It is unfortunate that the WGA is contemplating plans to ‘investigate’ Jay's authorship of his Tonight Show monologue. The WGA agreement clearly permits Jay to create and perform his own monologue. The enforcement of strike rules against Jay in these circumstances would violate the Federal labor laws.”
“‘The answer is, he is not getting a pass,’ said Sherry Goldman, a spokeswoman for the Writers Guild of America East. She said that the action to be taken had not yet been specified.”
Meanwhile, since it’s kind of tough for the writerless shows to get big-name celebrities willing to cross the picket lines, Leno and Jimmy Kimmel are going to cross one another’s picket lines this Thursday to appear as guests on each other’s shows. Kimmel stuck up for Jay his first night back (Kimmel’s also doing a nice/smart thing, showing clips from previous shows that’ll get the writers some residuals).
And Leno has scored yet another Republican Presidential candidate willing to cross the picket lines: Ron Paul, the libertarian guy considered crazy by the other candidates because he’s against the war in Iraq and who famously has an army of Internet trolls terrorizing any political blogger that says something mean about him. Paul’s polling in the single digits and has no chance of winning, so going scab means little to him.
Paul, who’s appearing Monday, is hardly the get that Mike Huckabee was, who helped Leno to some 7.2 million viewers on Wednesday, the late-night shows’ first night back. But the initial interest in seeing what the late-night hosts were up to cooled quickly: On Thursday, Leno had 5.2 million viewers, while David Letterman had 4.6 million.
Depending on how long the strike proceeds, it might reach the point where you and I might be palatable guests on one of the late-night shows.